How the Blue Jays Got Their Name

Our Blue Jays World Series guide covers the team's greatest moment. This page is about how the franchise actually came to exist in the first place — including a name that's more about beer than birds.

Awarded to a Toronto-Canadian ownership group (1976)

In March 1976, the American League voted to expand into Toronto (alongside Seattle), awarding the new franchise to a group made up of Imperial Trust Ltd., the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Labatt Breweries.

A name-the-team contest, won by a beer brand

A public contest to name the new team drew more than 30,000 entries. The winning choice, Blue Jays, fit Toronto's established tradition of blue team colours — but it also wasn't a coincidence that majority owner Labatt Breweries' flagship beer was called Labatt Blue, a detail that shaped the decision as much as the actual bird did.

A freezing, snowy opening day

The Blue Jays played their first-ever game on April 7, 1977, at Exhibition Stadium, beating the Chicago White Sox 9–5 in front of 44,649 fans who showed up despite snow and freezing temperatures — a genuinely rough opening day that still counts as one of the more memorably absurd home openers in MLB history. Exhibition Stadium remained the team's home until it moved to SkyDome in 1989.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Toronto Blue Jays
• Wikipedia — History of the Toronto Blue Jays