3 places the Blue Jays could play instead of Toronto

The Toronto Blue Jays can’t play the 2020 season in Canada.

The Toronto Blue Jays are officially a team without a city, at least for the 2020 MLB season, as Canada is doing everything possible to prevent someone on the team from bringing the coronavirus into the country and potentially spreading it across a country that is currently seeing a steady decline in cases.

The Canadian government has banned the Blue Jays from playing home games in Toronto in 2020, as the country is taking a very cautious approach when it comes to allowing players who will have been traveling all around the No. 1 COVID-19 hotspot in the world to re-enter their country.

The Blue Jays still have 60 games to play in the shortened 2020 season.

These three cities should be trying their hardest to secure the rights to Toronto’s home games in this campaign.

No. 3: San Juan, Puerto Rico

The MLB has tried this before with Canadian teams, as the Montreal Expos once played a good chunk of home games at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan. The warm weather and lack of COVID-19 cases in Puerto Rico make this an attractive, albeit unusual, landing spot.

With less than 10,000 active COVID-19 cases, playing games in San Juan represents not only a chance to grow the game on Puerto Rican soil, but it might be safer than playing in America given the relative lack of cases.

No. 2: Dunedin, Florida

While the Blue Jays spring training complex couldn’t be in a less safe place due to the uptick in coronavirus cases in Florida, playing games here feels like the most likely scenario. Good weather is guaranteed, the players are familiar with the local area, and the team has plenty of experience playing in TD Ballpark.

The major hangup is playing games in Florida, where COVID-19 cases continue to spike. Packing and moving from Canada to central Florida might also be difficult for a good chunk of players on that Blue Jays roster. However, given how Florida has not only welcomed, but advocated for pro sports using their state as a home base for games, fans might have to get used to seeing Vladimir Guerrero Jr. going yard in Dunedin quite a bit.

No. 1: Buffalo, New York

If the Blue Jays hop on a bus, cross the border, and get a nice look at Niagara Falls, they’ll end up in Buffalo, home of the Bisons, Toronto’s Triple-A affiliate. Rather than leaving the country or playing in the coronavirus petri dish that Florida has become, Buffalo’s stadium has all the fixings necessary to support 30 home MLB games, and it’s under two hours from the Rogers Centre.

While going from the Rogers Centre to Sahlen Field, the largest Triple-A Stadium in the country with a capacity of around 16,000, would be a bit of a nostalgia trip for some of the youngsters who finally earned their promotion to the big league club, playing in Buffalo would likely be the closest thing, both literally and figuratively to playing in Toronto. Besides, “the Buffalo Blue Jays” has a really nice ring to it.