Game 1 of the World Series on Friday is a chance for the Blue Jays to show off the refurbished Rogers Centre. Time had taken its toll on the futuristic building that opened as SkyDome, the first baseball stadium with a retractable roof, in 1989.

A $400 million (Canadian) renovation project completed in 2024 has once again turned Toronto’s baseball home into a state of the art facility.

So it’s easy to forget the franchise’s humble beginnings at Exhibition Stadium, the outdoor venue that even former Blue Jays team president Paul Beeston once called “the worst stadium in sports.”

The Blue Jays would become baseball’s model franchise in the early 1990s. But when they began play as an American League expansion team in 1977, they were far from it. And so was their home ballpark.

“Except fo

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