The Toronto Blue Jays are about to get their close-up, and there’s a very good chance the rest of the baseball world is about to get acquiainted with the home run jacket.
The Jays ended a 32-year World Series drought by defeating the Seattle Mariners in the American League Championship, setting up a Fall Classic date with the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers. The National League champions are going to do all they can to make sure the jacket — which Toronto uses to celebrate its home runs — stays on the hanger for as much of the series as possible.
As for the jacket’s origin story, the celebratory coat dates all the way back to 2021, when team translator Hector “Tito” Lebron had an idea, inspired by teams across baseball starting to use props to celebrate their round-trippers. Whereas teams like the Boston Red Sox had the laundry cart, the Blue Jays turned to the jacket.
“In golf, they have the green jacket, so I said maybe we can come up with something like that,” Lebron said in a video produced by the team in 2021. “We’ll just change the name, call it the blue jacket, see how it goes.”
How Blue Jays Home Run Jacket Got Started
Lebron, largely a behind-the-scenes guy, was sheepish about the idea of presenting the jacket to the team on his own. Instead, he went to star outfielder George Springer and let the slugger bring it to the team.
Springer did just that, the team immediately bought in, and after first baseman Vladimir Guerrero launched one out of Fenway Park on a rainy July night in Boston back in 2021, the new tradition was officially born.
The jacket stuck for the rest of 2021 and all of the 2022 season. However, after the ’22 Jays won 92 games, they were quickly dispatched in the wild-card round. An abrupt end to the season preceded an unceremonious end for the jacket, and the 2023 season came and went without any dugout fashion shows.
A month into the 2024 season, however, the jacket returned .
“I think that can help a lot,” Guerrero told Sportsnet. “I see the jacket like, OK, you do something good, you put the jacket on. Sometimes when you see a lot of guys grab the jacket, you say, I want to do something good too so I can put on the jacket, too. But it’s more like having fun. We have to have fun right now. We’re up and down and to me the jacket brings the fun.”
How Blue Jays Home Run Jacket ‘Brings Everybody Together’
While the jacket has seen some alterations over the years, one thing remains the same: The back of the coat is littered with names of countries from around the world, representing the culture, heritage and homes of Blue Jays players, coaches and staff.
But as the Blue Jays explained in 2021, it’s about more than that.
“As you can see, the jacket has every name of the country or whatever it is, and that just brings everybody together,” Lebron said. “Nobody is left behind. … People from everywhere, every part of the world. It happens that the team is (in) Canada. There’s a lot of nationalities here in Canada also. So it goes beyond the players. It’s to the fans, to the city, to Canada, we represent everyone here in Canada.”
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