Mike Wilner: OK, Blue Jays: Hall of Fame honour is music to Fred McGriff’s ears
celebrate their seventh-inning stretches with a fun, silly little song. Originally composed to give dancers from Fitness Ontario a way to get the crowd at Exhibition Stadium up and moving, it has become a mainstay. Loved by many, greeted with eye rolls from a few, “OK, Blue Jays” is an essential part of every Jays home game.Fred McGriff was paraded in front of the baseball media in San Diego less than 24 hours after finding out he’d been the.
Despite having hit 493 home runs — a total that absolutely would have topped what was once the magic 500 mark if not for the 1994 strike that took 66 of his games off the schedule — McGriff, a model of consistency who hit 30 or more home runs 10 times , won a home-run title in each league and finished his career with an on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .886, never even got as much as 40 per cent of the vote in his decade on the writers’ ballot.
That one day in the big leagues — the first one — came in Toronto. The slugger’s first big-league appearance was as an eighth-inning defensive replacement for Willie Upshaw at old Exhibition Stadium with the Jays leading Cleveland 11-4. He got as far as the on-deck circle, but had to wait until the next day to make his first big-league start.
That huge deal, sending him and Tony Fernández to the Padres for Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter, was the second time McGriff had been dealt. The first time he was just in rookie ball, a 19-year-old Yankees prospect who welcomed the trade north of the border.
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