Why Jays fans are shuffling off to Buffalo

Many folks in the Golden Horseshoe have only experienced professional baseball at the Rogers Centre, watching the Blue Jays. But this season, the Jays moved their Triple-A affiliate from Las Vegas to Buffalo, which makes going to Bisons games a must if you want to see the Blue Jays of tomorrow. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun.

As the gates open, fans begin to file inside Coca-Cola field. The 25-year old ball park is located within the historic district of downtown Buffalo, and was actually designed to look older to fit in with the surrounding buildings.

For locals, it’s become a staple.

“I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. I love this team. It’s always been kind of a family day for us.”

“The family friendly prices, the food is great too, their hot dogs are super.”

Bisons GM Mike Buczkowski says that is exactly what the Bisons management is hoping to acheive.

“What we try to do here is offer affordable, fun, safe, clean family entertainment. When you’re doing that, you need to have a great facility. The bathrooms need to be clean, it needs to be safe, it needs to be well lit, the food experience needs to be just as important as the play of the team on the field.”

This year the Bisons officially became the Blue Jays’ Triple-A affilate. Prior to that they were most recently the affiliates of the Mets from 2009-2012. And it’s made a noticeable difference when it comes to the fans.

“When we were affiliated with the Mets last year, kind of sparse crowds, but now you see a lot of Toronto coming down, especially on weekends, which is nice to see.”

“We’ve always gotten a good number of fans from Southern Ontario. Probably, we would estimate about 12% of our attendance. This year we’re tracking about 25% of our attendance are people that are coming from Canada.”

Coca-Cola field seats just over 18,000 spectators. If that sounds like a lot, it is. It has the largest seating capacity of any ball park in the minor leagues.