As Blue Jays honour Buck Martinez, new Hall bridges past and present

TORONTO — As Buck Martinez walked through the Toronto Blue Jays dugout and turned down the steps toward the batting cage following the ceremony inducting him to the club’s new Hall of Excellence, he spotted someone running up toward him.

“He stuck his hand out and said, ‘I'm Brett Bateman .’ I said, 'I know who you are.’ He goes, ‘Congratulations. This is very special, what you've done,’” Martinez recalled afterwards. “That blew me away. He didn't know me from Adam. I never had any contact with him before. But he took the time to say how much he appreciated what I did. I told Paul Beeston and I certainly told John Schneider, I said, 'You've got a special kid, right there, to take the time to say to an old man thank you very much and congratulations.' That was pretty awesome.”

The private exchange — on an emotional Saturday that began with the Hall’s unveiling, continued with a brilliant on-field ceremony for Martinez and ended with a 4-3 win for the Blue Jays over the Seattle Mariners — highlighted the wider significance of creating a destination celebrating the team’s history.

In transitioning the names on the current Level of Excellence on the Rogers Centre’s façade to the new display centre, the Blue Jays are bringing the honourees' accomplishments to life, in a space where stories can be passed from one generation of fans to the next.

Similarly, the ceremonies reinforce to players that if they accomplish great things on the field, what they do won’t simply disappear with time.

“I feel like that's how it always should be," he said. "Baseball is more than just a sport, it's about the relationships that you build and you saw that today with all the fans and all the legends and players that were in the building. What better time to meet him than now? We're in playoff race and trying to win ballgames, I just feel like that's how it should be done for everything that he's done for this organization, one that's taken a chance on me. I feel like I've got to pay my respects for that.”

The club certainly did that with the forever Blue Jay Martinez , celebrating him with videos, speeches, gifts and the establishment of two awards in his honour: The Buck Martinez Heart of the Game Award, given to a volunteer in Jays Care Foundation’s Challenger Baseball program; and the Buck Martinez Scholarship for Sport Media, given to a student in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Sport Media program.

Nailing the moment as he always does, he ended his on-field speech with a riff on his play-by-play catchphrase, telling a crowd of 41,512, “Swing and a drive, get up ball, get outta here, I'm gone.” He did fib a little, jumping back into the Sportsnet broadcast booth with longtime partner Dan Shulman and Joe Siddall for another inning before making the rounds.

“Today blew me away,” he said. “I just didn't have any grasp for the magnitude of today. But it was awesome. The Blue Jays did a hell of a job with it.”

The plan is for days like this one to be an annual event, since now that there’s a proper space to house inductees, the team aims to clear a backlog of deserving candidates with one or two additions per year moving forward.