Mariners mania has taken flight in Seattle. With Game 4 of the ALCS on Thursday, the M’s are closer than ever to their first World Series appearance. Standing in the way: the Toronto Blue Jays.
Both teams wear blue, both entered MLB in 1977, and both relied on fans to name the teams. While a Bellevue fan chose the name “Mariners,” Canada’s largest city went with “Blue Jays,” following in the flight path of other MLB bird teams, like the Baltimore Orioles and St. Louis Cardinals.
Blue jays are endemic to Toronto and elsewhere in eastern North America. But how similar is Seattle’s opponent to its winged namesake? And does the bird have any weaknesses that Mariners fans should know about?
Nick Dujnic — an avid birder, baseball fan and the senior coordinator of community building at the Seward Park Audubon Center — humored this curious journalist’s call. Here’s what he said.
Blue jay behavior
Blue jays (the birds) have a few unique traits.
“They do tend to be aggressive,” Dujnic said, noting that they sometimes eat the eggs and chicks of other birds. “They’re also very intelligent, as all corvids tend to be,” he continued, referring to the family of birds that also includes crows and ravens.
Aggression and intelligence form a winning strategy in baseball — and the Toronto Blue Jays had the best record in the American League (94-68) this season. The Blue Jays also had the highest batting average of any MLB team in the regular season (.265) and they’re leading in the postseason, too, at .278.
Blue jays are also great mimics; they have been known to copy the calls of red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks when approaching feeders in an attempt to scatter other birds, Dujnic said.
In the baseball world, that might equate to sign stealing, when a runner on second base observes the opposing team’s pitcher and relays information to the batter via some sort of gesture. (Using technology-assisted sign stealing is strictly prohibited, but “old school” stealing is fair game. Just ask Mariners first baseman Josh Naylor.)
Toronto has not been at the center of any sign-stealing kerfuffles of late, but the Mariners and Blue Jays did get into a benches-clearing standoff April 19 when Jays pitcher José Berríos accused Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh of stealing signs, which Raleigh denied.
Blue jay weaknesses
Blue jays have predators — namely: other, bigger birds.
“Not moose, unfortunately,” Dujnic said. If the antlered Mariner Moose needs backup from a more natural predator for the remainder of the ACLS, help could fly in from next door at Lumen Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks.
“I’ve known that Cooper’s hawks tend to eat birds of that size and range,” Dujnic said. “Around here, they really like Steller’s jays, robins and flickers. So I would imagine that blue jays are probably a favorite of theirs as well.”
(The Seahawks moniker, in fact, is based on an osprey, which are not hawks but members of the Pandionidae family. And ospreys eat more fish than birds.)
Whether these scientific observations and unscientific comparisons hold, the Massachusetts-born Dujnic, normally a Boston Red Sox fan, is just as excited to root for the Mariners as the rest of the city.
“I live here now,” he said, “and by default, I’m rooting for the Mariners.”
