Obligatory “the roof is opening!” post
7 years ago
Hold your horses before rushing to get Jays tickets tonight with the expectation of watching baseball outdoors, because I’m sure they’re only just testing things here, but look! By way of @Tomyoung590 of Sportsnet, it’s light from the outside world! Coming through an open flap in the Rogers Centre roof!
Summer is coming!
It’s a nice enough day out — though not as nice as when the Jays first started testing the roof last year, which happened a few days earlier on the calendar, April 29th (apparently I was working in the backyard!) — and obviously the Jays are doing some testing in anticipation of playing with the roof open sometime soon.
Maybe this weekend?
The forecast calls for it to be 19 degrees and sunny in Toronto on Saturday afternoon, when the Jays host the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that sure seems like it should be warm enough for this to happen — if not the night before, when we’ll be coming off a high of 17.
That’s… awesome.
But there won’t be outdoor baseball tonight (at least, I’m nearly 100% sure — if only the Jays had some kind of online point man for fan questions like this!), because there’s a bunch of testing that will need to be done first. As is the case every year.
“Since the dome is sealed through the winter, testing of the roof can’t begin until all the snow and ice have melted. The mechanical parts that allow the roof to open and close contract in the cold, so consecutive warm-weather days of roughly 10C or higher are required before testing can begin,” wrote Brendan Kennedy of the Toronto Star in a piece in May of 2014. Jays then-senior VP, business operations, Stephen Brooks told him that “At around 10 degrees, if we were to open the roof, and the temperature then dropped, we risk not being able to close it.”
Granted, what we’re looking at is just the roof flap being opened, not the whole contraption. But as Arden Zwelling of Sportsnet tweeted last May 9th, it’s not just any flap, it’s “the predictive LF flap,” and it “means the Rogers Centre roof will likely be opening soon.”
Can’t come soon enough.
Weather!
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