Las Vegas was miles away from landing Blue Jays games

Within minutes of Buffalo’s Sahlen Field being confirmed as the COVID-19 home of the Toronto Blue Jays Friday, there were questions in Las Vegas.

Isn’t the Buffalo ballpark minor league? Isn’t Las Vegas Ballpark considered the Taj Mahal of minor league ballparks? Wasn’t Las Vegas once the Jays’ affiliate and didn’t the Jays play games that counted in the standings against the A’s at Cashman Field in 1996 when Oakland Coliseum was being renovated?

If so, why wouldn’t the displaced Blue Jays choose Las Vegas as their home away from home during the social distance era?

The answer? It’s the same reason the Jays no longer call Las Vegas their Triple-A home: It’s much too far from Toronto (2,249 miles).

“They wanted to stay east because all their opponents are out there,” Aviators president Don Logan said about making a pitch to the Jays, who aren’t being allowed to play at home because the Canadian government doesn’t think it’s safe for them to do so.

It’s only 98 miles from Toronto to Buffalo, and if you could hit a line drive over Niagara Falls in a straight line, it’s only about 60.

Logan said he also talked to the A’s early on amid the virus spike.

“I told them it was a lot cheaper to open up Las Vegas Ballpark than the Coliseum,” Logan said. “They said ‘yeah, but if we play games (in Las Vegas) after the Raiders left Oakland for down there, we would never get a new ballpark in Oakland.’”

Around the horn

— The seats at Wrigley Field were empty Friday when the Chicago Cubs beat Milwaukee in the teams’ pandemic-delayed season opener.

But there’s a good chance that two seats removed from the venerable ballpark in 2017 were being occupied — by NASCAR champion Kurt Busch of Las Vegas and his wife, Ashley. They were a gift from the driver’s friend, Steve Farmer of Las Vegas, and sit in the couple’s backyard overlooking Lake Norman near Charlotte, North Carolina.

“After the tough races when I’m seeking those W’s, I come out to these chairs,” said Busch, a longtime Cubs fan who was on hand for Game 5 of the 2016 World Series and has thrown out the ceremonial first pitch at several Cubs games.

Of those chairs, he said, “They’ve seen a lot more failure than they’ve seen wins.”

That was especially true before he got them.

— The email of the week comes from Lafayette grad Bob O’Brien of Henderson, riffing on the cancellation of the Patriot League football season that will interrupt Lafayette vs. Lehigh, the nation’s longest-standing rivalry:

“I ran into a classmate who told me that one of his most prized possessions was a piece of one of the goalposts from his freshman year, and that it saved him from some serious hazing. Years later, he and his wife were sleeping in the second- floor bedroom of their condo and were awakened by the sounds of a burglar on the first floor. The wife said she’d call the police and told him to go investigate.

He didn’t want to go empty-handed, so he looked around. The only thing he could find was that piece of goalpost, and off he went. While he was walking around downstairs with the piece of goalpost at the ready, he heard a loud voice say “Freeze! Police!” Of course he froze, but not without thinking that the goalpost that saved his life in college almost cost him it afterwards.”

O’Brien also said that he and Angels manager Joe Maddon were members of the same Lafayette graduation class (1976) and that “although Lafayette’s student body is half the size of Lehigh’s, we lead The Rivalry 79-71, including the all-important 150th meeting at a sold-out Yankee Stadium.”

— Another Las Vegas tie to The Rivalry: Deuce Gruden, the oldest son of Raiders coach Jon Gruden, was a running back for Lafayette before turning his interests to power weightlifting. Deuce — Jon David Gruden II — graduated from Lafayette in 2016 with a degree in biology and won the gold medal in the 183-pound class at the 2017 International Powerlifting Federation’s World Classic in Minsk, Belarus.

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Deadspin’s Sam Fels, on the NHL expansion team Seattle Kraken’s jerseys:

“The jerseys are good enough to help soften the blow when your favorite unheralded player on the team you’re a fan of is stupidly spirited away in the expansion draft, and then puts up 25 goals, like you always knew he would if only your moron (expletive) coach or (expletive) GM had valued him the same way you did.”

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.