"The wisdom of this decision not to be there is evident to everybody," Phillies president David Montgomery said yesterday.
Like many residents, Blue Jays manager and a longtime face of the city, Cito Gaston, decided to limit the danger. He lives downtown. He sent his wife, Lynda, to stay with her sister north of the city. Gaston rued the image that the usually peaceful, clean, cosmopolitan city was projecting.
"It's a great city to visit," Gaston said. "It should be OK today in the city."
Actually, before Gaston spoke at noon yesterday, police had already raided a building on a university campus. In a separate incident, a riot squad had used rubber bullets and blank rifle shots to deter protesters. The number of arrests in the city had reached 600 for the weekend.
So, dangers remained. The Phillies would have been right in the middle of them.
The usual team hotel and the Rogers Centre, where games would have been played, are situated in the midst of the affected area.
Players might have been essentially locked down in their hotel – a restrictive, if plush, detention.
Players who routinely arrive especially early at the ballpark would have been discouraged from walking or hiring cabs to take them from the team hotel to the Rogers Centre; rather, they would have been sequestered at the hotel and ferried in team buses, probably with an extra early bus added.
"It's great not to be dealing with that sort of thing," said Frank Coppenbarger, the Phillies' travel director.
Considering the gravity of the dangers, a postponement or doubleheader might have been forced.
"That sort of thing might have actually messed up our games," rightfielder Jayson Werth said. "That's a situation nobody wants to be in."
The teams wouldn't have been the only ones inconvenienced. Fans would have been diverted to a limited number of entrances – at least, the fans who got there, since public transportation was interrupted.
