Blue Jays now expected to play out of Baltimore for 2020 home games: report

The 2020 Major League Baseball season kicks off tonight and the Toronto Blue Jays are still without a home base.

After getting rejected by the state of Pennsylvania to play out of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, the homeless Jays are turning to their American East rivals, the Baltimore Orioles, in the hopes of playing home games out of the historic Camden Yards.

As of now, according to Jon Heyman, it seems like two bird-named baseball teams in the AL East will be sharing a nest.

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Heyman says the Jays have received approval from the Orioles organization and await the state of Maryland to give them the okay to officially call Camden Yards home for the 2020 season.

Having already been bounced by the Canadian government to play out of Toronto, it might be tricky to convince the state of Maryland to permit another professional sports team to visit and host more games out of Camden Yards.

According to a report by the Athletic, the same issue caused the state of Pennsylvania to balk at the Jays request to play out of Pittsburgh, citing too many additional personnel and traffic as potentially dangerous amidst the pandemic.

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The Blue Jays begin the 2020 campaign on Friday at Tropicana Field to face the Tampa Bay Rays. Toronto’s first “home” game is scheduled for Wednesday, July 29, which is slated to take place at Nationals Park in Washington, with the Nats hosting two games as the home team and then Jays hosting two, out of the same ballpark.

Due to the pandemic, the 2020 MLB season is geographically based, meaning teams will not be able to venture outside of baseball’s newly aligned “regions” in an effort to contain the virus.

When it comes to the Jays and Orioles schedules, the two clubs would share eight overlapping scheduled home games. They’re scheduled to play each other ten times in 2020, with six scheduled with the Jays as the “home team” on August 29 to 31 and September 25 to 27.

So, it’s not a question of root, root, rooting for the home team, it’s a question of where they’ll be rooted out of.