Medicine Hat, former home of Blue Jays’ farm team, produced big leaguers

A run at a World Series championship is bringing memories flooding back in Medicine Hat: the former home of the Blue Jays’ farm team, and the site of visits by the world championship teams in the early 1990s.

Those games are the stuff of local legend in the Hat, taking residents back to when the city had a minor league farm club — and the big leagues came to southeast Alberta.

That includes Greg Morrison, a high school kid and aspiring ball player when future hall of famers like Paul Molitor and Roberto Alomar visited his hometown in 1994.

Morrison wasn’t in the stands, however.

He was on the field, playing with a team of highly-rated amateur prospects tasked with taking on the best team in baseball. 

"The Blue Jays really hit home with me, because you emulate who you watch as a kid," Morrison said this week, noting that before the team’s success gripped the nation in the early 1990s, he was actually a Boston Red Sox fan.

“The Blue Jays were my second chance.”

Originally drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers, Morrison was eventually signed by the Jays. 

He went on to star with his hometown “Baby Jays,” a Single-A team in the Pioneer League, setting a home run record that still stands today. It was the first rung on the minor leagues, with stops across Alberta, Montana and Idaho. 

After an 11-year independent league career, Morrison returned home and now owns the Medicine Hat Mavericks of the Western Canadian Baseball League. It formed shortly after the Blue Jays left the city in 2003, and each summer hosts college-aged players looking to get drafted. 

Morrison sees it as a continuation of Medicine Hat’s elite baseball tradition, and little league camps and academy programs as a way to keep that going forward. 

“Medicine Hat