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Taking care of business

College Heights grad has bird’s eye-view of Blue Jays’ playoff run
Stephen Brooks
Stephen Brooks brought a bit of Prince George to the locker room at Camden Yards in Baltimore when he joined the Toronto Blue Jays' celebration after they clinched the American League East title with a win Tuesday over the Baltimore Orioles. From left are Brooks, the Jays senior vice-president of business operations, Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos, and Mike Shaw, the team's traveling secretary.

Stephen Brooks made a last-minute decision to join the Toronto Blue Jays in Baltimore and snagged the last seat on the plane.

Knowing the Jays needed just one win over the Orioles to wrap up first place in the American League East, Brooks was behind home plate at Camden Yards watching the Jays hammer the O's 15-2 and got down to field level close to the dogpile of Jays celebrating their win.

The party was just beginning.

In the locker room, the spray of champagne was unavoidable and Brooks, the Jays' senior vice-president of business operations, got soaked. He joined the players sipping the sweet taste of success, hopeful there will be more postseason bubbly to be uncorked this month for the boys of October.

"I tried to keep my distance a little bit and let the guys all do that, that's their show, but I did get drenched," said Brooks.

"I got to Baltimore the day before. I wanted to be a part of it knowing the magic number was two. Tuesday's game was rained out and the Yankees lost, so that gave us two opportunities in the doubleheader to win and we played a heck of a game and pulled it out."

Brooks was surrounded in the stadium by hundreds of Blue Jays fans who made the trip.

"It felt somewhat like a home game and to have everybody around the dugout as the players celebrated, it was something I'm very fortunate and thankful to be a part of," said Brooks. "I certainly know where I came from and to be a P.G. kid and be part of that is pretty special."

Brooks, 45, has come along way since he left his home Prince George after graduating from College Heights secondary school.

He went to UBC to study history and came up a few credits short of a business degree because he failed calculus, but that was only a minor blip. After two years at BCIT, he aced his chartered accountant's exam and ended up working in New York as a senior manager at Deloitte & Touche.

In 2004, Rogers Communications (which owns the Jays and Rogers Centre) hired him as a corporate controller and he moved to Toronto. Five years later, he joined the Jays front office as vice-president of finance and administration. He was promoted in January 2011 to his current job - third down the line behind president/CEO Paul Beeston and general manager Alex Anthopoulos on the Jays' lengthy corporate directory.

Brooks is big on social networking and saw the photo somebody from Prince George posted on Twitter of Mr. P.G. holding up a Blue Jays flag after they clinched a playoff spot earlier last week.

Like the rest of Canada, Toronto is ecstatic to have the Jays in the playoffs, ending a 22-year drought, the longest in North American professional sports. Toronto hasn't been in the playoffs since 1993, the year the Jays won their second-straight World Series, and playoff fever is catching.

At its peak, a lineup estimated at 114,000 people queued up outside Rogers Centre last Saturday for a limited number of playoff tickets made available to general public. Most went home disappointed.

Attendance spiked this season for Jays home games as the team on the field took off. The Jays averaged 34,504 per game and sold out 21 of their last 22 games in the 48,000-seat stadium. They had 27 sellouts in total, up from 13 in 2014 and six in 2013.

Total attendance numbered 2.794 million, up considerably from last year's 2.375 million, but still well off the record 4.057 million set in 1993.

"It is definitely Canada's team, and we're seeing that support right now," said Brooks.

Brooks has asked his mother Bev Ramage and her husband Phil to fly from Prince George to Toronto for Thursday's playoff opener against a wild card opponent but she said she's not sure if Phil can arrange the time off work. Brooks's father Bob lives in Thailand. If any of his family makes the trip, he has tickets for them.

Brooks was born in Toronto and moved to Prince George with his family when he was eight. He and his wife Connie have two sons, five-year-old Charlie and two-year-old Henry.

"My oldest guy thinks we've won the World Series," said Brooks.

The Jays stock their stores with merchandise at the Rogers Centre and the Eaton's Centre and sales are up 100 per cent over last year. Some items, like David Price jerseys, they can't keep in stock.

Brooks oversees the team's postseason marketing and logistics, a mammoth undertaking which involves hundreds of employees.

"You've got to arrange staffing, concessions, receptions for the league, postgame receptions for the media, you have to set the ticket pricing and figure out ticket distribution," he said. "Then you have transportation of teams, transportation of media and sponsorship, it's a big behind-the-scenes effort we've been working on for about two months now.

"I'm very fortunate to have this position to work with the people I get to work with and to do the things I do. To see this all come together like this has been tremendously rewarding."

Trades the Jays made in the off-season to acquire Josh Donaldson and during the season combined to make them the hottest team in baseball in the second half.

Since July 28, the day they picked up shortstop Troy Tulowitski and reliever LaTroy Hawkins, they've gone 38-14. The move to get starting pitcher Price from Detroit paid immediate dividends. Their ace went 9-1 with a 2.30 ERA in 11 starts with the Jays.

"This is a pretty special group of players and you can see what they do when pitching and defence and hitting all come together at once, this is a team that's very tough to beat," said Brooks.

"There's lots of baseball to be played and we want to celebrate three more times."

Brooks will soon have a new boss now that Beeston has announced he'll hand over the reins in November to Mark Shapiro, after 41 years with the team.

"Paul has been a tremendous mentor to myself," said Brooks.

"I don't think people realize just how much he does behind the scenes, not just for the Blue Jays but for baseball across the country. It has been an honour and a privilege to work with and learn from him."