The Sky's The Limit

The disembodied head oh Mookie Wilson grinned at me as I came to. Thirty-three feet tall and 25 feet wide, the outfielder's noggin hovered high above the crowd like a helium-filled bust broken free from Mount Rushmore. I had passed out in a seat in the sun after 51 hours of voluntary confinement at SkyDome, the retractable-roofed restaurant, ballpark, bar, hotel, health club, cinema, self-contained city and sold-out curiosity shop that Mookie and the rest of the Toronto Blue Jays call home. Heat stroke, no doubt, was causing me to hallucinate.

For three days, I called SkyDome home, viewing a weekend series of baseball from all those venues that have become so venerated in the somehow venerable two-year history of the park that will host baseball's All-Star Game on Tuesday. I watched from the windows of Windows on SkyDome restaurant in centerfield (Oakland's Jose Canseco tattooed it with a grand slam on May 22, 1990) and from the Hard Rock Cafe in right (touched by ex-Blue Jay Fred McGriff, April 23, 1990). I watched from section 540 in the fifth deck, just inside the left-field foul pole (reached by Canseco's near-600-foot homer, Game 4 of the 1989 American League Championship Series), and I watched through windows of a room at SkyDome Hotel (site of an unidentified couple's inside-the-park home run, May 15, 1990).

I was shown "the brains" of this $583 million building (they're located in its bowels), and I stood on a catwalk 20-some stories above the field as the roof literally brushed my hair while retracting. In short, I explored every superlative feature of SkyDome (never, in stadium literature, "the SkyDome"), not the least of which is its amazing, overwhelming, inexhaustible Cholest-O-Plex of snack stands, a collection unlike any other in the world. In fact, I took a culinary tour of them just before, sated, I slipped from consciousness in the sunshine.

Now that I mention it, my vision of Mookie in the Sky above the Diamond may have had something to do with the 18 mini-donuts I snarfed on the heels of a McFrankfurter, which was preceded down my gullet by a Labatt's, which had washed away the Nachos Grande I had consumed for starters. The Nachos Grande is a laundry basket full of chips slathered in "cheez"—I would say from a dozen or more "cowz"—an order so formidable that my sombreroed server told me to enjoy my "meal" after he had the thing hand-trucked from behind the counter for my consumption.

This, I know now, is the gigundo scale on which all things SkyDome are done. For instance: Mookie's giant mug, it turns out, was not an indigestion-induced hallucination after all, but the ballplayer's real-life bean projected onto the Sony JumboTron in centerfield, a 110-foot-wide scoreboard three times larger than any other in the world. But that is hardly the beginning. The rest of this SkyJoint is equally....

"Magnificent," murmured 49-year-old Jimmy Riggio of Tampa, as he panned the stadium with his camcorder. "I will never see anything else like this in my lifetime. And I've got it all on videotape for my kids."

A good thing, for Riggio probably couldn't have gotten seats for the kids even if they had made the trip to Toronto. More mammoth than the centerfield Sony is the attendance zenith being approached this year by the division-leading Blue Jays, who had sold out 20 consecutive home games as of Sunday, and who, by season's end, may surpass the absurd attendance frontier of 4,000,000 fans. Last season the Blue Jays drew a major league record-smashing 3,885,284 folks to SkyDome.

Or did SkyDome draw them to the Blue Jays? "I think it's a combination of the two," Jays president Paul Beeston was forced to admit following four consecutive SkyDome sellouts (of 50,000-plus) for a four-game set against the Cleveland Indians, baseball's worst team by a Canadian kilometer. "How does SkyDome compare to Cleveland Stadium?" I asked a man in an Indians cap and T-shirt while the Jays were beating the Tribe in the final game of the series to complete the sweep. "In Cleveland," replied Mike Bennett, 33, of Chatham, Ont., "you call and ask what time the game starts, and they ask you, 'What time can you make it?' An old joke, but it's true."

There are no old jokes about SkyDome, but there are stories that already seem old. And they're true. Indeed, that's the beauty of SkyDome: It's all true. Everything alleged to have happened here actually happened here. You can't make this stuff up.

Toronto was playing with the top down on June 7, 1989, when a biblical rain began falling on the Blue Jays and the Milwaukee Brewers. The roof was in the process of being closed, but before the last panel slid into place, the sky opened up. A 20-foot gash, running the width of the stadium, left home plate exposed to the elements. Thus, while the rest of the players on the field remained bone dry, sheets of rain drenched and blinded Toronto batter Lloyd Moseby, Milwaukee catcher Charlie O'Brien and home-plate umpire Rich Garcia, who finally called time and took one step backward, where it wasn't raining a drop. Not so O'Brien, who by habit sprinted from his position behind the plate and didn't stop until he was beneath the shelter of the visitors' dugout.