Watching highlights of the Toronto Blue Jays in their current playoff run, Vince Horsman says the team reminds him of a style of baseball from years past.
Horsman, a left-handed pitcher who was born and raised in Dartmouth, N.S., played in 141 games over five seasons in the major leagues, including a season with the Blue Jays in 1991.
Horsman said that in an era where teams rely on analytics to make decisions and the focus is more on power, the Blue Jays are taking a different approach.
“They still have their shots, but they’re not afraid to go the other way and use the entire field,” he said. “And to me it seems more like an approach from a bygone era.”
Horsman spoke to CBC News on Saturday ahead of Game 2 of the World Series between the Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers evened the series at 1-1 with a 5-1 victory.
Horsman has spent the last four decades in professional baseball, first as a player and then as a coach. He has coached in the United States, Mexico, Italy and Taiwan, where he is currently a pitching coach with the 7-Eleven Unilions in Tainan City.
Horsman spent fourteen years of his career as a pitching coach on the Blue Jays farm teams, so he knows many of the coaches involved with the team today.
“I’m happy for them and I’m happy for the people in Canada because I know how much they support Toronto,” Horsman said by phone from his home in Palm Harbor, Florida. “And I hope they do well, I hope they win.”
How Horsman was discovered
Horsman’s path to professional baseball was an unlikely one, dating back to a 1984 national tournament for midget players in Moncton, N.B. Horsman, 17, pitched well in both games he appeared in, drawing the attention of a Blue Jays scout.
That led the team to send its Canadian scout, Bob Prentice, to Nova Scotia to scout Horsman. But Prentice suffered food poisoning, had to be hospitalized and missed the game, Horsman said.
“On that particular day I struck out 16 of the 18 batters I faced and 16 in a row,” Horsman said. “And he found out and said he would get in touch and about two weeks later he offered me a contract.”
In those days, Canadian players were not drafted. They were classified as international free agents.
But Horsman’s baseball career didn’t begin right away. I still had to finish high school. Horsman was a student at what was then known as Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth.
Minor league career
Horsman then began to work his way through Toronto’s farming system, starting in Medicine Hat, Alta. Other stops included Florence, South Carolina, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Dunedin, Florida, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
Horsman made the jump from AA baseball directly to the Blue Jays in 1991, skipping AAA ball.
Horsman said the jump was surreal, in part, because he was now playing against players who were in video games.
“But at the end of the day, it was just baseball,” he said. “And if… you have the ability to control the nerves of the pitch in front of a lot of people, it’s all the same. You know, 60 feet, six inches. Good pitches throw hitters out.”
Horsman is the only Nova Scotian to have played for the Blue Jays and one of the few Nova Scotians to have played in the majors.
Playing for the Blue Jays
Playing in front of a crowd of around 50,000 people in Toronto was also quite remarkable for someone who grew up in Dartmouth, which had a not much larger population at the time.
The Blue Jays had a strong team in 1991 and made the playoffs.
“It was crazy, electric and exciting, and you were anxious and your heart was pounding in your neck and all those emotions that are involved in something of that magnitude, but it was incredible,” Horsman said.
He then spent the next three years pitching for the Oakland Athletics. In the 1992 playoffs, the A’s lost to the Blue Jays, leading to their first consecutive World Series victory.
Horsman’s last year in the majors was with the Minnesota Twins in 1995.
After that, he moved into coaching, which has taken him all over the world.
“I’ve been blessed, I really have been,” Horsman said. “God has been good to me because I’m a Nova Scotian with a high school education.”
Other career plans
Horsman said that if he had not become a baseball player, he would have become a schoolteacher, teaching history.
He said that in every place he has lived he has immersed himself in local history, which has allowed him to explore that passion of his.
“You get an appreciation for the cultures, so I’ve been lucky to not just be there as a tourist, but I’m usually there as part of the fabric of that community,” Horsman said.
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