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The hairline is heading north, and he walks with the stiff gait of someone who has known back miseries, but otherwise Roberto Alomar looks pretty much unchanged, looks like the kid who arrived here in the winter of 1990, the least-known name in the biggest trade in Toronto Blue Jays history, the best player ever to wear the uniform.
"It is great to be back here," he says. "This is like my home."
Literally, it was his home, at least the hotel appended to what was then called SkyDome. Alomar, during his five seasons in Toronto, liked to keep things simple, liked his daily commute during baseball season to involve just a single elevator ride.
And during those few years when he was a teen idol celebrity in the Big Smoke — yes, kids, it's true — it was also the easiest place to live the bachelor life.
Last night, at the Jays' home opener against the Boston Red Sox, Alomar's name was affixed permanently to his former home address, joining the home team's Level of Excellence, along with — in a surprise and long overdue gesture — the franchise's first employee, former president, and its guiding spirit through the glory days, Paul Beeston.
All of that nostalgia for a bygone time might have been a bit much to swallow for those who weren't there, but it's still powerful stuff for anyone who lived through it, and especially those who lived through the lean years leading up to those two World Series triumphs.
Alomar in many ways is the perfect symbol of how a good team turned great. He came to Toronto along with Joe Carter as part of a bold gutsy move by Beeston and Pat Gillick, a trade that sent two all-stars, Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff, the other way.
Until then, the Jays had been in close-but-no-cigar mode, and it wasn't just the talent, but the clubhouse culture that had to change. Alomar was never a vocal leader — when he was forced to depart in 1995, that was one of management's knocks against him, a ham-handed attempt to convince the fans that it was the right move at the time — but he made his statements on the field. Cito Gaston was the perfect manager for him, low key, never forcing the issue, allowing Alomar to go about his business and freely play his game.
The son of a big leaguer, an avid follower of his father's unbending beliefs about the rights and wrongs of baseball (brother Sandy Jr. was a harder sell), Alomar arrived in Toronto on the cusp of stardom, blessed with a genius baseball IQ. Talk all you want about the acrobatics around second base, hitting for power and average, stealing bases, but what separated him from so many players was his ability to think on the fly. ("He made the game look amazingly easy and slow for a guy of that age," Boston manager Terry Francona last night recalled. The two played together in winter ball.). He never threw to the wrong base, never made the wrong decision, and every once in a while would do something extraordinary and different, drawn from no textbook but the one of his own making.
His home run against Dennis Eckersley in the 1992 American League Championship Series is often cited as the turning point in franchise history, the moment when the Jays discovered their championship swagger. His departure, in the dark days following the labour wars of 1994 and 1995, with the Jays in ownership limbo, was hard evidence the golden age was over.
He played very well for the Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland Indians, and was back in Toronto for what would be the worst moment of his career, the spitting incident with umpire John Hirschbeck in 1996 for which he has been apologizing almost non-stop since.
Alomar walked away from baseball three years ago in the middle of a spring training game while on the Tampa Bay Rays roster: He could have kept playing, he says, but he couldn't have kept playing the way he once had.
It's no surprise that since then, he hasn't really found anything in his life to replace the game. Alomar splits his time now between Florida and New York with his fiancée and her two young sons. He wouldn't mind coaching, he said last night, not full-time — his old man probably warned him off that — but maybe as a kind of roving instructor. The Jays seem interested in making that happen, though you have to wonder if someone with such an intuitive sense of the game could impart that wisdom on others.
There's also the Cooperstown question: No other Blue Jay, or at least no other player who would identify himself as a Blue Jay, seems bound for the Hall of Fame right now.
"If I make it one day," he said, "you can be sure that it would be wearing a Blue Jays hat."
Never any question about that.
