Blue Jays game postponed due to ice-damaged dome

The Toronto Blue Jays-Kansas City Royals game was postponed Monday after inclement weather caused damage to the roof at Rogers Centre.

The game will be made up Tuesday afternoon as part of a traditional doubleheader, the Blue Jays announced late Monday afternoon.

The regularly scheduled game will follow on Tuesday evening.

Tarps were spread out along the artificial turf in right field and a hole could be seen in the roof at the downtown stadium. The hole was repaired late Monday afternoon.

Tarps were also down near the infield dirt and in spots along the left-field line.

Batting practice was cancelled for both teams but players still played catch and performed some running drills into the early evening.

The falling ice, which followed a weekend of freezing rain, forced the closure of the tower and prompted the the Blue Jays to cancel the game. 

"It's hard to describe, it was really loud," Blue Jays executive Andrew Miller said. "It sounded like fireworks or some sort of explosion going off."

'It was pretty frightening

Police said they had blocked off the area directly under the CN Tower and the baseball stadium due to the "relatively large" blocks of ice tumbling down onto the streets and sidewalks below.

"Fortunately there's been no injuries reported," said Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook.

"We saw it happen, it was pretty frightening at the time," said Miller, the team's executive vice-president of business operations. "We knew that [if] there was a game going on at the time, it would have been a risk to players and the fans."

Fans with tickets to Monday's cancelled game are being offered an exchange for tickets to Tuesday's afternoon game or several other games scheduled in May and September. 

"If you come to a dome and get banged, something ain't right," said Royals manager Ned Yost.

Miller said pieces of ice crashed to the turf in right field along with some insulation from the roof.

"From talking to people who have been here a long time — since the building opened in 1989 — no one had ever seen anything like this," he said. "It was something we took very seriously right away."

Toronto, along with much of southern and central Ontario, is recovering from an ice storm that resulted in power outages, cancelled flights and road collisions over the weekend.

The mix of snow, freezing rain, ice pellets, rain and powerful winds that battered the region Saturday and Sunday had made driving treacherous, with provincial police reporting more than 1,600 non-fatal crashes on the highways surrounding Toronto over the two days.

The poor conditions also prompted bus and school cancellations in parts of the province Monday, with schools in Hamilton, Halton and Peel regions closed for the day and buses cancelled in various other districts.

Call it 'karma'

A Kansas City sportswriter considers it karma that the game was postponed.

Columnist Pete Grathoff noted on the Kansas City Star's website that the possibility of a rare postponement at the domed stadium came hours after a "smug" post on the Blue Jays' official Twitter feed boasted the Rogers Centre was impervious to the inclement weather that has been causing chaos throughout the league.

"Weather update: Due to our stadium having a roof, today's game will be ... Played as expected," the since deleted tweet read, punctuated by a winking emoticon.

"Perhaps this potential postponement is karma, because the Blue Jays have done a lot of bragging about having a roof, particularly after having games postponed in Cleveland," Grathoff wrote a couple of hours before the team confirmed that Monday's game was a no-go.

The Blue Jays were scheduled to play a weekend series at Cleveland's Progressive Field, but the Saturday and Sunday games were rescheduled due to rain.

The Jays' account sent out a few tweets over the course of the weekend, taking mild jabs at the situation in Cleveland in the belief that postponements couldn't happen in Toronto, where the weekend weather — a mess of snow and freezing rain — was much worse.

Incidentally, the Royals were the opposition the last time a game was postponed at Rogers Centre, back on April, 2001.