Baseball Canada’s 50 for 50 contest is designed to find the top moment or story in the 50 year history of the organization.
Week 1 Voting – May 5th (12pm ET) to May 9th (10am ET)
Out of the following five choices, which one do you feel should move on to the semi-final round?
1) Québec wins back-to-back Baseball Canada Cups (2003 & 2004)
A year after defeating Team BC in the gold medal game of the 2003 Baseball Canada Cup in Windsor, Team Québec repeated as Baseball Canada Cup gold medalists in 2004 with a 3-2 victory over BC at Port Arthur Stadium in Thunder Bay. The win in 2004 gave Québec their sixth Baseball Canada Cup title that, at the time, tied them for the most in event history with BC. Four players (David Gagnon, Patrice Godbout-Ouellet, Alexandre Périard and Philippe Valiqutte) were members of both championship clubs, while coaches Richard Emond, Joel Landry and Jasmine Roy were on hand both years.
2) Women’s National Team program begins in 2004
With the first ever IBAF Women’s World Cup scheduled for Edmonton in 2004, preparations to assemble the first edition of the Canadian National Women’s Baseball Team began late in 2003 with open try-out camps at select locations across the country. Led by Manager André Lachance, the only person to manage the club over its ten-year history, coaches had the opportunity to evaluate over 200 players across Canada. In May 2004, 40 players were invited to Olympic Stadium in Montréal for the first ever Women’s National Team Selection Camp and soon after 18 players were selected to represent Canada at the 1st IBAF Women’s World Cup where they would win a bronze medal. Two players from that original group, Kate Psota and Ashley Stephenson, are still playing with the National Team today and each has a silver medal along with three bronze medals from the five World Cups they have played in. To date, over 13, 000 female players play baseball across Canada and Baseball Canada conducts two all-female National Championships annually.
3) Jr. National Team wins silver at 2012 IBAF 18U World Cup
4) First single site National Championships takes place in Windsor (2003)
Traditionally Baseball Canada’s National Championship tournaments have each been held in different locations across the country, but in 2003 Windsor, Ontario brought the Canadian baseball community to their city hosting all events. The championships took place over a two-week period with games being played at parks across the city. With the amount of baseball occurring in such a short period of time, and in a confined space, a baseball type festival took over the city providing an excellent atmosphere. If attendees and participants look back on one event from the single-site championships in 2003 and remember one thing, it would be the famous Blackout that occurred on August 14th where power was lost for all of Ontario along with parts of the northeastern United States. The power outage did not have a big effect on any of the championships as all games were played.
5) Brett Lawrie hits five home runs in 2008 doubleheader in Dominican Republic
The story has become something of a legend for those who were lucky enough to witness the day in May 2008 that Brett Lawrie hit a total of five home runs during a doubleheader against the Seattle Mariners Dominican prospects in Boca Chica. With less than two weeks until the 2008 MLB Draft, Lawrie, then an 18 year-old member of the Junior National Team, went foul pole to foul pole hitting home runs to left, left-centre, centre, right-centre and right field in 18 innings of baseball. The current third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays put up video game numbers on that particular trip to the Dominican hitting .500 (17-for-34) with eight home runs and 24 RBI in only eight games. The Milwaukee Brewers made him the 16th overall selection two weeks later in the MLB Draft and after a December 2010 trade to the Blue Jays, Lawrie made his MLB debut in August 2011 as a 21 year-old.
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