Rogers Centre: Breaking Down the MLB's Most Intense Place to Play

Baseball fans were treated to a brilliant postseason that featured the Los Angeles Dodgers dethroning the Chicago Cubs in the National League Championship Series and the Houston Astros eliminating the New York Yankees in seven games in the American League Championship Series.

The Astros and Dodgers engaged in a memorable seven-game World Series that saw Houston win the first championship in the team's history.

Dodgers fans supported their team with unabated noise in their wins in Los Angeles, and Astros fans may have been even louder at Minute Maid Park in Houston.

A good argument can be made that either stadium is the toughest place to play in baseball. However, we are not going with the venues that are top of mind.

Instead, we will go north of the border to the Rogers Centre in Toronto as the most intense place to play in Major League Baseball.

The Closing of the Roof

Rogers Centre was called the SkyDome when it opened in June 1989.

The architecture of the building allows the roof to be open on sunny days and warm nights in Toronto, but it can also be closed during the cooler weather that impacts the Canadian city in the early part of the season and again at the end of the year.

The closed roof keeps the noise in the stadium and doesn't allow it to escape, which means the sound of the fans can be deafening.

Vocal Fans

The Toronto Blue Jays joined the American League in 1977 as an expansion team.

When the Blue Jays started to play, their fans were supportive of the home team and polite to the visitors. They were in a learning process when it came to Major League Baseball and discovered quickly how to support their team.

As the longtime home of the National Hockey League's Toronto Maple Leafs, the Blue Jays fans learned how to bring their team raucous support.

By the mid-1980s, Blue Jays fans supported their team as well as long-standing fans in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago.

1992-93 Back-to-Back World Series Champions

The Toronto Blue Jays won back-to-back World Series titles in 1992 and 1993, and both times their crazed fans supported them in ear-splitting fashion.

The Blue Jays defeated the favored Atlanta Braves in six games in 1992, and they came back the following year with a six-game triumph over the Philadelphia Phillies.

The win over the Phillies was remarkable, and the sixth game ended with slugger Joe Carter hammering a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Carter hit the homer off Philadelphia pitcher Mitch Williams, who took the mound with a 6-5 lead in the bottom of the ninth.

The Toronto fans had jeered Williams by cheering his name when he entered the game, and that could not have helped the relief pitcher perform in this game.

2015 Playoffs

There have been many noisy postseason games over the years, but Game 5 between the Toronto Blue Jays and Kansas City Royals at the Rogers Centre was different.

Not only were Blue Jays fans incredibly loud and supportive during Toronto's 7-1 victory, they may have had an impact on the way the game was umpired.

Kansas City pitcher Edinson Volquez surmised that home plate umpire Dan Iassogna was intimidated when he made a ball-four call on a sixth-inning pitch that appeared to strike out Jose Bautista.

"He (Iassogna) might get nervous a little bit," Volquez said afterward, per Steve Buffery of the Toronto Sun. "It's a big game for Toronto. The fans all over him, probably."

'Hockeyization' of Baseball

Alex Brandon/Associated Press

Blue Jays fans may be more like hockey fans than baseball fans.

When former New York Yankee Nick Swisher referred to Blue Jays fans as the rudest in baseball, Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Mark Kingwell was not up in arms.

Instead, he decided to take a clear look at the behavior of the supporters. He came up with the conclusion that they took every opportunity to insult and intimidate opposing players in any way possible.

"The Jays' New Millennium fans seem hell-bent on the hockeyization of baseball, with the hurling of beer cans, racial insults and water bottles, directly at opposing players from the upper decks of the chaotic SkyDome–a stadium that corporate influence forces me to call, in this forum, the Rogers Centre," Kingwell wrote.

Kingwell pointed to a late-season series in 2016 with the Baltimore Orioles in which players were forced to avoid objects thrown from the stands and also endured racial insults.

Kingwell was duly embarrassed by the tone and attitude of Toronto's baseball fans.

"We're not PolitenessLand anymore (maybe we never were). Instead, we're the Broad Street Bullies of Baseball, the continent's backward louts of lousy conduct."

The Broad Street Bullies was the nickname given to the Philadelphia Flyers in the mid-1970s. While the Flyers were a championship team in 1974 and 1975 and adored by their home city, they were hated by much of the NHL; when they were defeated by the Montreal Canadiens in 1976, the hockey world breathed a sigh of relief.

Now a hometown columnist has compared the local fans to one of the most despised hockey teams of all time. That's what makes the Rogers Centre the most intense place to play in baseball.