Lucky loonie at heart of Canadian baseball gold-medal win

By this point, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that a Lucky Loonie is purported to have played a key role in a Canada-USA international sporting event.

Team Canada baseball coach and legend Stubby Clapp told the Toronto Star on Sunday night that before the Pan Am Games baseball tournament got underway, he embedded a lucky loonie into the infield dirt. From the way the final inning of Sunday night’s gold medal final unfurled, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the loonie was planted into the pitcher’s mound.

That would explain, at least in part, how U.S.A. pitcher David Huff missed the mark so badly with his ill-advised pickoff throw to first base. The throw sailed not the outfield and set off a Benny Hill-type runaround that finished with Team Canada’s Pete Orr scoring all the way from first with the game-winning run in a 7-6 Canada win. So much for the value of the American dollar being higher than the Canadian buck these days.

The Star’s Brendan Kennedy, though, reported that the Canadian players gathered near second base and appeared to be digging at the ground, so maybe the loonie’s presence in the heart of the infield, halfway around the bases, propelled Orr forward with extra gusto.

The lucky loonie has been a part of Canadian sports lore since 2002, when Canadian ice maker Trent Evans buried a loonie at centre ice at the Satl Lake City E Center, home of the Olympic hockey tournament. The Canadian men won the tournament - its first Olympic win in 50 years, while the women’s team won its first Olympic gold medal that year as well, with both teams beating the Americans. Since then, lucky loonies have popped up everywhere, from the speedkating oval in Vancouver, to a beer fridge in Sochi.

Considering Canada’s gold rush at the 2015 Pan Am Games, and the sheer amount of construction that took place around Toronto to set up for the games, it wouldn’t be surprising to find out lucky loonies were buried all over the city - deep in Lake Ontario, in the foundation of the velodrome, or underwater at the new swimming and diving facility in Scarborough.