In Quebec City, the baseball is good, the stadium is packed and the fans are here to party | Canada Voices

The game is tied 1-1 in the fifth inning, but the real tension is down inside the stadium’s concourse, where hundreds of hungry fans are lined up waiting for food. Everything has suddenly come to a halt, and we’re all watching the concession staff gather around a giant vat of gravy being mixed by the manager.

He samples the brown sauce for consistency, consults with his assistant and finally nods in approval. The gravy is ready. The crew springs back to work.

This is baseball in Quebec City, and the only people working harder than the players on the field might be the employees in the concessions pumping out thousands of orders of poutine – that much-loved Quebec staple of fries, cheese curds and gravy. At just $3 an order, they will sell a lot of it tonight.

We’ve come to watch Les Capitales de Quebec play at Stade Canac, one of the oldest cathedrals for baseball still in use in North America. It’s a concrete artifact from another era, the kind of magical, timeless place where you can still buy a ticket to sit in the wooden grandstand for $5, a beer for $4 and a hot dog for $1. In other words, it’s perfect.

The Capitales play in the Frontier League – an independent professional league with three Canadian teams (Ottawa Titans and Trois-Rivières Aigles are the other two) and 15 American teams. For Canadian baseball fans looking for an alternative to U.S. road trips during the Donald Trump presidency, it doesn’t get much better than this. The stadium is almost always full, the baseball is very good and the fans are here to party.

“I came to the stadium two-and-a-half hours before the game started today, and there were already hundreds of people lined up, waiting to get in,” said Cleveland’s Steve Tahsler, the league’s commissioner. “That only happens in Quebec.”

It helps that the Capitales are one of the best teams in the league, having won 10 championships since they began play in 1999. Their players, a mix of homegrown talent and athletes from the U.S. and Latin America, are often scouted by major-league teams.

At the second game we attended, I ended up sitting next to Andrew Tinnish, the Toronto Blue Jays vice-president of international scouting and operations. He was there to watch Braeden Allemann, the Capitales starting pitcher who struck out 12 batters over five innings. Tinnish, who played in Quebec during his own career, said major-league teams are paying more and more attention to what’s happening in the Frontier League.

The Capitales have high expectations this season, after winning the championship three years in a row. But there’s a good portion of the crowd who seem less concerned about the score or the standings. On Friday and Saturday nights, the stadium’s large outdoor terrace feels more like a packed bar – with live music, cheap drinks and all-you-can-eat pizza, hot dogs and popcorn.

“We all know that Quebec is a hockey city, and so we need to sell more than baseball to bring people into our stands,” explained Charles Demers, the team’s president and co-owner. “We want to make it entertaining.”

At a time when everything seems to be getting more expensive, the Capitales have somehow found a way to freeze their stadium prices in the 1990s. That may be part of the reason the atmosphere is often wildly fun, whether they’re winning or losing, and regardless of the weather. People cheer as lustily for pizza giveaways and strikeouts as they do when the team’s blindfolded mascot Capi tries to throw cheese curds into a giant tub of poutine in between innings. You often find yourself standing and shouting at the top of your lungs, just because everyone else is doing it.

Baseball may be America’s pastime, but Quebeckers have found a way to make it their own. There’s no balls and strikes here, rather balles and prises. Bases are called buts. A knuckleball is beautifully described as une balle papillon (a butterfly ball). Most of the game’s French vocabulary was standardized in 1969, when the long-gone Montreal Expos were established. At the time, broadcasters and reporters agreed to use a list of French terms recommended by linguists and baseball experts.

We knew few of these words when we settled into our seats. But there’s something about watching a baseball game that is universal, regardless of the language used by fans or the announcers in the stadium. And the good news is that booing and cheering remain the same in any tongue.

If you go

Air Canada and Porter Airlines fly direct to Quebec City from Toronto, but since this was meant to be a road trip, five of us piled into a van and headed down the highway. It’s about an eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Toronto.

We stayed at the Hilton Quebec, a short drive from the stadium, and an even shorter walk to the cobblestoned, historic streets of Old Quebec, the Citadelle fortress and the Plains of Abraham Museum. Rooms with stunning views of the city and St. Lawrence River start at $209 a night.

After the game, take a taxi to Pub L’Oncle Antoine and play games of Jenga under vaulted stone walls, in one of the city’s oldest buildings. Watch out for the shots of maple whisky that seem to emerge whenever the towers come crashing down. Snack Bar Saint-Jean in the popular Rue Saint-Jean bar district is the best option for late-night poutine and hot dogs.

The writer travelled as a guest of Destination Québec cité. It did not review or approve this story before publication.