With the Toronto Blue Jays in Washington this week, the Nationals decided to use the opportunity to highlight the franchise’s Canadian heritage and the relationship between the two neighbouring nations.
Tuesday’s game at Nationals Park was dubbed Canada-U.S. Friendship Day as a number of fans attending the game received a special themed hat, featuring the Canadian maple leaf with a Montreal Expos logo on the side.
After a 35-year run in Montreal, the Expos were relocated to Washington in 2005 where they became the Nationals, eventually winning their first World Series in franchise history in 2019.
Jason Sinnarajah, a Toronto native, has been a business executive for a handful of professional sports teams, including the Cleveland Guardians, Kansas City Royals and Buffalo Bills before joining the Nationals in early 2026.
Sinnarajah’s responsibilities with the Nats include everything from ticket sales and sponsorships to marketing and concessions.
He credits Washington’s marketing and PR team for coming up the idea for Tuesday’s contest.
“They put together this idea of celebrating our heritage as an organization, we obviously came from Montreal. We’ve done some Expos days in the past, we have an Expos jersey giveaway later on this season for our fans and we sell a lot of Expos stuff in our store,” said Sinnarajah. “They came up with this idea of doing a Nationals hat with the Canadian maple leaf and the Expos logo on the side and doing a special theme night.”
Canadian ambassador to the United States Mark Wiseman threw out the first pitch before the game. Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc was also in attendance.
The themed night occurred despite tensions between Canada and United States remaining high, mainly attributed to the ongoing trade and tariff dispute that has lasted well over a year.
“I very much stay away from political stuff. We want to respect the office down the street here, but we’ve done this with other countries as well,” explained Sinnarajah. “We did the UK-U.S. friendship day earlier this year, we’re going to do something with the Australians. We did the Japanese Heritage Night [on the] opening weekend when we played Shohei Ohtani and Dodgers. So, just being in Washington and being in our nation’s capital here in the U.S. just affords us the opportunity to work with a lot of different groups.”
The Blue Jays lost Tuesday’s game 8-6 to fall to 49-59 on the season. They wrap up their three-game series in Washington on Wednesday afternoon.
