On a hazy evening 30 years ago, a seagull died in downtown Toronto.

Not uncommon in a city then teeming with ring-billed gulls, this particular death would leave a mark on Toronto, an all-star athlete and a group of people who found themselves drawn into one of the more absurd episodes in sport.

On August 4, 1983, more than 36,000 watched the Toronto Blue Jays play the New York Yankees at Exhibition Stadium. When Yankee star Dave Winfield threw a baseball at the end of the fifth inning warm-up, it came into disastrous convergence with a bird that had been watching in right-centrefield. The bird slumped lifelessly on the Astroturf.

A police officer sitting on the edge of right field thought it was an intentional hit. Winfield said it was an accident. He was taken to 14 Division and charged with causing “unnecessary suffering to an animal.” The charge was later dropped, but the moment never really went away.

It was too bizarre, and it was the slow, draggy time of summer when news was sparse — a bad time to be a seagull; a strange time to be Dave Winfield.

In letters to the editor, some called it a deliberate act of cruelty. One man praised Winfield as a “watchdog” against seagulls — a perceived menace in 1983 Toronto, when six per cent of the international ring-billed gull population made their home on the Leslie Street spit.

“That bird didn’t look right to begin with,” said Yankee coach Jeff Torborg after the game. “Didn’t you see how its feet sort of skidded out underneath it when it landed?”

“Nobody likes to kill a bird, but accidents happen,” said Dave Winfield’s mother, reached at her Minnesota home days after the incident. “My goodness, people hit deer with their cars but aren’t treated like criminals.”

On the 30 year anniversary, the Star reached out to the major players in the seagull slaying, to bring you an oral history of one of the strangest incidents in Toronto Blue Jays history.

A baseball is thrown

On the night of his most famous arrest, Constable Wayne Hartery was a 10-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service. He was 28, with two youngsters at home. Normally on patrol in Parkdale, this was his off day, but he took a paid duty shift at Exhibition Stadium. The extra money helped. It was a night game. He wasn’t a big baseball fan, but knew the names of some of the Blue Jays from other shifts at the ballpark. He watched from the edge of the field, near the right field bullpen.

Wayne Hartery: That bird had been on the field for three innings, it was just sitting there, it kind of looked a little sickly to be honest with you, it was just moving slowly.

Karen McDonald, Toronto Region Conservation Authority: The seagull population peaked in 1984 with 74,564 pairs. We only count nests. Each nest represents at least two adults, so this (number) isn’t going to include birds that are too young to breed or never find a mate . . . In the 1970s there was a substantial amount of building going on at the Leslie Street Spit and because it was so new there wasn’t a whole lot of vegetation, which made it perfect habitat for ring-billed gulls.

Hartery: There were always seagulls out in the empty parts of the stands. You have to remember, we were right on the water. There was all this popcorn, garbage and food that was always left. They knew that when the people all got up and left, they were going into the stands to pick up the food. I don’t really think it was much of a problem during the games. To see a seagull sitting in the field like that, it didn’t really throw anybody off, but it wasn’t a common occurrence

Dave Winfield: Don Baylor was in left field and Ken Griffey Sr. was in right. When I finished playing catch, I was throwing it to the ball boy, they sit down the right field line. I saw the bird in that direction. I threw in that direction, but really not anticipating or expecting to hit it. I threw it with some force to get to the ball boy, sure enough the bird, you know, it just killed it immediately.

Jeff Pinchuk, former ball boy: It just happened to accidentally get in the way of the ball that came back to me. I still remember, it was a one-hopper. The Astroturf there was wet. It’s like throwing a rock in water. If you throw a ball and hit the turf, if you’ve been to a game and watched it, it just skips, and it just so happened that the bird couldn’t get out of the way in time.

Helen Lyon, spectator: I was at the ball game when that poor seagull got sent to heaven . . . I was looking around, I was just watching the bird. He just beaned him. He shouldn’t have done that . . . I certainly wouldn’t remember everything I did 30 years ago, but that was such a startling thing to have happen that I never forgot it . . . I was one of the people that gasped.

Hartery: I sent the kid out, the ball boy out, to pick up the seagull and the ball.

Pinchuk: Have you ever picked up a dead animal? You can imagine something that’s dead, basically its neck is broken, and the nerves are still jumping around, and you’re trying to pick it up. So yeah, it’s a little eerie but I didn’t have to go too far.

Hartery: There were 30,000 people in the stands that night and they went ballistic, they really did, they were chanting “Winfield sucks” for the next four innings . . . I sat there for a few minutes just thinking, what I was going to do? I left my post, I called my staff sergeant and told him I’d meet him in the Blue Jay security office, which was under the stadium. I walked in with a dead seagull, at that point I told him I was going to be arresting the centrefielder — I didn’t know his name — after the game was over.

Winfield: You heard some boos and then between innings, I’d come up to the bat, and you’d hear boo. I’d have to look at what I did that day, it seemed like I hit a double or a home run during that day.

Hartery: You know what, I got put on mum back then by the chief and the deputy, I was not allowed to talk to anybody, so, I don’t really give a heck anymore. I’ll guarantee you 100 per cent he tried to hit it, he aimed for it, I know for a fact he was surprised to hit it, because it was long distance throw . . . Every inning up until this inning, Winfield would get the ball and throw it into the ball boy sitting beside me. That ball would roll into that ball boy at about one mile an hour, there was just enough heat on that ball to make it, and on this inning, and I can’t prove what he said, but he turned to left fielder, when he picked up the ball, and again I can’t prove it, but I know he said, “Watch this,” and he turned with everything he had, and he threw that ball.

Winfield: I didn’t just sit and take aim. It was thrown pretty quick, but it wasn’t like I sat there and took aim and fired just at the bird. It was on the ground, it had been there for a while between innings, it wasn’t like a malicious type of thing. Honestly I would have thought like anything else, sometimes birds scatter as an object comes toward them, whether it’s a car or a baseball . . . I would kind of liken it to, if you’re driving down the street and you see a squirrel or raccoon or something and you’re driving pretty quickly and you say, “Ah it will move,” and you hear the thump and you say, “Oh man,” and that’s kind of the way it unfolded, I didn’t expect to hit it, but I did.

Hartery: I waited until after the game and then we arrested him. Well, I arrested him. My call . . . I knew when I did it, that people were going to say yep that was good, or yep, that was bad and stupid, I knew it was going to go both ways, let’s put it that way . . . most of the naysayers didn’t see what I saw.

Winfield: They were doing this interview in the dugout, and our manager Billy Martin came up and he said, “Hurry up, there’s police waiting for you in the locker room, you gotta deal with this after the game.” I thought he was kidding, but they weren’t. They were waiting for me.

Pinchuk: I still remember Billy Martin’s comments: “Cruelty to animals? That’s the first time he hit the cut-off man all year.”

Hartery: I just waited till after the game, and knocked on the Yankee dressing room door, I said, “Look when he’s ready, he’s coming with me.” Everybody always asks, how come you brought him to the station and so on? Because he was an American citizen, and our law says that an American had to post bail in cash before you leave the station.

Pat Gillick, then Blue Jays general manager: (Paul) Beeston and I went with him over to the police station. They had to get the crown out of bed to come down there. The police showed up they brought the bird in there with a towel, covered over, like a sheet would be over a dead person.

Hartery: He was a total gentleman, he didn’t have the arrogance, or “I’m the big shot.” He was obviously not happy coming to the station and stuff, and didn’t want to say a lot without his lawyer.

Winfield: I remember peeking out the window, around midnight it seemed, you know behind the curtain, and there’s a picture of me peeking out . . . it’s like John Dillinger holding up people in the house.

Hartery: It was actually the Blue Jays upper management that came and posted his bond so he could get released that night. He didn’t have enough cash on him. We asked for $500. He only had $200 American in his pocket I think.

Gillick: It created a lot of problems for them (the Yankees). At that time, there was a curfew at Pearson, you couldn’t fly out of Pearson after midnight. Well, they had to move the plane to Hamilton, and I had to explain to Billy Martin, he ended up waiting out there probably three and a half hours in Hamilton for us to get Winfield out to the airport . . . He thought it was rather ridiculous.

Paul Godfrey, then Metro Chairman: I go home, on television I hear that Dave Winfield has been arrested and charged with cruelty to animals . . . I’m sort of horrified, I call the chief of police, who is then Jack Marks who has unfortunately passed on, I wake him up, pull him out of the bed and I say, “Jack what the F is going on?” Poor Jack he was asleep he was dazed by getting a call from me . . . he must have thought there were multiple murders going on in the city . . . He said, “I don’t know anything about this thing, I’ll find out and I’ll call you back first thing in the morning.”

The morning after

Lyon: I don’t know what I was doing that made me so ambitious to sit down and write a letter to the editor. It was a topic of conversation every place you went. I was actually pretty upset about it. I’m an animal lover, and I think even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t like to see somebody conk the bird on the head with a baseball.

Paul Dalby, former Global News reporter: It (the dead seagull) went from the Blue Jays field to the police station initially. It was kept in the fridge or something. And then I think it was sent to Guelph, at that point, they were still thinking of bringing this ludicrous charge against Dave Winfield, some little known clause of the criminal code.

Ian Barker, retired Guelph University wildlife pathologist and professor: I didn’t catch the news in the morning or anything like that. When I went into my office at 8 a.m., there were five television crews already waiting for me, wanting to find out about this bird, I hadn’t even heard of it . . . the word was the Toronto Humane Society had sent it to Guelph. Well, they certainly hadn’t. There was no communication from them at all and I couldn’t get through to them because of course they were being completely bombarded by the press from all over the bloody world.

Dalby: I remember us hanging on and waiting, and I’m pretty sure that by the time we were able to film anything . . . it was so late we were almost hysterical.

Barker: The guy that was the most fun, his name was Paul Dalby, he was the reporter for Global News, and Paul was sure I had this gull, and I was concealing that fact from him. So he and his camera man were hanging around all day. He went to the toilet with me, he went to lunch with me, he shadowed me everywhere and I did not have this gull, nor had I had any communication about it.

Dalby: I don’t know about the bathroom. I don’t know whether I’d be quite that desperate. Following him around? That certainly makes sense. We were desperate. You had a news desk that was telling you we’ve got to have that footage, we’ve got to have something. The rule of thumb? You never came back with no footage.

Barker: About 4 p.m. I get the word from the post-mortem room that a green garbage bag has turned up with the gull in it, and no preliminary consultation or anything. So anyhow, I went down and started to get ready to do the autopsy, and Dalby wanted to film this. We don’t allow autopsies to be filmed. He wanted some kind of camera opportunity, and so I said, “OK, well, I’ll hold the gull in my gloved hands, and you can take a shot of me looking knowingly at the gull.” As we’re about to do that his cameraman said, “Hold on, my batteries are dead,” and I said, “The news just broke and you guys just missed it,” and proceeded off to do my autopsy. That’s how miserable I can be to reporters.

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Dalby: It would have been one of those cases, the cameramen is supposed to stick the extra battery in the back pocket and that was just one of those occasions, where he left it in the car, which was in the parking lot . . . we weren’t too proud, we were begging, we threw ourselves on their mercy.

Barker: It was a juvenile bird (likely hatched in June), in thin body condition. My assessment basically was, it had microscopic evidence of Aspergillus in the lung . . . animals with suppressed immune systems are more prone to developing that. It had reduced muscle mass, no fat, one of these young birds that was going to die within a week or 10 days. There was a little bacterial infection in its wing, a number of things that were going on. It was a debilitated bird . . . There was a bruise on the brain, and there was a lot of hemorrhaging around the base of the brain . . . that’s due to the blunt force trauma of the baseball hitting the head.

Dalby: I guess we must have got some footage. We were hoofing it back for the evening news, which I think at that time was probably still 6 o’clock. Traffic was really bad, and he (the cameraman) said, “No problem.” He put his emergency flashers on, and pulled into the shoulder lane of the centre of the 401 and went straight down the shoulder lane, which is strictly illegal . . . I remember looking up and feeling quite ill and thinking, “I just trust that we’ll get through alive.” And all the time I’m thinking, “We’re doing this for a dead seagull, this is ridiculous.” But I came to learn that in television, that was really not unusual. You’d risk life and limb for a dead seagull.

Charges withdrawn

In the days after the seagull incident, then mayor Art Eggleton said the city “went overboard on this one.” When asked for his reflection 30 years later, the senator politely declined: “I think to drag it out again is a little overboard,” he said with a chuckle.

Hartery: Mr. Godfrey went down to New York and apologized on behalf of the city which I was not happy with.

Godfrey: It wasn’t paid for with taxpayer money. It was paid by myself. . . We had planned a trip down to New York, I used to take my sons on road trips to watch the Blue Jays play. There was no intention of me running down and apologizing or anything else to Dave Winfield . . . after the first game, I’m sitting there, someone from the Yankee front office said, “Mr. Godfrey, Mr. Winfield would like to see you.” This was between games, it was a complete surprise to me, it wasn’t planned . . . I walk into a dressing room where half of the players were nude, some had towels around them. There was Winfield, and they took me over to him and he said “Geez, I’m sorry I would like to make a big donation, I’m sorry I caused the big controversy.” I said, “Look we all regret that things unfolded in the way they did.”

Hartery: A couple days later, they withdrew the charges, the crown attorney, and that was the end of it, basically.

On August 12, the crown attorney wore a seagull lapel pin and said he couldn’t establish criminality or intent. Winfield was awoken with the news in Detroit. “I just want to forget about it now. . . I feel like I’ll be hearing about it for a long time,” he told the Star.

Winfield: I didn’t have to come back for a court appearance somehow that wasn’t required, then I was asked to come to a charity fundraiser up there, it would have been in January or February. I owned a couple of art galleries then, so I had an artist paint a very nice piece, something to do with natural resources, the Canadian flag, you know, a good concept, so it auctioned for over $30,000 (for Easter Seals). And they were very happy, you know it’s kind of like turning lemons to lemonade. The people weren’t mad at me or upset or anything like that. I told my mother I’d been invited to go up there and she said, “Invited or extradited?”

Hartery: Most of the guys on the shift were all pretty cool with it, we all laughed about it. If you ever go down to 14 division, even today, they designed a patch, an insignia for 14 division, and it’s a seagull holding a baseball bat, it’s sort of been, it’s sort of the 14th division crest and motto . . . I go down a little bit in history at my old station.

Winfield: There were a couple times it seemed like the Blue Jays had wanted to get me in a trade. I don’t know if it was because of all this, but I always played well up there, so I had no hard feelings or anything like that. ’92 was the only year (playing in Toronto.) It was my best and most enjoyable year in the game. I played a long time, so that says something.

Hartery: When he came back to the Blue Jays, again I was working a game and I was in that same hallway. I said, “Hi,” I told him who I was, and he didn’t want to talk. I said, “OK, no problem,” and I just walked, gave him his privacy.

Life goes on

A month after the bird’s death, the Star asked readers to weigh in on whether the city should control the gull population. The results were evenly split, with one person noting: “The eggs should be sprayed. Or bring in Dave Winfield and the Yankees.”

Toronto remained a city divided by the ubiquitous seagull. In 1985, Etobicoke mayor Bruce Sinclair declared “war” on the “rats of the air.” Dmytro Buchnea, a retired biochemistry professor, suggested harvesting the eggs for eating, but officials nixed the idea.

Not all seagull reviews were negative. A music critic noted that the usually annoying gulls at Ontario Place were “unwitting allies” to the musical cause when Don McLean came to town in 1986: “Who could resist the visual splendour of ‘Castles In The Air,’ sung to the gliding antics of 40 feathered friends, who seemed to swerve and dip as if in time to McLean’s breezy testament.”

Pinchuk: The job I had was probably one of the best jobs in the world that every single kid would want to have. August 4, it was a moment, put it this way. I’m not a professional baseball player, but I laugh because everybody calls me a professional ball boy, because of all this stuff that always happens.

Gillick: To be frank I thought it was a little bit ridiculous. The charge I mean. It’s normal for guys to play catch between innings and keep their arms loose. We had a lot of seagulls at Exhibition Stadium. Evidently one wandered into the path of the ball and got hit in the head . . . I think the guy was overzealous. Sometimes you gotta use common sense, sometimes, I know the law is the law. As I said I don’t think it was intentional.

Hartery: I worked my whole career in Parkdale, at the time back then, a pretty rough, tough area to work. We were very busy. It had nothing to do with inexperience. I knew what I was doing . . . I still have the baseball stuck here in my cabinet . . . The only thing I kind of regret is not getting him to sign the baseball.

Winfield: I don’t go around trying to hurt animals or destroy them. So you know, let’s just say I know that in my baseball career, I will always be remembered for hitting a bird, and I don’t know. I’m not that upset, it’s just a part of that career. One of those things that always comes up.

Barker: It was a completely inappropriate disposition of resources. It tied me up for basically a couple of days, by the time all the fallout and whatnot went on. You know I’ve had a lot of interactions with the press, but nothing where I felt it was so frivolous.

Dalby: It wasn’t on my escape reel when I left Global. “Oh I better put on the seagull story it might get me a job with CBC. Not.” It was fun. The folks at Guelph were great, we went there a few times on stories. They were always very kind.

Winfield: One of the funniest things I have, I still have, somebody gave me one of these wooden seagulls with a ball embedded in its side, they gave it to me as a gift, I still have that around my house.

Because of public concern, TRCA and the Canadian Wildlife Service began managing the seagull population in the mid ’80s, scaring the birds with a falcon and a fake coyote (A coyote skin that was put on different things, including a saw horse.) The most effective method proved to be oiling the eggs to stop them from hatching. The estimated seagull population on the Leslie Street spit is now 35,000 pairs.

McDonald: Gulls used to nest in three areas at the park. We only want them to nest in two, so we took one area and said you’re not allowed to nest here and we oiled all of the eggs. This allowed the vegetation to take hold, because there weren’t as many gulls there trampling all of the vegetation that was trying to grow. Eventually the grass did start to grow and they no longer nest there and we don’t need to manage them ...

The population actually reduced pretty quickly after control was initiated in 1984. It (the Winfield incident) probably was a contributor to public outcry ... I think the other thing you have to keep in mind is the closure of the Keele Valley Landfill. That eliminated a food source for them and contributed to their decline in population.

Post script

The seagull was incinerated at Guelph University following all necessary post-mortem analysis.

Wayne Hartery, 58, retired from the Toronto Police Service in 2001 and works as Royal LePage real estate agent in Mississauga.

Jeff Pinchuk, 46, was a ball boy for a few more seasons and is now the roving reporter for Georgina Life on Rogers TV.

Paul Dalby, 66, is a freelance writer.

Pat Gillick, 75, is a special advisor to the general manager and president of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Paul Godfrey, 74, is president and CEO of Postmedia Network

Ian Barker, 68, retired from Guelph University in 2010 but still teaches and supervises grad students.

Dave Winfield, 61, drove in the winning run of the Blue Jays 1992 World Series triumph and retired from baseball in 1995, having hit 465 home runs, 1,833 RBIs and killed one seagull. The hall of famer and philanthropist is now executive vice-president and senior advisor with the San Diego Padres.