Matlow Says Baycats Still Team To Beat
by Jeffrey Reed, Editor, LondonOntarioSports.com
If you’re searching for a poster boy for bleeding Barrie Baycats blue, then look no further than the club’s new general manager and bench boss Josh Matlow.
There are many backstories to Matlow’s allegiance to the Baycats ballclub, but none speak as loudly as a decision he made on the eve of the club’s first Intercounty Baseball League championship victory in 2005.
As Barrie’s starting left fielder on that team – the first of seven IBL championship squads since the team’s charter season in 2001 – Matlow faced a big decision: stick with the club and help them clinch the Jack and Lynne Dominico Trophy, or rejoin his teammates with the Canisius College Griffins in Buffalo, N.Y.
Josh Matlow
“We were a game away from winning our first IBL championship,” recalled Matlow, “but I was supposed to return to Canisius for a mandatory players’ meeting. I thought it would be OK to play one more game with Barrie. I called my coach and said, I need to be here to help win a championship. But he told me, ‘You had better be here for this meeting.’
“Well, I missed that meeting, collected an RBI in the ninth inning of our championship game but it was the end of my career at Canisius,” said Matlow. “It was a shame how it unfolded, but I would do it over 100 times knowing we would win the IBL championship. And I have the ring to prove it. It was about loyalty. A lot of players wouldn’t have done it. But it was my only choice.”
And just like that, the Thornhill native now living in Innisfil with his wife, Sasha, and their 7-month-old daughter, Jasmine, became a Barrie Baycat for life. But it wasn’t a continual story. After suiting up with the Baycats in 2005-06, and 2008-09, the 35-year-old entrepreneur took some time away from the game to establish a business career.
Matlow is owner of SeatGIANT, an online market place connecting sports and concert ticket buyers and sellers across North America. That company, like most others, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. But Matlow is digging deeply into his baseball roots to ride out the storm, just as he is doing during the genesis of his new role with the Baycats ballclub.