Via Eric Simon comes the news that former Met Rusty Staub will be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, which exists. Staub is not Canadian — he was born in Louisiana — but he enjoyed three straight All-Star seasons with the Expos from 1969-1971 (and another handful of at-bats with the club late in the 1979 season). That’s about all the claim to Canadian-ness it turns out you need for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.

Other Canadian Baseball Hall of Famers include actual Canadians like Larry Walker, Ferguson Jenkins and Kirk McCaskill, but also some with more tenuous connections to the nation, like Tommy Lasorda — who pitched for the Dodgers’ Triple-A team in Montreal for nine seasons — and the entire All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which had 64 Canadians including the catcher Geena Davis’ character in A League of Their Own was “rumoured to be based on.”

There’s obviously a waiting period after a player retires before he can be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. I can tell because Matt Stairs isn’t in yet even though they (presumably) already have a Matt Stairs Wing full of awesome Matt Stairs memorabilia, including jerseys from all 13 of his Major League stops, an empty beer can that is believed to be from his first-ever postgame Molson, the original scouting report on Stairs by Expos scout Bill MacKenzie*, and, of course, a whole bunch of hockey stuff.

The Matt Stairs Wing is right near the early Winnipeg Slugger prototypes, across from where the wax statue of Kelly Gruber stands and kitty corner from where the actual Kelly Gruber stands, just sort of hanging around admiring the Canadian baseball history, considering his small role in it and secretly hoping someone recognizes him even while he insists to his friends that he hopes no one recognizes him.

Come to think of it, I should probably get to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. Worth it for the trip down memory lane to those times when Jason Bay was pretty good.

*- Actual name of Expos scout that signed Matt Stairs. Canada!