Blue Jays fan Dean Angelo at Shape Fitness in Toronto on Thursday. Mr. Angelo has gone viral for his appearances in the crowd behind home plate during Jays playoff home games.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
At first, there was one. With biceps like a Christmas ham and mountainous traps that nearly touched his ears.
In the second row, behind home plate of Game 1 of the American League Division Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees, a young man watched the game intensely, his arms appearing as if they were on the verge of bursting the seams of his Jays jersey.
“Who’s this unit at the Yankees vs Blue Jays game?” an X user asked during the game, along with a zoomed-in video of the unit in question. Others quickly chimed in: “Why is there a refrigerator behind home plate” and “dude bought 3 seats, one for his torso and one for each arm.” On TikTok, a grainy video simply captioned “Bro is huge” has more than five million views.
The bro is Dean Angelo, a 28-year-old personal trainer and bodybuilder from Toronto who has been attending Jays’ games since he was a kid. He’s also become a minor supporting character in the Blue Jays’ remarkable World Series run.
Then, at Game 6 of the recent series between the Jays and the Seattle Mariners, two more very muscle-y men arrived, sitting side by side at the Rogers Centre. Somehow, unbelievably, they were even bigger than Mr. Angelo. The trio of hulking fans became impossible to miss.
Once again, fans were mesmerized. TikTok, Instagram and X exploded with posts about the yoked men behind home plate. Even the U.S. sports broadcasters covering the game were dumbfounded: “What is going on in Toronto where there’s just jacked dudes behind home plate?”
While most have been dazzled by Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s home runs, George Springer’s Game 7 winning three-run blast or rookie Trey Yesavage’s golden arm, a smaller, yet passionate, slice of the internet has been obsessed with the jacked men at the Jays’ home games.
Mr. Angelo, who has been off social media since 2021, is shocked by his newfound viral fame.
“The first time I saw the TikTok of me, I didn’t think I’d be having my story told in the newspaper. That’s not a follow-up thought I had,” he says.
A long-time Jays fan, he attended his first game with his dad on June 25, 2003, against the Baltimore Orioles, when he was six years old. Around the same time, he started playing baseball in Toronto, and was eventually recruited by Trinity University in San Antonio, Tex., as a pitcher.
Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
But an injury in his freshman year halted his fledging professional career. He started partying and stopped exercising. At his heaviest, he weighed close to 300 pounds.
Then about eight years ago, he started going to the gym again and training for bodybuilding competitions. He’s currently prepping for an event next June and working out twice daily, five days a week.
The seats behind home plate are his dad’s season tickets, with whom he usually sits and who home viewers may recognize as “the dude that kind of looks like Danny DeVito,” Mr. Angelo says.
“It’s bonding for me and my dad. That’s how we spend a lot of our time together because growing up playing sports, we’d be on the road together all the time driving to play baseball. Then when that ended, we started going to more games.”
It was through the bodybuilding community that Mr. Angelo met the two other jacked men who captured the internet’s attention.
“We thought it would be funny if we showed up since we’re all pretty big,” says Quinton Eriya, a professional bodybuilder who arrived to Game 6 of the Mariners’ series in a cut-off shirt and a Blue Jays hat. Mr. Angelo’s dad was able to help Mr. Eriya and the other bodybuilder, Blake Course, buy tickets for the game.
Mr. Eriya, who eats around 400 grams of protein a day, says the response has been surprising. “The weird thing is, being around bodybuilders so much, I almost think I blend in for some reason,” says Mr. Eriya, whose biceps look like overstuffed duffel bags. “I wasn’t expecting much, so the reaction was really funny.”
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He’s unsure if he’ll be able to make it to any World Series games, but he’s hoping that he can make it work somehow.
After the first TikTok went viral, Mr. Angelo says he stopped looking at social-media posts about himself. “Regardless if it’s positive or negative, I don’t think that’s good for your brain,” he says.
Mr. Angelo has made it to every home game this postseason, except for two, although he’s sometimes in other seats in the stadium, which has induced anxiety among the most superstitious fans. “People were DMing me on Instagram when I wasn’t seated in my regular seat in Game 7. They’re like ‘You need to move!’” he says. (For his part, Mr. Angelo only has one superstition: He won’t wear a jersey to the game if it’s raining.)
On Friday, for Game 1 of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Mr. Angelo will be back in his regular seats. He’s feeling cautiously hopeful.
“I started out kind of pessimistic, but now I’ve started to talk myself into ‘We’re gonna win the World Series.’ My gut instinct is to protect myself because of all past sports traumas,” he says, referring to when the Jays were knocked out in the American League Championship Series in 2015 and 2016. “But I feel like we can do it.”