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Toronto Blue Jays’ Troy Tulowitzki, left, and David Price celebrate an 11th inning walk-off win over the Kansas City Royals with Jose Bautista, right, on Friday, July 31 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.Nick Turchiaro

A long-lost phenomenon rarely seen since the team's glory days of the early 1990s has resurfaced at Rogers Centre in Toronto.

Lineups at the box office, of excited fans seeking tickets to Toronto Blue Jays games, have popped up in the past several days.

If Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos needed any positive feedback to the jaw-dropping trades he orchestrated last week, this is it.

But fans seeking tickets to Monday's holiday matinee, in which new team ace David Price will make his Blue Jays debut against the Minnesota Twins, need not bother heading down to join any queues.

The American League club said Sunday that the game against the Twins has been sold out so upward of 45,000 will be flocking to the stadium, their interest no doubt fuelled by the presence of Price.

That follows on the heels of Sunday's sellout of 45,736 to witness the finale of the four-game series against the Kansas City Royals, a 5-2 Toronto victory.

It marked the fifth sellout of the season and the first since Anthopoulos retooled the team for a serious playoff push with two months left in the regular season.

Along with the acquisition of Price from the Detroit Tigers, the other trade of note was the Anthopoulos deal for Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. Both are all-stars with impeccable baseball pedigrees.

"Obviously everyone's kind of rallied around the moves that Alex has made," said Jason Diplock, the Jays' vice-president of ticket sales and service, whose job just became a lot easier. "In the last week it [interest] has certainly jumped and I think all the initial excitement has been funnelled and channelled into this weekend's series.

"And we're sold out, as everyone knows, for Monday's game and pretty close on Sunday as well."

Without providing a specific number, Diplock said that the ticket sales for the remainder of the Blue Jays home games "quadrupled" over what is usually anticipated at this stage of the season.

The Jays are averaging around 29,000 per home game and that number is sure to increase as long as the team remains in the AL playoff hunt.

The team entered play on Sunday six games behind the New York Yankees for first place in the American League East standing and two games behind the Minnesota Twins for the second and final wild card berth.

"You can feel the excitement entering the dugout, the feeling in the locker room," Price said when asked about the charged atmosphere he felt when he first joined the team Friday night following the trade.

"This is a group of guys that want to win. This is a management and a front office that wants to win. Whenever you can kind of put those things together and put it in this city and in this country, they want to win. That's very important. That's what matters."

A 20-game winner for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2012 when he won the Cy Young Award as the AL's top pitcher, Price has already endeared himself to the city's baseball fans even before he has thrown a single pitch.

First he proclaimed his unfettered love of popcorn, calling the stuff he has wolfed down at Rogers Centre over the years the best he's ever had.

Price's easy-going nature and media savvy were also on display after he noticed on social media how a young Toronto baseball fan welcomed his trade by taping "Price" and the number 14 on the back of an existing jersey.

Price took to Twitter and quickly discovered the identity of the boy and has made arrangements to get him an official David Price Blue Jays jersey.

Of course, the primary concern of the Blue Jays is how well Price will play.

Long-suffering supporters of the team are pumped that his addition will be enough to land Toronto its first playoff berth since 1993, when the Blue Jays won the World Series.

Price goes into the game with a record of 9-4 with a 2.53 earned-run average, the fourth lowest in the AL. He averages close to nine strikouts for every nine innings pitched.

Gibbons said he is planning to use Price every fifth day, meaning that he has at least 13 starts to make if the manager sticks to that plan.

Price said that suits him just fine.

"I've always been ready for that challenge," Price said. "That's what I've wanted."

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