Al East? Fugetaboutit: Jack Todd

If the day comes when a reborn Montreal Expos team is playing ball at beautiful new Felipe Alou Park, we have to hope that the field will never be sullied with the designated hitter.

I don’t like the DH — but that’s not the problem. The problem is a division called the American League East. I know, I know. I am as guilty as most people who want to see Major League Baseball return to this city. I thought that instant rivalries with the Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees made it a nobrainer for the Expos to play in the AL East.

Upon further reflection, I’ve concluded that for prospective owners Mitch Garber and Stephen Bronfman, the AL East should be a deal-breaker.

Here’s the thing: On June 5 this year, I happened to notice that the well-heeled Blue Jays had already lost their 34th game of the season. How long, I wondered, would it take the Yankees and Red Sox to reach that level? I guessed it would be around three weeks, meaning that the Jays were, in effect, three weeks behind.

So here it is July 22 and as of this writing, the Yankees (who have been struggling of late) have exactly 34 losses, while the mighty Red Sox are still at 31 losses. The Blue Jays, coming off a modest two-game winning streak, have 52 losses and are 22.5 games out. Their season was over by Canada Day.

Even the Jays can point down in the standings to the onceproud Baltimore Orioles, who went into play Sunday with a record of 28-71, 40.5 games out in July — and in a move reminiscent of Claude Brochu and his fire sales, the Orioles have dealt their best player, Manny Machado, to the high-rent Los Angeles Dodgers. That’s the reality of the AL East.

You want the Expos to play in this division? Seriously? To be doomed to an eternal effort to grab the second wild-card spot, this season in competition with the 59-40 Seattle Mariners out West?

During the past off-season, the Yankees (already a playoff team) went out and acquired slugger Giancarlo Stanton from the Marlins. Their reward? They’re now 4.5 games behind the Red Sox and looking at a probable Wild Card matchup with Seattle, with one team or the other flying clear across the country for a single game.

The current standings are not a one-season anomaly. The Red Sox and Yankees reflect the new Super Team structure of North American sports, with near bottomless treasure chests, free agents itching to climb aboard and solid minor-league organizations churning out young players like New York’s Gleyber Torres and Mookie Betts, a solid candidate for MVP in his fifth season with the Red Sox. There is every reason to believe that a decade or two from now, the Yankees and Red Sox will be exactly where they are now in the AL East: Sitting on top, with the rest of the division fighting for the leftovers.

No, the Expos, if and when they return, should go right back where they started, to the NL East. Let them rekindle rivalries with the Mets, the Phillies, the Braves and start a new rivalry with the ex-Expos in Washington, who will elicit a special sort of loathing in Montreal. (No, I have no idea what the restructured divisions would look like with two expansion teams bringing the total to 32 — that’s not my problem.)

Montreal was among the six teams named by commissioner Rob Manfred as potential expansion sites last week, but first of all, there’s the ticklish matter of a new stadium. Spending something well north of $250 million to gussy up the Olympic Stadium so this city can host three or four games of the 2026 World Cup is insane. If you’re going to spend that kind of money on anything sports related, it should go to help build a ballpark for an Expos team that would play 1,640 regular-season home games in this city over two decades.Any investment in Major League Baseball makes infinitely more sense that pouring hundreds of millions down the World Cup/ Big O rathole.

Baseball will work brilliantly in this city with the right combination of factors. That includes the right ownership, the right ballpark in the right location and a competitive team in the right division. A couple of seasons of inept management like the Blue Jays have got from Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins and even the eighth highest payroll in the game (nearly $165 million for 2018) leaves you gasping for oxygen.

Mind you, the product we would be getting is not quite the wonderful game we lost when the Expos moved south after the 2004 season. Baseball has changed — and not for the better. The shift, the strikeout-or-home run mentality, launch angles and exit velocities and analytics and hitters taking a full minute between pitches to adjust their batting gloves: It isn’t pretty but it’s still the Grand Old Game.

As long as you don’t have to play in the AL East.