A return of MLB to Montreal? Altogether feasible
When the Expos morphed into the Washington Nationals at the end of the 2004 season, I thought we were done with baseball in this town.
The decade-long struggle to save the Expos had worn out everyone, even those who merely covered it. It drained us emotionally, frayed old friendships and left everyone bitter after a couple of carpetbagging scoundrels lammed off to Miami as the team limped to Washington.
I must have been asked a dozen times if I thought baseball would ever come back to Montreal, enough to have a pat answer: “Maybe. But it’s going to take a quarter-century, at least.”
Welcome to nine years later. Major League Baseball isn’t back, but the results of the feasibility study conducted by the Board of Trade, the Montreal Baseball Project, EY (formerly Ernst & Young) and BCF LLP says its return is entirely possible.
So if the BTMM, MBP, EY and BCF LLP say MLB can fly in MTL, who am I to stand in the way of all those acronyms? (Seriously, I’ve never seen so many initials this side of the military.)
Before we get too excited, remember this is a feasibility study, nothing more.
The price tag is steep (over $1 billion unless an existing franchise is transferred here) and as yet, despite all the talk and goodwill, the project is missing one key element:
The money guy. Mr. Deep Pockets. Pierre-Karl Péladeau. Bell. Rogers. Guy Laliberté. Heck, George Gillett Jr., looking to get back into Montreal sports in a big way.
This is a big-time play, and without big money it isn’t going to happen. The estimated total cost of the project is $1.25 billion — but that assumes whoever brings a team to Montreal would be paying $525 million in expansion fees.
That would clearly not be the case if an existing team could be transferred to Montreal — and that existing team is out there, in the form of the Tampa Bay Rays, an excellent organization that struggles at the gate. No less an authority than Peter Gammons said three months ago that the Rays might have to move and Montreal was the likely destination if they do — meaning this city would get a team in the American League East with the Yankees, Blue Jays and Red Sox, where the Expos should have been all along.
The Board of Trade, in its press release announcing the results of the study, did not attempt to fudge the public component that would be necessary to make this happen.
“It’s also important to note,” the Board of Trade says, “that the majority of MLB teams use a hybrid funding model that requires both private and public involvement.”
According to the Major League Baseball model, the team owner typically funds 67 per cent of the project (unless that owner is Jeffrey Loria), while government funds 33 per cent — or $335 million.
But if Rays owner Stuart Sternberg ( who has done everything right in Tampa except putting fannies in the seats) can persuade Major League Baseball to approve the team’s transfer to Montreal, that price tag is cut roughly in half, to a more manageable $165 million, the public share of building a new ballpark — and the component of this proposal that has to make any rational person a little queasy.
The report strikes me as somewhere between giddy and wildly optimistic — but then you have to be optimistic to make something like this happen. Michel Leblanc, president and CEO of the Board of Trade, certainly fits that category.
Leblanc admits the amounts required to bring baseball back to Montreal are “clearly significant,” but he states flatly the various levels of government that would have to be involved would recoup their investment within eight years through a combination of the QST on stadium and team sales activities, income taxes paid by companies and workers involved in the project and Quebec’s cut of the tax on player salaries, estimated at $75 million a year initially.
The project estimates, for instance, that the provincial government would recoup $18 million per year in QST — but that assumes game and related revenues in excess of $180 million each season, or $1.11 million per game.
That estimate, in turn, is based on an average attendance at a new ballpark of 26,000 per game, in a town where the club was having trouble drawing 6,000 before it departed for Washington.
I know, I know. The Big O (baseball will not accept a return to that gloomy hole), bitterness over the fire sales and the strike, all that. A downtown ballpark alone, in my estimate, would be worth an additional 10,000 fans per game.
One weakness of any baseball proposal in Montreal is that the best possible location for a new stadium is gone. David Samson gave up the club’s option on a plot of federally owned land directly south of the Bell Centre, which was subsequently sold to a private developer and is now home to ugly generic condos rather than Major League Baseball.
The Board of Trade report clearly states a downtown site is preferable (ruling out Blue Bonnets) and identifies three specific plots of land: Adjacent to the Bonaventure Expressway, the site of the current Children’s Hospital and the Wellington Basin.
Of the three, the third possibility seems the most intriguing. The Wellington Basin is a 20.5-acre site bounded by Bridge St. to the west, Mill St. to the south, the entrance to the Lachine Canal to the east and raised railroad tracks to the north.
It would play heck with traffic headed to the Victoria Bridge on weekdays, but the basin area is within healthy walking range from downtown and it would present builders with the squeeze (not to mention heritage sites) they would encounter around the soon-to-be vacated Children’s Hospital.
We’ll see what comes of all this. The effervescent ex-Expo Warren Cromartie could sell Obama shirts at a Tea Party convention and there is a positive, upbeat feeling about baseball out there.
The real potential strength of this proposal is in the insatiable need for programming felt by the sports networks. That means Rogers, Bell, Videotron or all three. Plenty of cash there (as Rogers demonstrated with its $5-billion NHL broadcasting deal) to make it happen.
All in all, we’re about 15 years ahead of schedule for the return of Major League Baseball to Montreal. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen — but it’s possible.
Back in the fall of 2004, even that much seemed impossible. Heroes: MLB’s proposed rule on home-plate collisions, Warren Cromartie, Dan Church, Martin Jones, Drew Doughty, Anze Kopitar, Alex Ovechkin, Alex Steen, Alex Galchenyuk, Carey Price, Martin Brodeur, Michael Thomas, Alshon Jeffery, Vasili Arkhipov, Woody Guthrie, Alice Munro, Felipe Alou, Saku Koivu, &&&& last but not least, because great individuals are so rare in our time — Nelson Mandela. Zeros: Don Cherry’s brainless attack on Brooks Orpik, Max Pacioretty’s sword trick, Jameis Winston, Semyon Varlamov, Melody Davidson, Shawn Thornton, Alex Emelin, Dion Phaneuf, James Neal, Jared Cowen, Scrooge McBurke, Bobby Cox, Pete Rose, Canada Post, Pierre Gauthier, Marcel Aubut, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& last & least, Jeffrey Loria.