Expos 2.0?
Montreal’s desires remain a distant wish
They will get 90,000 fans for two exhibition Blue Jays games in Montreal,
which is something to take note of.
If they awarded baseball franchises on the basis of number of jerseys worn by fans of a city’s departed team, Montreal would be all set.
Expos jerseys were all over Stade Olympique on Friday night, rivalling those for the Toronto Blue Jays, a team that was actually playing in the game and — this is key — actually exists.
But nostalgia is a powerful thing, and so Montrealers poured into their 40-year-old monument to overspending to hear, again, the crack of the bat and the pop of the leather. They chanted “Let’s Go Expos,” just like they did 11 years ago, before a strike, and some loathsome owners, conspired to bring an end to major-league baseball in Lower Canada.
They cheered loudly for the Jays, and wildly for former Expo Vlad Guerrero, at least in part because the whole affair has the feel of an audition for baseball’s return to this town.
Russell Martin, the new Blue Jays catcher who used to come to this stadium with his dad — he took the Metro to the ballpark on Friday, just like he did as a kid — sat in front of a huge media throng before the game against the Cincinnati Reds with a smile on his face as wide as the strike zone.
“This is more than opening day for me,” he said. “It shows that there’s still a passion for baseball in the city.”
Martin spoke about the emotional connection he had with baseball here, and suggested it was the same for a lot of the other fans who were reprising visits to Olympic Stadium they used to make 15 or 20 years ago. “It’s kind of surreal,” he said. Surreal is a good word for it. More than 90,000 fans are expected for the two games here, which could end up being the largest two-game home crowd for the Blue Jays all season, unless they finally make a pennant run into September. And these games don’t even matter.
“It shows that this is definitely a baseball city,” says Simon Arsenault, director of sports and special events for Evenko, the promoter that organized the event. “This is a major-league result for two years in a row.”
Arsenault points out, correctly, that the Montreal series and its huge crowds will make news in the United States. It is not often that exhibition games draw more than 45,000 fans. “Every baseball fan across North America will hear about it,” he says.
Look at us, mad for baseball, Montreal is saying. So crazy for the sport that we are willing to pack our terrible cavernous stadium with the notoriously fragile roof for two meaningless games featuring a team that, in normal circumstances, we would hate.
It’s not a bad argument. A compelling one, even, to those major-league owners who see attendance figures averaging under 22,000 fans per game in some markets — there were five of those franchises in 2014 — and wonder if they couldn’t squeeze a little more cash out of a second go-round in Montreal. Various baseball people have said in recent days that there is a desire in Major League Baseball to repatriate the team this city lost, but commissioner Rob Manfred would only say the Jays games show there’s an appetite for baseball here.
And there remains just the little matter of the owner, the stadium, and the team that would be relocated. The first part is the easiest: a group that included a Bronfman, a dollarstore magnate and a casino mogul was reported last fall to be seriously interested in bringing some version of the Expos back to this city. Those men have been very quiet on the matter in the months since, which is the right way to go about it: meet all the baseball power-brokers you want, but do it out of the public eye, which keeps the power-brokers from having to answer any awkward questions.
Getting a stadium and getting a team are different classes of hurdle. Take, for example, the Tampa Bay Rays, the franchise most often mentioned in bring-back-the-Expos fantasizing. They check a lot of the boxes of a team that might want to relocate: fan support is tepid, averaging fewer than 18,000 fans a game in 2014, and not much more than that in recent years when the team was making the playoffs. The market is small, about half that of Montreal, depending on where the circle is drawn around the respective metropolitan areas, and the Rays’ stadium is old, in a bad location, and seemingly doomed to remain that way for, well, ever. The mayor of St. Petersburg just this week surrendered on a proposal that would have allowed the Rays to search the surrounding area for a suitable site for a new ballpark, so that makes the team, in theory, that much closer to decamping.
Except the whole reason for the mayor’s decision to throw up his hands is because council won’t entertain the idea of the Rays leaving St. Petersburg, where they have a contract to play at dreadful Tropicana Field through 2027. If council would rather cross its arms and let the Rays walk 12 years from now rather than allow them to find a long-term home in a neighbouring county, it suggests councillors would force the team to pay serious penalties if it was going to depart for another country.
That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. It just wouldn’t happen easily, as would no doubt be the case when the prospective new owners tried to find a spot for a new stadium in Montreal. It’s easy for a lot of people to be supportive of Expos 2.0 in the abstract, but many a great idea has been marooned on the shoals of the details.
Even Martin, the Montreal kid, was cautious when asked to assess baseball’s future in his hometown.
“I’d have to study all the things that come into play. My passion leads me to say I’d love to see it [back here],” Martin said before talking about the need for a winning team to make the thing successful. It was an honest response, but something less than a full-throated endorsement of Montreal as a major-league town.
Which is fair. It will take a lot more than some big crowds for exhibition games to resurrect the Expos. But it’s a start.