New Netflix Expos documentary bound to leave us feeling sad
You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.
That’s a line from Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell’s classic 1970 hit, and it probably sums up what Montreal baseball fans were thinking this week when they heard the news that Netflix has commissioned a French-language documentary about the demise of the Montreal Expos . When our city’s Major League Baseball franchise slunk out of town in shady controversial fashion after the 2004 season, Montreal was greatly diminished.
Yeah sure it’s just a pro sports team and yeah life goes on, but it was a sad day for the metropolis. In the two decades since, Montreal has mostly become a one-sport town or rather a one-team town. There is plenty of support for the Alouettes when they’re winning, like they did in dramatic fashion last season , and there’s a strong but vocal minority who love that soccer team that used to be called the Impact.
But there is an unhealthy obsessive focus on the Montreal Canadiens here and life was just so much richer when there were two major-league franchises here to keep us on the North American sports map.
Perry Giannias, the president of Expos Fest, has already been talking to folks at Attraction, the Montreal media company that’s producing the documentary on the Expos, helping connect them with former Expos players. Work is just beginning on the Netflix film and no one at Attraction was willing to talk about it this week, though director Jean-françois Poisson did write to me to say the documentary won’t just be about the bitter end “but will allow fans to relive the great moments of the team, like 1994.”
That of course was the year the Expos had the best record in Major League Baseball as of Aug. 12, the day the players went on strike and ended the season.
“There’s still that desire to have a baseball team back,” said Giannias. “It goes back to that old adage ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.’ We unfortunately found that out a little later than sooner. Getting back a team is a lot harder than losing a team, it seems. I think people want the return of baseball and there’s a thirst for it. The Netflix (film) is going to be huge. It’s the first of its kind not only for Netflix but in French as well. I think it’s going to be a very big deal.”
Montreal filmmaker Robbie Hart is just putting the finishing touches on another Expos documentary, Nos Amours — The Saga of the Montreal Expos, a sequel to his 2003 documentary Nos Amours. The new film, which will be released in theatres across Quebec in May, looks at the efforts over the past decade to try to bring baseball back to Montreal. That project collapsed in 2022 when Major League Baseball rejected the Tampa Bay Rays’ plan to split its games between Tampa and Montreal .
“My old film was about trying to save them from leaving,” said Hart. “This new film is about trying to bring them back. But in this one it’s the Biblical story. It’s the whole ball of wax. It tells the untold story of trying to bring them back. It’s 10 years in the making. There’s two stories. The resurrection story and there’s the (overall) Biblical story, all intertwined.”
In other words Hart’s film recounts the efforts from 2012 onward to revive the franchise but also goes all the way back to the beginnings of the Expos at Jarry Park in 1969, the team’s Book of Genesis if you will.
Hollywood trade paper Variety broke the story of the Netflix Expos documentary and the Variety article states that “According to Netflix, the film explores the setbacks that led to the departure of the Expos from Montreal and how the loss of an MLB team in Montreal continues to spark debate 20 years later.”
Hardcore Expos fan Giannias is happy to see two new documentaries coming on his beloved baseball team but he admits the films are bound to leave baseball fans here feeling a bit melancholic.
“The way it was done to us and the way it was done to the (Quebec) Nordiques, it was eerily similar, a thieves in the night kind of deal,” said Giannias. “We share the same pain. Then you see a franchise like the Arizona Coyotes and how they’re holding on to a team. It’s disheartening to see how hard it is to get a team back. But we had so many great years here and developed so many great players. We still have more Hall of Famers in Cooperstown than the (Toronto) Blue Jays have. That tells you a lot.”