FISH ON SPORTS SPECIAL EDITION: DREAMING BIG IN MONTREAL
Normally, this column is merely a collection of gags about major news stories in the world of professional sports that my editors, for some unfathomable reason, still think are funny after nearly three years. Maybe it’s because they’re being distracted by their kids, their spouse, or their massive cocaine habit – who knows. Today, however, I’m doing something a little different. There won’t be any jokes about LeBron’s hairline or Tiger’s bed that’s covered in money and Denny’s waitresses; instead, I want to make a simple plea to Major League Baseball: please bring the Expos back to Montreal.
In case you haven’t heard, the Toronto Blue Jays played two preseason games in my hometown, known for its poutine and protestors, over the holiday weekend. Over 96,000 people filed into the crippled edifice that is Montreal’s Olympic Stadium to watch the boys of summer go to work, even if they aren’t really their boys of summer. Like a loving parent who has sporadic visitation rights, you can’t blame Montreal’s baseball enthusiasts for getting excited to see something they don’t often get to have in their own backyard.
It’s been so long that some people outside of this city forget how beloved the Expos still are, long after the team changed its name and relocated to the DMV. It’s been a decade since the move, and the nostalgia for “Nos Amours” has never been more palpable. The hot summer nights of 70s enthusiasm, the agony of 1981’s Blue Monday, the strike that ended the 1994 season prematurely and potentially cost the Expos a World Series title, Montreal’s baseball faithful have more than paid their dues. Throw in a decade of poor management and consistent losing until the franchise’s departure in 2004, and the scars might not be fresh in 2015, but they definitely aren’t forgotten.
It’s no secret that the prospect of a team returning to Montreal, perhaps as early as 2020, has got pundits and potential buyers alike all abuzz. Even MLB’s new commissioner Rob Manfred has gone on the record as saying that, “with the right set of circumstances and the right facility, it’s possible”. So, that means it’s pretty much a done deal right?
If only it were that simple.
It would seem that Montreal needs two big dominos to fall in their favor before any talk of baseball returning to the city can turn from fantasy to reality: a new stadium needs to be built and a current major league franchise would need to agree to play there. Expansion doesn’t seem to be on Major League Baseball’s radar for the near future, and the two most likely candidates for relocation – the Oakland A’s and the Tampa Bay Rays, are still trying to get deals signed for new ballparks in their current cities. Cynics will say that Manfred and co. are selling a fairy tale to dreamers, but who said there was anything wrong with dreaming?
The city itself is a completely different animal in the summertime. Festivals and events turn Montreal into one big, long summer block party, and the return of baseball would bring even more paying customers into the downtown core. Give fans a start time, an adult beverage and another excuse to live for the weekend, and it sounds like a win-win for the both patrons and merchants alike. It might sound like a reductive analysis, but I mean it in the most beautiful sense. From May to September, no other city in Canada knows how to have a good time quite like Montreal.
Speaking of cash flow, that’s the last big piece missing in this puzzle. Any initial corporate investment to get a team to the province of Quebec would look to have their goodwill repaid by healthy attendance numbers, perhaps even a lucrative TV deal, and a newly-minted version of the Expos certainly wouldn’t guarantee anything. That being said, I look to the recent resurgence of the Winnipeg Jets in the NHL as a sign of hope. It’s a smaller market that may not have been at the top of the call sheet, but a fan base with an insatiable thirst for the sport has made it work thus far. I say that the same thing could happen with baseball in Montreal – forget just the history and love that go along with the city’s well-documented nostalgia for big league ball, but getting nearly 100,000 people to come out over a weekend more than qualifies as insatiable thirst. I can only hope that Major League Baseball can help Expos partisans quench that thirst in my lifetime and help another Canadian city become part of the sport’s lexicon once again.
