Why did MLB open an expansion team in MONTREAL?

The Game Room
1

I notice the expos are moving after decades of low attendance. Obviously the quebecois (?) are french minded and dont like la americain (?) games. It’s pretty obvious that a baseball team wouldnt work well in Quebec

So why did they open it there? Were they forced to because of appeasement towards Quebec nationalists? Seems strange to put a team in the probably only place in North America that doesnt want baseball.

And why do the Montreal people hate their team so much? Are they eureopean in nature and want ‘futbol’ instead?

2

Again - wrong forum, this belongs with Sports stuff in The Game Room.

The Expos actually moved and became the Washington Nationals a few years ago. I think Wikipedia really answers your question, and I don’t think it was “obvious” baseball wouldn’t work in Montreal. Attendance was dismal at the end, but the Expos played there for 35 years.

3

Erm, the Expos moved from Montreal to Washington DC many years ago. Checking on Wikipedia, they’re the Nationals since the 2005 season. And contrary to your ideas, the Expos were actually rather popular for most of their history. The 90s were the beginning of the end for them, when they started not being able to afford to keep good players, possibly at least in part of the (at the time) low value of the Canadian dollar. Attendance declined. The team asked for a new stadium paid for in large part by public funds, but the province of Quebec and the city of Montreal couldn’t afford this, and the team ultimately moved.

Feel free to read the Wikipedia article on the Montreal Expos.

ETA: Oh, and despite the disappearance of the Expos, Quebecers are still rather fond of baseball. Many people play baseball or softball in neighbourhood teams, and a good number of MLB games are being shown on television. I believe the Red Sox are now the most popular team here.

4

Be serious. Was this a joke?

5

Montreal had a long tradition of baseball. In the 1940s it was home to one of the Brooklyn Dodgers minor league teams. Jackie Robinson played there before he came up to the majors.

If you can find it in a baseball anthology, I highly recommend “Up from the Minors in Montreal” by Mordecai Richler.

6

The real problem was their mausoleum of a stadium, which even on bright sunny days (and the hole in the roof opened) was as depressing as sin.

7

There’s not a single sentence in the OP that makes any sense.

8

Montreal was a great baseball town for many years. I agree with the dissing of the stadium, but I’ll also spare some for the owners too.

9

To be fair, there HAS been pretty low attendance for the last few years anyhow. I went to Olympic Stadium looking to take in an expos game just last year and it was empty.

But yeah, in all seriousness the problem was the stadium.

10

Wow. Ignorant and rude. First off, if Montreal has a sport, it’s hockey. Which is about as stereotypically Canadian (not European) as you can get. The city breathes hockey, dreams hockey, riots hockey. They have a football team, a soccer team, and had a baseball team for a very long time. As mikeargo said, the area was important to baseball as a whole, way back in the day. Plenty of exceptional players made a start there.

There was a huge public outcry when the Expos’ move was announced. But the stadium is ancient, falling apart, and very far from the downtown core, making it inconvenient to get to games. The Canadian dollar had been weak for a while, meaning we couldn’t afford to keep any good players - they’d start here, get good, and then take a better offer with an American team. But what really killed baseball in Montreal, IMO, was the baseball strike of 1994.

It was our shot at the series, but because players already making millions of dollars were asking for more money (which would likely make the drain of talent from Montreal get even worse in the long run, since we couldn’t afford the big bucks), the season was canceled. Most baseball fans were pretty disillusioned by that strike. The game lost a lot of its joy, at least to me. I was a kid at the time but I remember thinking it pretty sad that the Expos were denied their shot at the World Series because all the already-rich players everywhere wanted more money.*
*Just my perception as a then-14-yr-old, but a lot of people I know felt the same way, and I think that was a huge cause in the decline in attendance in the following years. People were just pissed off.
ETA: At least the Canadiens adopted Youppi! as their mascot after the Expos left. Poor guy would have been so depressed.

11

And for long before the Expos, too. The Royals were one of the premier minor league teams for decades.

12

Considering the way the question was asked, perhaps you could move this again to the Pit. I find myself unable to answer the several key points of ignorance in the wording of the OP.

Jim

13

Rereading the OP, you’re actually right, with the possible exception of “So why did they open it there?” So let’s do some old-fashioned ignorance-fighting, sentence by sentence.

They moved in 2005, after a decade of low attendance.

Quebecers are North American in culture and do enjoy American games. They’re not any more anti-American than other Canadians, and if anything, maybe less.

In actuality, many baseball teams did well in Montreal, including the Expos for more than 25 years.

In 1967, Montreal was a major market with a history of baseball but without a major league team. It made sense to start a team there.

Oh puh-leeze. Read a book on the history of Quebec nationalism from 1960 to today, if you think our goal is to start baseball teams.

As previously said, Montrealers and Quebecers in general do want baseball.

“Hate”? Antigen said it best: they were disillusioned from the business of baseball after the strike of 1994 robbed them of their best chance of winning the World Series, and the team becoming uncompetitive afterwards didn’t help keeping them on board.

They are mostly North American in nature. Again, as Antigen said, their favourite spectator sport is hockey but they also enjoy watching Canadian football, boxing and soccer (it’s only known as “fútbol” in Spanish-speaking countries, and in Quebec it’s actually known as “soccer”). And baseball. For participatory sports they’ll probably go with hockey, soccer and baseball.

There are a few Quebec baseball players who have played in the major leagues. The most popular right now among Quebecers is probably Russell Martin, the Dodgers’ catcher. Before that, Éric Gagné was quite popular, especially when he won the Cy Young with the Dodgers in 2003, but afterwards his career hit some rough times, and he was involved in the doping scandal, so he isn’t as popular as he used to be.

Oh, and just to give Caesar his due, while ice hockey in its modern form is probably a Canadian invention, it has been popular in Northern Europe for more than a century, and had apparently been foreshadowed in the centuries before by some European skate sports.

14

I’m pretty sure it’s called football everywhere except Canada and the USA (I’m not sure about Australia, with that whole Australian Rules thing going on).

15

Association football is known as simply “football” in a great many places, even though the name “soccer” ironically originated in the UK. What I was saying is that only in Spanish-speaking countries do people spell it “fútbol”. (I couldn’t tell you how they spell it in Portuguese.) It’s not the first time I see an American here talking about “soccer (or, as Europeans say, ‘futbol’)”, so I wanted to point out that this spelling is solely a Spanish spelling of the word. I see no reason why Quebecers would use this term. “Football” or “foot” would be possibilities, but the sport is actually known as “soccer” in Quebec.

16

Easy to get good parking and the very best seats, though?

17

The place certainly could still support a minor league team, if there was a right-sized field available (they could take the tennis courts out of Jarry Park, f’rinstance). Ottawa and Quebec have independent teams (Can-Am League), but at this time the International League is not international.

18

We should also remember the financial factors the baseball owners had at this team. Owners charged the new teams entrance fees to join their league. I believe each team got $2 million for allowing expansion. This may not seem like much now but 40 years the largest payroll in baseball was the St Louis Cardinals at $1 million (today the New York Yankees have a payroll around $209 million). Baseball had expanded in 1961/62 to help forestall the Continental League, proposed by several people to get a second team back in New York after the Dodgers and Giants moved west. Baseball is also exempt from anti-trust laws by a 1922 Supreme Court decision and today remains the only sport so although
SCOTUS has said on several occasions (Tolson case in the 1950s, Flood case in the 1970s) Congress can change it if they wanted. So there was incentive to expand to keep various Congress members happen and you need to expand in even numbers because baseball is played almost every day for 6 months.
Other sports saw rival leagues formed and salaries escalate (AFL in football, ABA in basketball. A rival hockey league, WHA, emerged in 1972). Expanding to new markets would defuse any possible competition, as did moving franchises to new markets in the 1950s did.
I don’t think owners in the 1960s ever thought the reserve clause, which bound players to the team they signed with for life would end. That coupled with the declining Canadian dollar hurt the Expos, especially after the promise of the early 1980s Expos with Carter, Dawson, Raines, Rogers and Reardon faded with little success (got eliminated in the last round of the National League playoffs in 1981, a season marred by a two months strike that left a bad taste in fans mouth. Attendance which was third in the league, plunged quickly to finish in the lower half for the next 15 years http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/WSN/attend.shtmt

Baseball attendance had peaked in the late 1940s and declined for two decades. They probably got increasing amounts of money from television but I’m sure TV people told them expanding teams to new markets would increase ratings in those areas.

The real power in baseball at this time was Walter O’Malley. He was very effective in convincing other owners to do what he wanted. Union boss Marvin has said in his autobiography (quote may be on O’Malley’s website) that many owners went into annual meetings not even knowing what was on the agenda, O’Malley did, he knew what was best for him, and he could be very persuasive. The good thing about O’Malley if you were a Dodger fan is he apparently took his expansion fees and invested it in his team to keep it strong when other owners pocketed the money. O’Malley used to have a team in Montreal so he probably knew people who could help put the deal together to get a franchise, stadium, parking, etc

19

Of definitely. I can’t complain one bit about that part of the experience.

20

Montreal could support a major league team starting in 2009. The problem with the Expos, of course, is that for almost a decade prior to moving they WEREN’T a major league team.

The notion that Montreal couldn’t support a baseball team because there was something wrong with Montreal is at least ninety percent ignorance, ignorant in two major areas;

  1. An understanding of the specific history of the Expos, and
  2. A lack of understanding of the way North American pro sports work.

The Montreal Expos were, as top-tier-league sports franchises go, probably the worst in the entire world by 2004. In 36 years of existence they had won exactly one division title. It’s a shame they lost a shot at it in 1994 because of the strike, but remember that the only reason they won that one division title in 1981 was because of a strike!

The team played in a stadium that was just indescribably terrible, an absolute joke of a stadium. It was dark, astoundingly ugly, sold atricious food, and it literally stank. You’ll hear a lot of people talk about how “yeah, but the crowds were loud” and other such bullshit; it’s all apologist lies. It was a disgrace to the city of Montreal and to the institution of baseball, and significantly reduced the Expos’ potential attendance.

By 2004 the team had also been threatening to move (or be contracted) every year for years. Sports fans are, understandably, unwilling to emotionally invest themselves in a team that will be taken from them. They had long since given up on being competitive. They weren’t even broadcasting games anymore. The ownership, prior to takeover my MLB, had marketed the team as badly as a team could be marketed, had driven away corporate sponsors through mendacity and stupidity, alienated the city, alienated the fans.

In North American pro sports, everything comes down to ownership. If an owner wants to leave Los Angeles to play in a mausoleum like Oakland, well, Oakland gets a football team and LA doesn’t. Al Davis doesn’t give a shit about fans; he cares about money, and if he can work a better corporate deal to play in Oakland, he’ll do so. The National Hockey League has lots of franchises in ridiculously shitty markets, like Nashville and Fort Lauderdale, where a good weeknight game might draw seven thousand fans, while hockey-starved markets in Canada go without, because tehy get sweetheart stadium and tax deals there that outweigh the benefit of selling more tickets. It has very little to do with fans. Why is the NBA allowing a team to move from Seattle, a reasonable large sports market, to Oklahoma City, a very small sports market? Because the owner’s from Oklahoma and it’s his team and anyway fuck you. It’s really not much more complicated than that; if Ralph Wilson wants the Buffalo Bills to stay in Buffalo then they will stay there, even though it makes no economic sense, and if his heirs sell the team to Ted Rogers, they’re moving to Toronto, and the good people of Buffalo and their loyal fans can go fuck themselves. Nobody whose opinion matters cares about fans in Buffalo or Toronto (or Oakland and LA, or Nashville and Hamilton, or Seattle and OKC, and so on.) All they care about is money, and their competence or lack thereof is what determines the success of the team. Not the fans.

Montreal had awful, awful ownership. The franchise gave the fans no reason to support them. They asked the fans to cheer a team that never won anything, that played in a ghastly, dangerous dump, that pissed off everyone they dealt with, that never did a thing to improve the state of baseball in Montreal. Any hope they had to build a major league baseball stadium was pissed away by 2003 (and in fairness, Canadian governments are not as willing to bark up taxpayer dollars to finance billionaire owners and millionaire athletes as American governments are) which pretty much cemented the team as a joke. And when MLB became the owners, they moved the team to a twice-failed baseball market to please politicians.

It’s a comparison I’ve used before but I can’t think of a better one; imagine a grocery store in a really nice neighborhood that’s poorly lit, never cleaned, smells like sweat and dirt, and has rats running up and down the aisles. All the food is rotten and old, the store never has any coupons or specials or advertises at all, and the cashiers tell you to go fuck yourself. If that grocery store were to go bankrupt, would you conclude the people in the neighborhood don’t like eating food?