FOR BASEBALL IN MONTREAL

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred spoke on the record about relocation in the year 2017, saying that he thought the league needed to address the stadium situations with the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays before the league could focus on expanding to match the NHL and NFL with 32 franchises. Fast forward seven years, and both teams are close to solving those issues.

Even though the wrinkles haven’t been ironed out yet, all signs point to these stadium issues being resolved. This optimism has led to fans and some members of the media bringing back talks of MLB Expansion. With the NFL and NHL both having 32 teams, it’s viable that expansion could happen. In the midst of all these talks, one city keeps repeatedly being brought up: Montreal.

Montreal had the Expos from 1969 to 2004, and the results were mixed. They only made the Playoffs once in their 35-year history, and likely would have made it a 2nd time in 1994 if it wasn’t for the MLB Player’s Strike. Sitting at 74-40, the Expos had the best record in the MLB at the time of the strike and were the favorites to win the 1994 World Series.

Expos Fans Hold Signs to Show Frustration With Players Strike (Per CBC)

Unfortunately, that never happened, and the Expos never truly recovered. With a dwindling fanbase, a decrepit Stade Olympique, and the Expos facing contraction, the team was sold and moved to Washington D.C. marking the end of the Montreal Era.

So why are we coming back here? For one, Montreal is one of largest cities in North America that does not currently have an MLB Team. With a metro-area population—essentially a city with outskirts and populated suburbs—of 4.38 million, Montreal has the population necessary to establish a flourishing market.

Montreal is a tourist destination. There are museums, churches, outdoor parks, and hiking experiences. With an impressive downtown district, Montreal has the basic requirements to host Major League Baseball. Likewise, we’ve seen how passionate the city can be with the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League. Sure, the NHL has smaller venues, but people need something to watch in the summer.

This is where a lot of the rebuttals against Montreal begin. The most common one being “They’ve already had a team, and there was no interest in the Expos.” However, that’s not entirely true. In the heyday of the Stade Olympique, the Expos saw over one million fans per season. When the team was performing at its highest level from 1979-1983, the Expos averaged just under 2.1 million fans per season.

The big problem was that the Stade Olympique was riddled with problems before the team could ever reach the heights of the 1994 season. According to the CBC, the list of issues with the Expos began in 1986, with an “Explosion and Fire in the unfinished Stade Olympique Tower.” The full list of problems is linked here. In reality, going to the Stade Olympique was a liability for fans. While no one was seriously hurt because of these issues, the risk was always there that going to see the Expos was going to result in A) the game being delayed, B) something falling and injuring you, C) the roof tearing apart.

In the modern era, ticket revenues don’t mean as much as television revenue. Hence why teams like the Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays can stay afloat despite the fact they consistently have some of the lowest attendance numbers in the MLB. In reality, having a television deal could have extended the life of the Expos well beyond their near contraction in 2002. This was one of the biggest problems that killed the Expos in the first place, according to former owner Charles Bronfman.

In an interview with the Montreal Gazette, Bronfman discussed how the MLB’s expansion of television rights for the Toronto Blue Jays effectively killed the Expos. He said, “[MLB Commissioner] Bowie Kuhn decided that we could only telecast fifteen games into Ontario… We were Canada’s team. I told Bowie ‘if you make the rule, that is going to kill us…”

To put it in perspective, Ontario’s population in 1980 was 8.764 million, meanwhile Quebec’s was 6.506 million. With 90 percent of Expos’ games not allowed to be broadcasted in the Ontario province, the Expos lost 57% of their potential viewer base.

While it would be unrealistic to assume that everyone in Ontario would tune into Expos games over Blue Jays games, or vice versa, it’s an important point to make that the Expos became severely limited in who could watch their games. This loss would make them less likely to land large television and radio deals, as the demand to watch the team becomes smaller. Leading to the team hemorrhaging money and being unable to afford the talent needed to produce a winning club.

So how would this be different in 2024? For one, I would expect the Montreal fan base to want their team to be locally owned. This would limit the risk of the team relocating, increase the willingness of ownership to field a competitive team, and create a connection with the city of Montreal.

The biggest problem working against the city of Montreal is the Stade Olympique. There was a proposition—a stupid one at that—to bring the Tampa Bay Rays to Montreal for half of the season. It obviously would never have worked, but there were talks about building a new stadium for it. It was quite literally the dumbest idea I had ever heard, but it was the first somehow serious talk of bringing a team back to Montreal.

There were talks in 2022 that a stadium could go on Montreal’s Peel Basin, but nothing came of those talks. Even with this ridiculous proposal, Stephen Bronfman, the son of the Expo’s owner Charles Bronfman, was willing to have the stadium built. This leads me to believe that there is interest in baseball in Montreal.  

It’s hard to gauge interest when I’m not from Montreal, and I haven’t been able to find much about it. I’m assuming that interest in bringing baseball back to Montreal amidst the attendance issues of teams like the Marlins—who play in a twelve-year-old stadium—is high. Even if I am overstating the interest, the social media landscape could be huge in generating the interest necessary for a team to thrive in Montreal. The capital of Canada, Ottawa is two and a half hours away, closer to Montreal than it is Toronto, and is the home to just under one million people. It’s not the closest, but it’s two hours closer than going to see the Blue Jays.

The demands of the Montreal community are not outlandish. They’ve already lost one team. Why would they want an ownership group that would be willing to leave again? The Stade Olympique is far beyond its ability to host Major League Baseball games, and fans refused to go there even when the team was good. Why would they come back for a team that is going to take a few years to be competitive?

Looking at everything, Montreal could be a success story this time around. The league has shifted so much that TV revenues impact a team’s overall financial success far more than ticket sales. So even if it takes a couple years—or if the Montreal team were to play in a smaller stadium—they’d be able to stay afloat without the fear of contracting. There are new issues for Major League Baseball to figure out before they expand, but when the time comes, Montreal should be the first city on the list of teams to get a new Major League Baseball team.