Baseball fans in Montreal have been left without a MLB team since the Expos left for Washington, DC following the 2004 season. But they maintain anything is possible, including a team in Montreal. Last summer about 1,000 fans travelled to Toronto to visit Rogers Centre to make their presence felt. Two weeks ago, a long-awaited feasibility study was released in Montreal. The $400,000 study was produced by Cromartie’s Montreal Baseball Project in collaboration with Ernst & Young and the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal. It concluded that the dream of seeing the Expos–or another Major League Baseball team–back in Montreal is not beyond the realm of possibility. But it would cost. Really cost–at least a billion dollars, $355 million coming from government funding. (The study concludes that the that money could be made back in eight years, mostly from sales tax as well as income tax paid by players.) Breaking down the billion dollar estimate, about half the money would go to buying a team and the other half to building a downtown ballpark holding 36,000 fans.
When the Expos left in 2004, they were pretty much a dead issue–beaten into the ground by horrible management. The fans–not fools–stayed away, confirming former Expos manager Felipe Alou’s assessment of them. “People say Montreal has bad fans,” Alou noted. “In fact, it’s the opposite. They are terrific fans, and they are also smart people who will not be sold a bill of goods and won’t support a bad product.” Michel Lablanc, the CEO and president of the Montreal Board of Trade that supported the study believes the financial and political climate has changed over the past nine years. It remains to be seen.
What Cromartie and the hardcore Montreal fans need is a financial slugger. Only time will tell if one is prepared to come forward. Richard Griffin worked in the Expos’ front office for 21 years before joining the Toronto Star as its premier baseball columnist. Terry Haig asked Griffin to share his thoughts on the dream of baseball’s return to Montreal.
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