Bringing Baseball Back to Montreal Is a Terrible Idea

The concept of baseball in Montreal is—much like this old hat—old hat. via Flickr.

Hockey is Canada’s game, baseball is America’s. So why should I care about a painfully boring sport designed around nine innings of narcolepsy-inducing "athletics"?

I gave up on baseball when baseball gave up on me. That began with the 1994 strike, which cut the balls off the best team the Montreal Expos ever fielded. The team, which was the best in baseball that year, was dismantled in the off-season. When fan interest waned in the late 90s as one ownership group after another—including, at the end, MLB itself—starved the team of funds and plans for a proposed downtown stadium fell through, the Expos’ ultimate demise was inevitable. The team slunk out of town, DC-bound, in 2004.

Since then, I’ve watched maybe enough individual MLB innings to constitute one, maybe two, entire games. I haven’t missed it whatsoever.

Some people have. Sports nuts and journalists mostly, who pine for the good old days and the good old teams, especially the late 70s/early 80s group that included Gary Carter, Tim Raines, Andre Dawson and Steve Rogers, who led the franchise to its only post-season series in its history in 1981. (Their run was cut short on NL Championship Series’ Game 5, Blue Monday, a game so traumatic it’s still marked today, like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11. Hell, I remember watching it, and I was seven years old.)

Now, one member of that team is testing the waters to see if Montreal is ready to bring baseball. Warren Cromartie’s Montreal Baseball Project was created last year and held a media shindig last week to drum up interest among the city’s business and political leaders.

A feasibility study on bringing MLB back to Montreal has been launched, but Cro is also looking at just getting a minor-league or Can-Am league team here as well. Other projects include a summer baseball camp and an Expos reunion gala in June.

Cro’s also been good at getting the local media to pay attention to him. He helped organize a pre-screening of the upcoming Jackie Robinson biopic 42 last week, and he’s cultivated enough interest to keep the idea buzzing in the media ether.

Well, good luck Cro! Because there are a bunch of reasons why MLB shouldn’t come back to Montreal. Here’s a few.

A Bud Selig autograph. You jealous? via Flickr.

Major League Baseball is run by a weaselly, double-crossing prick
When the Expos were in their death throes, most fans blamed team owner Jeffrey Loria and his wretched stepson David Samson as the culprits. One baseball writer called Jeffrey Loria “the Voltron of awful baseball owners.” But the rot went further than that: Commissioner Bud Selig is now considered the black-hearted architect behind the team’s decline and fall, the grey, cancerous eminence who okayed the cancellation of TV and radio broadcasting of Expos games, who refused to allow the team September call ups for a post-season run, who spat in the few remaining fans’ face by scheduling 22 “home” games in Puerto Rico and who engineered cushy loans to Loria so he and Samson could buy the Florida Marlins—which they did, and went on to pillage Miami even worse than Montreal.

Barry Bonds whackin' a dinger. via Flickr.

Major League Baseball is an evil, sinister enterprise that cares nothing for its players
Baseball was fucked in the mid-90s. As with hockey in most American markets today, fans were so turned off by the 1994 strike that attendance dropped by something like 20 percent the following year. Hence, the blind eye Selig’s league turned to juicing. As Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire’s testicles shrank and their home run numbers grew, the league criminally turned a blind eye to a growing culture of steroid use in its ranks, a culture that pissed on sportsmanship and fair play. It fought tooth and nail against testing, and when, in 2002 it instituted drug policy, it was considered laughably weak. Following the explosive BALCO investigation, the policy was strengthened in 2005. But that certainly hasn’t stopped the problem.

A gathering of every living Montreal baseball fan. via Flickr.

There’s no guarantee Montrealers want the MLB back
And who can blame them? In 2004, our baseball fans—including me—were saddled with a team crippled by years of disinterested if not downright hostile owners, a crumbling, inaccessible stadium and generally lousy teams (despite the occasional bright spots). Most fans hated the Olympic Stadium and its cavernous emptiness: attendance towards the end was often well under five figures. And any team that would come back would be constant second fiddle to the Habs anyway. We loved “Nos Amours” when they were winning, or at least had the opportunity to. When the team had its hearts and guts and hopes torn out of it, fans got the idea. Major League Baseball didn’t give a shit about us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t return the sentiment.

Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter @PatrickLejtenyi

Previously:

Brett Lawrie, the Toronto Blue Jays Superstar, Is Still Sad about High School Sports