The Montreal Expos have left with a whimper, not a bang. A three-point-five-decade tradition of bilingual baseball finally sputtered out with the last home game Wednesday night, following four years of threats by Major League Baseball to move or fold the team.
The Expos’ home-game attendance has been abysmal for some time. Their field performance has been abysmal ever since the 1994 labor lockout. One fan, in a letter to the Anglophone Montreal Gazette, blames baseball’s post-1994 business structure, hostile to “small market” teams, for the team’s demise. Yeah, except Montreal’s not a small market but a big city whose media reach extends to six to eight million people.
No. The handwriting was on the wall (or the domed-stadium roof) for the Expos by their ninth season in 1977. It’s a long story, and it involves Seattle.
The Expos were one of four teams added to Major League Baseball in 1969. Among the other three were the Seattle Pilots. After one pathetic season in the long-since-demolished Sick’s Stadium, owner Dewey Soriano sold out to now-MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. He moved the team to Milwaukee. The City of Seattle sued the American League. Following years of litigation, the league agreed to award Seattle another expansion franchise, which became the popular and fiscally successful Mariners.
But adding just one new team would’ve screwed up league scheduling. To maintain an even number of teams, the league awarded a second expansion franchise for 1977—the even more successful Toronto Blue Jays.
For their first eight seasons, the Expos had been Canada’s first and only MLB team. They enjoyed coast-to-coast TV coverage and print-media attention.
But once the Blue Jays showed up, the Anglophone Canadian media, and the Anglophone Canadian public, reclassified the Expos into a team of merely local significance within the province of Quebec. The Blue Jays became the “home team” for all the entire rest of Canada, from Labrador to Vancouver Island. The Expos’ newspaper coverage, merchandise sales, and broadcasting contracts all diminished. At one point the team didn’t even have an English-language radio contract.
The Expos never recovered in the marketplace. With reduced sponsorships, they couldn’t get the backing to replace Olympic Stadium, one of those dull domes of fluorescent lights and artificial turf so popular in the ’60s and ’70s among everyone except fans and players. Attendance diminished, as did political support for a new publicly-funded stadium.
The rest was a long, slow denoument, ending with this week’s announcement that the team will move to Washington DC (no team name or owners have been announced).
