There’s an old saying, “What’s the answer to 99 of the 100 most asked questions? Money. God is the answer to the other question.”
It’s been over 20 years since the Montreal Expos played their last game and the franchise relocated to the Washington, D.C. area and became the Washington Nationals. It’s almost fitting this documentary dropped on Netflix a few days after the Toronto Blue Jays won their spot in the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers who spent 75 years in Brooklynn before they moved west. Yet the Blue Jays were an expansion team that started in 1977 whereas the Expos had been around since 1969.
But baseball was also Quebec’s favorite past-time as it was America’s. The sport had a long history in the Canadian province dating decades and generations before the Expos began spring training. That’s why many people in Montreal area were hurt when corporate greed led to it relocate.
If you’re unfamiliar with Montreal or Quebec in general, there’s a lot of people who speak French more than they speak English. The documentary is probably more in French than English, which only adds to the appeal of what made the Expos different. The documentary focuses on the Expos community and its fans. Every sporting team has their own legion of specific fans. The fans here have a feeling they were screwed over and they have a good reason.
By the time the 1990s were winding down, the brass who controlled the Expos felt Olympic Stadium wasn’t adequate anymore. And they were right. It was failling apart. However, Premier Lucien Bouchard refused a request from owner Claude Brochu for $150 million in public funding to build a new stadium. Hospitals were having to be closed. A lot of people didn’t feel millionaires and billionaires should get financial breaks. And private investors stayed away.
It still irritates me to this day that taxpayer money is used to build sporting arenas and stadiums where the ticket prices are so high people can’t even afford to go to the games. Call it what it is, a shakedown. College and universities spend millions to pay high price salaries of coaches but a player can’t even be given a slice of pizza unless it’s from a student booster club.
The Expos chances of a World Series run were dashed in August of 1994 when the strike happened canceling the season. The Expos had a great team and record with manager Felipe Alou along with Pedro Martinez and Larry Walker. Then when the 1995 season start, a fire sale led to all the good players moving to other teams. Walker went to the Atlanta Braves which won the World Series that year.
And then came in the final two nails of the coffin with Jeffrey Loria and his stepson David Samson. The latter is interviewed at length with a condescending tone that sounds like he’s mocking people for not understanding business is about the bottom dollar and the hell with the rest. He even goes as far as saying Montreal is the wrong city to have a professional team. And he does this all from the comfort of his house in the Hamptons.
But we can’t point the finger at people like Samson. It’s the world he grew up in where money talks and connerie walks. Running a Major League Baseball team isn’t a charity even though a lot of sports franchises in general try to get as many breaks as they can. When Loria and Samson took over in 1999, he was barely in his 30s. Their predecessor Brochu laid the seeds when he encouraged a consortium of about a dozen businessmen to invest as they bought the franchise from Charles Bronfman.
Yet Brochu wanted to have all control and say while everyone else ponied up the money and stayed silent. That’s not saying Bronfman didn’t make enemies as majority owner from 1968 to 1990 but it seemed he had more of the community’s interests in business decisions. But the 1980s was the rise of corporations owning businesses from takeovers and raiding them for the stockbrockers’ benefits.
In many ways, it was a perfect storm of problems that began in the 1980s with the Canadian recession. It is possible if the 1994 strike didn’t happen and the Expos won, it nmight have encouraged more people to get involved. But as the media learned before he did that Alou was being let go and Walker went to the Braves, a rival team, you had to expect fans to give up their support.
Speaking of the Braves, I remember how bad they were in the 1980s when going to a game was inexpensive. Now, a family of four is spending $200-300 on just one game which includes tickets and fees, parking and concessions. And you don’t want to spend that much money on a game that is going to be boring or a sure loss. You can’t treat your fanbase like this and expect them to keep coming back.
The owners of the Savannah Bananas realizd that for love of the game is important but for love of the fans is necessary.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 