‘Who Killed the Montreal Expos?’ Netflix documentary digs into demise of MLB team
My main takeaway from this was that Pedro Martinez fucking loves Montreal.
Im not from there and have only been once but Montreal is an absolutely bangin city. It’s my favourite city in Canada by a mile (or well 1.6 Kilometers).
It’s my favorite city in North America. I miss living in Maine and just being able to drive up for a weekend.
Same, but from Vermont. Montreal is just the best.
Absolutely. Incredible city that is relatively easy to visit for Americans.
I grew up in New England and Montreal was always the go to place for the 18-20 crowd because we could legally drink up there 😅
It was so amazing. We went when we were 19 (from Toronto). Group of 15 of us guys and girls. We met so many Americans in the bars. Such an amazing weekend back in 2000
Hahah yes it was like a rite of passage spending a weekend getting wasted in Montreal 😆
Yeah I was there earlier this year for the 4 Nations Faceoff and had a blast there. It’s just a really unique vibe that’s a mix between North American and European sensibility. Part of it for me is also that I watched a lot of Jacob Two Two when I was a kid.
I adore Montreal so much as a city. It’s just got vibes. So much cooler than Toronto and that is precisely why I am a Habs fan (also because my family all cheers for the Leafs and I am an asshole/not a masochist)
Jays and Raptors though, hell yeah.
I prefer Toronto, and I think you can debate which city is better, but Montreal is objectively the cooler city.
The deep history and fully nude rippers definitely help.
Everywhere in Canada has full nude rippers….except Saskatchewan.
There’s no vagina in Regina
But it somehow actually smells like it sounds.
Aren’t all strippers nude? Isn’t that the point?
They often leave their underpants on.
Ive only been to 2 stripclubs, one was in montreal and I never have heard of this though. Each one I went it was all totally naked where do they not get fully naked?
There’s a few states in America where strippers aren’t allowed to go fully nude, and there’s others where strippers are allowed to go fully nude but stripclubs aren’t allowed to sell alcohol (a lot of them do BYOB or have a legally distinct entity right next door selling alcohol to get around it I think). iirc, there’s only 10 or so states where stripclubs can have fully nude strippers and also sell alcohol.
The only thing Toronto does better than Montreal is food. Toronto food scene is fantastic.
international food is more varied and many more high end options in Toronto, but traditional french food and harvest to table in Quebec compares favorably with the best in Europe.
I like it better than Toronto just because the metro is actually useful..
lol. Don’t know why this got downvoted, montreals metro is objectively better for travelling vs our Subway
I love going to Canada, have probably been 20+ times, all over the country. Montreal is fantastic, but my vote for coolest Canadian city goes to Quebec. Such an awesome place, bring back the Nordiques!
Quebec feels more European than any other city in the US or Canada.
Have you ever been for the winter carnival? I went a few years ago for the first time and it was so much fun!
I haven’t, but I need to. I’ve been to QC during the winter a few times but the timing never worked out for the carnival. If you like nature and wildlife, a little north of QC is a place called Tadoussac, such an incredible spot. You can see beluga whales in the river, go kayaking with minkes, great hiking…I think it’s time for another trip north. Go Jays!
I love Montreal so much. The bagels, the food, the buildings. Au Pied de Cochon is one of the best meals I had in my life, just foie gras overboard.
The foie gras croquettes, duck in a can, pudding Chômeur with foie ontop was just otherworldly
I can see you actually been to Montreal because you didn’t mention the people on the list of things you liked 🤣
Montreal, particularly in the Summer, is very hard to beat.
I’ve only been once, in the winter, and I thought it was the coolest / best city I’ve ever been to, lol.
It’s honestly great year round. I mentioned the Summer because during that time they close down a lot of streets for pedestrian walking and it has such an insanely good vibe.
In Doug Glanville’s book, he says that Montreal was the favorite MLB city of most of his teammates to visit.
That’s because Montreal rules.
Montreal is amazing. Pedro was also amazing.
I haven’t watched the documentary yet. But I know many Dominicans love to play for the Expos; they have a good team with a dominican manager and lots of compatriots/latin players. So yes, at least Pedro, Moises (of course he was playing for his father) and Vlad have talked before of their love to the team.
He does
Seeing 90 year old Felipe Alou on camera again being the same kind, affable guy I remember from childhood almost brought a tear to my eye.
Moises Alou is the most overlooked player of the era.
Steve Bartman sure didn’t see him!
:_(
Holy fuck so good LOL
Out of all the Alous, he is the Moises….
Moises legitimately should’ve had more Hall of Fame consideration than just 6 votes on the 2014 ballot, sure he only had 39.9 bWAR but he was a lifetime .300+ average hitter with 2,134 hits, 332 homers, 6 All-Star appearances and two outfield Silver Sluggers, had consistent production every year (despite missing two full seasons in 1991 and 1999 with freak injuries), played until he was 41 and still played well then even with limited time (dude had a 30-game hitting streak when he was 40 in 2007), hell he probably could’ve lasted even longer had he not torn his hamstring on a rehab assignment in 2008. I’m not saying he should be in the Hall but he certainly shouldn’t have been just a one-and-done even with the 2014 ballot being ridiculously stacked with 3 inductees plus 9 more eventual members and the steroid guys.
Lots of blame to go around, but the biggest issue was that they were never going to secure public funds. It didn’t matter who the owner was.
The documentary failed to mention the Montreal Olympics. This Olympics put the province in debt for a long time. Even to this day, Montreal can’t get rid of that stadium without paying a lot of money because they way it was built.
You can tell by the way that it is.
Wow, what a beaut.
Isn’t that neat?
It is super cool looking and they are still maintaining it, and even making it better in hopes to sell it. Maybe that Robert H guy who borrowed Ohtani’s plane wants to start a new Canadian Baseball team.
I went to game there in 2003. Place is a dump and it’s severely outdated. The orovience should just bite the bullet and tear it down or repurpose it like Toronto did with maple leafs gardens
The problem is how it was built. The stadium is made of pre-stressed concrete, basically slabs of concrete poured over tensioned rebar. Because of this they can’t demolish it with an implosion or a wrecking ball, because doing so would essentially turn the entire stadium into a bomb and could send huge chunks of concrete flying hundreds of metres at high speed all across the area as the tensioned rebar breaks. This also risks damaging the metro line that runs directly underneath the stadium. Basically the only option to tear it down is to deconstruct it piece by piece which hugely inflates the price tag. If the options are spend hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars to completely deconstruct it before spending billions more to replace it, or spend hundreds of millions to upgrade it so that it can host events again, the second option is far more attractive.
Build a huge dome around it and then blow it up. Boom. Just fixed an entire province’s problems.
What’re you up to in 2026? Wanna be the premier?
Can we also play baseball in the new containing dome? Sounds like we can solve a lot of problems with this dome!
My idea is that we dome over not just the stadium, but an entire portion of the city and create a new indoor utopia. Montreal’s “Dome District” will be the envy of every city in the world.
Funnily enough there is already a biodome next to the stadium.
Is Pauly Shore inside it?
Anything is outdated if your last memory of it is more than two decades ago. Let them refurbish. It’s a pretty cool architectural feat.
I dont know if you’re just disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, but that place is a dump. It was horribly built and not even 10 years later felt outdated and trash.
You can only put so much make up on a pig. Place with renovations still isn’t going to work.
They could try to do what Seattle did with their arena, and save pretty much nothing but the shell and build a new stadium inside of it.
Have you ever been? It makes the Trop look like SoFi stadium
The sound was crazy bad in there.
The stadium is 50 years old
Wrigley Field is 111 years old. Fenway Park is 113. Dodger Stadium is 63. Well maintained and properly updated older stadiums can be fantastic ballparks, the issue with Olympic Stadium is that it was allowed to degrade and fall apart.
The problem with it is that they never finished building it.
Fenway is also a dump
It’s the worst stadium i’ve ever been in. There’s nothing ever happening there, there’s like two events a year. They looked into demolishing it and the cost was 2 billion dollars, so between that or the renovations that cost 800 millions, they chose to maintain it. It’s the biggest reason why Montreal will never be able to have a baseball team again.
I went to see the two nights Metallica tour a few years ago and it felt like it would collapse at anytime. The seats are terrible. Nobody in Quebec likes the stadium. But I guess the tower looks cool.
Bringing it down in a rock concert would have been the most metal way of demolition
There are a ton of Olympic remnants around the city. It’s fun to explore and find them.
Quebec’s decision not to demolish the stadium after the Expos left is a continuing self-inflicted wound. It’s a money sink that only exist to feed cash to the Montreal mafia’s construction/infrastructure rackets.
David Samson comes out of this documentary looking like a total douchebag. Overall, it was very good. A bit depressing, but worth the watch. I wished it had explored the geopolitical situation between Montreal and Toronto more, though.
So it accurately portrays Samson
Yeah as an on-again off-again Le Batard show listener douchebag is David Samson’s natural state
Zagaki- that kind of thing
That kind of swing.
I like to eat butt
Boston Butt
Bay-beh!
And you know it
Thanks Billy.
Going to miss The Duke :(
Did you just kill Billy?
Who’s gonna tell him…
Again, Billy is very much alive.
I wouldn’t say douche, he seems like an ok-enough guy on NPDS or his hits on Lebatard, I’d just say he’s a business-hawk; anything and everything to help or protect or advance the business, he’ll do. Like the lawyer he is, “zealous defense of a client” and all that.
I know it would have not changed anything but always irks me that Rogers didn’t vote for them to stay.
It’s unfortunate but it’s not surprising. While I already don’t expect billionaires to do anything that goes against their own interests, I expect a corporation to do it even less.
Everything you say is truthful, but given that the vote to move them was in no danger of failing, I’d think (naively) that Rogers could have at least symbolically voted against moving.
Anglo French relations would take a long documentary
I mean that is who David Samson is lol.
Anyone remember when he went on survivor and got voted out first?
He was voted out over a women who’s one of the worst challenge performers in the history of the show, who was also starting to have a legit nervous break-down. His tribe-mates hated him that much after just 3 days.
David Samson comes out of this documentary looking like a total douchebag.
So he was himself.
I honestly wonder how Canadian history affected the Expos. They were a team named after Expo ‘67, a huge milestone for Canadian patriotism in Montreal. Yet in 1976, Quebec elected a separatist government, which scared a lot of businesses away from Montreal to Toronto, just in time for the 1977 Blue Jays to come into play.
They made the playoffs in 1981, just a year after the first Quebec referendum failed 40-60. However, the Canadian economy that was looming over like a dark cloud suddenly went down the toilet in the 90s, right as Bronfman sold the Expos. Despite cheap ownership, the Expos build a team with excellent talent, and it peaks in the exact wrong time.
If they peak in 1993, they probably generate enough buzz for businesses to be more willing to pour more money into the organization. If they peak in 1995, their talent wouldn’t have been too expensive to keep and they generate enough fan interest to force the government to consider a stadium (ala Seattle).
Instead, they peak in 1994, get stopped in mid-August, and elect the separatist government again in 1994 a month later (the same people that would later reject the stadium deal). Montreal gets a double whammy as the NHL lockout prevents the Canadiens from playing until January 1995, leaving Montreal in absolute anger and no sports. Expos fans in Quebec City also get pissed off in 1995 when the Nordiques move to Denver after the shortened 1995 NHL season. All of this is before the 1995 Quebec referendum, which almost succeeds with a 49.3-50.7 result.
I think the straw that really broke the camel’s back was the 1996 season, when they missed the Wild Card by 2 games. Flip a loss to the Dodgers to a win, and that creates a tie-breaker, generating buzz around this seemingly impossible team, gutted yet still competitive. Does that create a Seattle situation that pushes the government towards a stadium deal? Do the consortium surrounding Brochu actually invest money?
Instead, the shitshow happens. By 2004, the Expos not only leave Montreal, but for one last kick in the nuts, the 2004-05 NHL lockout cancels hockey for a year, so they don’t even have the Canadiens to watch.
Youre 100% on the money with all of your points. I’d also add the perception and attitude towards the stadium.
It was supposed to be finished in 1972, but was delayed due to a worker’s strike. This created more logistics/materials/timeline delays which threw everything out of order. If you’ve taken any construction or scheduling classes, this is huge. It ultimately left it unfinished for the 1976 Olympics and the roof materials sat in a warehouse until 1982. The tower and roof weren’t finished until 1987.
Let’s say that the strike never happens and the stadium is completed late in 1974 (still slightly late, but still before the Olympics). What are the public and city’s attitude towards a “New” Baseball stadium? At that point, Olympic Stadium would be 20 years old, would’ve cost much less from construction over runs and delays, and would be seen as having served its purpose. There also likely wouldn’t be as many issues with the roof as there were, or they would’ve been addressed at an earlier time.
The new stadium Price in 1998 was \(250M. In 2017 Quebec approved a \)250M for just the roof… and now the cost of that has increased to $870M.
Imagine if we had Jays vs Expos in 1993.
Post war the Canadian economy starting shifting to Toronto, by 1967 Montreal was celebrating its final heydays and with the Parti Quebecois they basically poisoned the well of any future international investment.
Fast forward to 2025, and the population of Montreal is in major decline despite Canada literally having an immigration and housing crisis.
Between darkening trade tensions with the US, a $0.70 CAD, Quebec population decline, and a relatively weak economy contrasted with BC/Alberta/Ontario, … the Expos are never going back to Montreal. There’s simply no growth potential.
I wish this were not the case, but there’s a dozen better cities infront of Montreal aside from a) trying to right a historical injustice and b) nostalgia.
I don’t think 1995 makes a difference. As is, they had to trade Grissom and Wetteland, and couldn’t afford to re-sign Walker.
Why didn’t they talk about the immense role the Blue Jays played in the downfall of Les Expos? They stole the tv rights, signed for them to fuck off to Washington so they could be “Canada’s team”. Roger’s is responsible as well.
Yeah, that was a glaring omission.
I know that the Blue Jays had a lot of success in the mid 80s to early 90s. But I thought it was quite odd that the Expos seemed to be the dominant team for national broadcasts til the mid 80s and then all of a sudden the Blue jays just took over.
I mean part of that was because the Blue Jays were never good until the mid 80s, but they also specifically boxed the Expos out of broadcasting in English in Eastern Ontario as the early cable television “territory” started to be defined. That was one of many things that really hurt the Expos financially.
It was an inversion of the hockey drafting and broadcast rights. Montreal for years was the best NHL team and dominated both television and draft rights. The Jays were sure as hell not going to let a Montreal property dominate their growing market. English/French Canada rivalry was still strong well into the 1980s.
In 1975 Montreal and Toronto had roughly the same populations. Today Montreal’s greater metropolian area is ~4.3m people, whereas the greater Toronto area is ~7.2m… but the ‘golden horseshoe’ is nearing 13m.
Just the local Toronto market dwarfs the entire province of Quebec’s population.
All the more reason why it was ridiculous Toronto got to exclusively claim territory like Ottawa, which is 4 hours away from them and box out the team that was 2 hours away. Especially when the rest of the country was more likely to lean Toronto being the English speaking and closer team.
in 2025 that seems ridiculous, in the late 80s that was hard fought viewing territory.
keeping in mind cities like Windsor were likely Detroit Tiger fans and hadn’t generationally converted to the Toronto Blue Jays yet, and much of the maritimes were Bosox fans.
Yeah I definitely understand the motivation from the Jays’ perspective. It was an obvious decision from a financial perspective to take every inch of territory that MLB would allow, even if in this case it ended up boxing out the Expos.
My qualms are with how MLB laid out their maps, especially in the era before MLB.TV where fans could only get their out of market teams if they were in a nationally televised game or playing against their local team…and to a lesser extent the whole “aw shucks, we’re just doing it for all of Canada” schtick the Jays marketing team has successfully turned into the dominant narrative over the last 20 years.
It’s Netflix, they go about as deep as a micropenis
It’s so weird that Quebec City nordiques and Montreal expos share in common
Because the Jays were not long removed from their own shit show. They did nothing after the WS back to back, and the Skydome cost went from 100 mill to 400…which got offloaded to the province. Rogers then bought it for 25 mill.
The expos just distracted because they were worse… 1 billion to the taxpayers instead of 400 million.
Jays didn’t even try to compete again until ~2015
This is so true. They had multiple Cy Young winners, Delgado, Wells and others yet did fuck all after 1993.
Even if the Blue Jays had voted in favor of them staying, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Bret screwed Bret
Who’s your daddy, Montreal?
You want Bret? Well you can’t have Bret, because I screwed Bret!
I want to see Manfred pretend to announce an Expos expansion like when HBK pretended Bret was coming out in that nuclear heat promo he cut.
He announces the San Antonio Expos instead.
the name on the contract does say expos! but its the PORTLAND EXPOS
I believe it was actually a time traveling Goldberg.
Just saw it and was dissapointed on the documentary not mentioning anything about the Expos playing some series in Puerto Rico during those last years. I knew it would be impossible for a franchise in the island, but growing up and seeing MLB games being played minutes from my house was great. Especially when the Expos had Vazquez & Vidró playing in their homeland.
It’s because mentioning that would bring up MLB’s complicity in moving the Expos… playing games in Puerto Rico were great for marketing the game and for giving San Juan a trial run for their own club, but it was terrible for the city of Montreal because they hadn’t even made an official decision on the team yet.
Same as mentioning contraction and the three-way deal between Florida, Boston, and Montreal that allowed MLB to take ownership of the Expos.
MLB would never have cooperated with Netflix if any of that had been brought up.
Montreal is possibly North America’s coolest city. Just a little bit of that Eurotrash swag mixed in with endearing Canadian earnestness.
They also have the coolest F1 track.
Other cities: We’ll just put up barricades on our existing streets that aren’t wide enough for two cars to pass!
Montreal: Guys check this out we built a fucking island
The coolest thing about the track is that it’s open to the public outside of Grand Prix season.
I love going to Montreal and just getting a bicycle and ride around the circuit. One of the coolest things to do in Montreal, if you have an infinity for F1 anyway.
And the bagels 🥯🥯🥯 I am always wanting to go back.
Montreal style bagels are the best types
Money and the local environment of who had money in French Canada killed them. Claude Brochu came off very nice in the documentary but he should have never own a North American sports team. Everyone close to him seemed to have shares but no one seemed to have any money to fix the issues. After a good 1994 season, he okayed a massive fire sale for which they never recovered from.
Brochu removal lead to the aquistion by Loria and Samson who were slime balls. Even if Samson actually got along with the French and doesn’t sabatoge the Labatt’s deal, the tv rights, and kept the old stadium plans, none of it was funded anyway. They went on to piss people off in Florida but the Expos were already gutted when they came in.
This was an era where most were threating to move to DC or Tampa at the time and most got their stadium. As much of a white elephant as the Olympic stadium was, Montreal said no deal to a baseball team that was hemoraging money.
Yeah I’m too young to remember this going down but the impression I took away from Brochu was that he was well intentioned but way in over his head. And the lack of a stadium deal probably killed the team staying in Montreal long before Sansom and Loria came into the picture bc like you said, other cities were chomping at the bit to get a franchise
Like Pratt (the journalist in the doc) says - money killed the Expos. The general unwillingness in Canada to fund stadiums for the “big 5” leagues with public money, contrary to the US is essentially what kills franchises outside of Toronto.
As a non-American is that just bc Toronto is your New York and that’s where the money is, bc the Jays have a top 5 payroll this year. But at the same time I have to imagine they’ll need a new stadium soonish given how old the Rogers Center is?
I very much doubt you’ll see a new stadium in Toronto anytime soon - there is ZERO political appetite to fund one, and I think the Jays recognize this, since they’ve poured $400M into renovating the Skydome.
That’s part of it, but the economics are important. Toronto itself provides 20% of Canadas GDP. That’s massive. Ontario, the province it’s located in, provides 38%.
The renovations were have said to extended Rogers Centers “lifespan” or usefulness as a venue another decade. So I don’t think the Blue Jays will be discussing a new ballpark until the late 2030’s at the earliest.
It’s not only because Toronto is our New York in a sense. We just don’t want to use public funds for stadiums here in Canada especially for teams in the Big 5 leagues. None of the Toronto stadiums/arenas. Sure there will be some (like Edmonton recent arena), but they are the exception. However, that situation is different for smaller leagues (like CFL, CPL, CEBL, Frontier League, Junior Hockey, AHL etc) as those will often be publicly funded, but often in “smaller cities” or for multiple use/tenants and even then, there are nasty debates (not unlike the same in the US). But funding a facility for billionaire owners/corporations and multi millionaire players doesn’t pass the sniff test here. See the main difference here between the US and Canada: Stadium subsidy - Wikipedia
On the second subject, the Skydome is 35 years old, but was just heavily renovated, and those renovations costed something like $400M and it’s been converted for baseball only (so no more dual use for football anymore, although it can still host concerts)
Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Brochu was evp of marketing at Seagrams, a Bronfman owned company who also owned the Expos. In 1986, he became team president and as mentioned in the doc, Bronfman said he’s losing a couple million a season and it will soon be tens of millions. Brochu got a group together as the largest shareholder but his stake was only like 7-10%. So it was these small investors with French Canadian money. Brochu was in a herding cats situation and the concensus way their culture is, nothing got done. Loria only purchased 23% when Brochu was outsted and the minority owners didn’t like the abrasive American owners. Brochu was certianly well intentioned and over his head but as I think of it more, he was a fall guy for all the minority owners who said they owned this team from 1991 to 2001 but didn’t invest. I also think MLB got off pretty light in this one. 1994 was accurate but they still were the ones that moved it.
I bet it crushes Jonah Keri’s bitchass more than anything that he’s not a part of this
I enjoyed reading Keri as a writer back in the day, but holy shit what a turd.
It’s been a rough 24 hours, but that thought brought a small smile to my face.
Hopefully he’s in a place where he can’t even access this. Fuck em
I really enjoyed his book on it (plus the one he did about the Rays) but yea he turned out to be a complete POS.
I haven’t watched the doc yet, but as a Marlins fan who is all-too-familiar with Jeffrey Loria, I don’t know how you can single him (and Samson) out.
The writing was on the wall before 1999 and MLB already wanted the Expos to move. I genuinely think Loria wanted a ballpark in Montreal. It was just an impossible battle.
Yeah, but good on them for having the balls to say no, because 20 years later they can all see exactly how that didn’t work out for Miami.
\(300MM of public money turned into \)800MM, no appreciable economic impact, and still no increase in payroll or competitiveness. Except Loria got his $1.2 Billion.
I can’t even imagine what kind of center field atrocity two New York nepo-babies would have come up with in Montreal. I assume a bunch of terrible French stereotypes, like say a giant rotating croissant that shoots Fleur-de-lise fireworks and spins whenever there’s a homer.
“World famous Montreal Poutine” at every concession stand, but it’s disco fries
Brochu was Canadian though, and he’s the one who had the stadium deal in place in 1997 before the government pulled the plug.
Miami’s Stadium is a disaster for a multitude of reasons… accessibility being the biggest one. It was built on the site of the Orange Bowl, which was notorious for being hard to drive to a park at. In the entire history of the Miami Hurricanes, they have never sold out 3 times in a single season. They’ve only done it twice in a single season 3 times, and one of those was 2017…. 5 National Titles, 4 unclaimed titles… and they were only able to sell out 2 games just twice. That should be an indication of both the fanbase and location. A majority of Marlins fans were driving from Palm Beach and Broward County, which added 30-45 minutes to their commutes.
Montreal’s Labatt Park was going to be in downtown Montreal. Brochu was going to foot close to half the cost (\(100M) of the \)250M for the stadium. The Canadian Government pulled the plug on their funding, the consortium of owners (at that time it was a group) turned on him, they replaced him with Jeffrey Loria, and gave him a clause where the new leader could issue “Cash Calls” to fund the team (and essentially buy out equity). When Loria issued cash calls in 2000, rather than pony up the money, the minority parters didn’t pony up (they proposed trading Vladimir Guerrero instead)… Loria was actually dumping money into the team in 2000 (payroll nearly doubled), it’s just they couldn’t operate without a long term guarantee from the city.
Was it the right call? Idk, you can make the argument that it was seeing how the Marlins turned out in 2013… but Miami has a team for the future. You ask people in south Florida what their issues are, and it’s poor ownership. That’s the complaint about almost every team from the Rockies, to the Orioles, to the Angels… but they still have their team. You ask people in Montreal, and they still say they’re bitter and want their Expos back.
It’s fun to give Samson shit for starters
Very similar to how the Nordiques left.
Terrible ownership that didn’t want to invest in a competitive team.
Weak Canadian Dollar while players were paid in USD.
Refusal to fund new facilities by politicians.
Lack of on-field success leading to low attendance and viewership.
Lack of English national broadcasting. Most Canadian baseball fans outside of Quebec were Jays fans.
Playing little brother to the more successful Blue Jays, like how the Nordiques played second fiddle to the Canadiens.
It sucks, but I don’t think anything could’ve saved the Expos unless a billionaire had come along, financed a new park, and turned the roster around.
Bronfman was one of the wealthiest men in Canada in the 80’s. The ownership group he sold to in the 90’s included some of the biggest companies and businessmen in Montreal at the time.
The problem is the city wanted the owners to do almost all of the work and/or financing, and the ownership group had bought in as a form of “charity” to keep the team in Montreal. Just look at the very early days of the Expos, when they were first awarded a team.
They applied for expansion, were awarded a team (with help that the Dodger’s Owner was chairman for the expansion committee), and then did literally nothing to accommodate said new team…. The new owners were expected to pay the expansion fee without a garauntee from Montreal that they’d have a stadium lol. The Expos almost got moved to Buffalo because of this.
I totally get the concept of cities/states/provinces not wanting to spend hundreds of millions or billions on a new stadium… that said, why then apply for an expansion team? Everybody involved just wanted the Expos as a status symbol while not doing anything to actually help them succeed.
Nordiques fans get to feel those wounds reopen again this season as Colorado is wearing the Quebec Nordiques jerseys for 7 games this season, one of the games being against Montreal
It’s just a lame cash grab. They have nothing to do with Quebec and haven’t for decades.
Yup. Fanatics gonna Fanatics.
The jerseys are still pretty slick though. I didn’t appreciate them enough when I was a kid.
The dubbing in this doc is WEIRD. Good otherwise.
I hate when they dub people who are clearly speaking accented English.
I watched it in its original version (no dubbing in any language), the francophones (Pratt, Filosa, Brochu, Brulotte) were all speaking in French though.
A bunch of them were, but plenty of people were speaking english (you could read their lips) and still dubbed.
I just started watching and switched the audio to French Canadian (original) it preserves the English too. Makes me think Netflix thinks people are too stupid and lazy to read subs
Set it to French Canadian original with English closed captioned. Bonsoir just hits differently.
Never do dub. Subs work just fine.
I’m super happy this was made but I’m not sure my heart can take watching it
Yeah, I don’t know if I even want to watch this. I’m going to be sad overall, and then I’m going to be mad if they don’t go into detail about certain big things that contributed.
I watched this last night and it completely ignored the political climate in Quebec and Canada at the time, which led to an independence referendum in 1995. It seems pretty irresponsible to ignore all of that, but I guess it was made for an American audience.
They also ignored many other things - they focused on people and not context or situations.
Montreal deserve their team back
What I would give for the Expos to return (in the NL)…
I want a Vancouver team. Give me a Pacific division with Cascadian teams of Portland and Vancouver.
It’d never happen, at least at the same time, but I’d love both Montréal AND Vancouver.
I think Trump is doing real damage to the Portland Diamond project chances of us getting a team here
Jeff Loria. That’s who.
The Expos were already doomed before Loria came along. Hell, he increased payroll when he bought the team.
Ask Marlins fans about him
I his first season as Marlins owner, they won 79 games and were 29th in attendance. The next year they won a World Series, and were 28th in attendance. The year after that, they’re the defending World Champions, and that got them all the way up to 26th in attendance. The year after that, they significantly increased payroll only to still be 27th in attendance.
Then the fire sale happened. Imo, Marlins fans don’t really have a leg to stand on. I’m not trying to say Loria is a good guy, because that dude sucks. But he’s not really to blame for Expos and Marlins fans refusing to show up to games.
The 2005 rebuild wasn’t even that bad either… they went from 83 wins in 2005 to 78 wins in 2006. By 2009 they were 87-75 and were loaded with a young core. Despite this, nobody showed up.
The 2014 Marlins were 53-53 at the end of July, 4 games behind Division leader Washington. They were 65-65 on August 25, still just 6 games back of the Wild Card… they ranked 27th in attendance that year, and last in the National League.
The 2016 Marlins were 41-35 on June 26, 3 games back of the Division lead and tied for the Wild Card lead. On July 31, they were 57-48… just 4 games back in the division, 2 games back in the Wild Card. On August 15th, they were still just 3.5 games back in the Wild Card at 62-56. On September 20th, they won 1-0 to improve to 76-75…. Still just 4 games back of the wild card leader (who they’d play 3 times in a week). Jose Fernandez would go 8IP striking out 12, and Giancarlo Stanton homered. It was the last game of Jose Fernandez’s career, in front of a feeble crowd of just 17,000. They averaged 21,405 fans that year, down from the previous uncompetitive season.
They didn’t show up when they were competitive, they didn’t show up when they had generational talent, and they didn’t show up even when they resigned their young players. You’re never going to be able to keep talent if nobody shows up to watch them.
I hope he lost his ring in the garbage disposal. Fuck Loria.
David fuckin Samson
I went to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame to watch the documentary along with some others. As a lifelong Expos fan, it was informative and depressing. Reliving the highs of ‘94 until the strike was rough. What could’ve been! Great to see the old footage of legendary players and Alou!
JE ME SOUVIENS!
Mon Couer :‘(
Bud Selig
Jean Coutu and Hydroquebec. Those are the two most egregious murderers of Les Expos
Interested to watch this, though I did watch the ESPN 30 For 30 on it.
The talking heads would be like “Montreal was such a baseball town and supported the team”, and then they’d show clips from the 90’s with like 5k people in the stands.
So it felt a lot like revisionist history and nostalgia more than it was accurate.
Fans really don’t support losing teams here unless it’s hockey.
Then again, look at a lot of US teams that aren’t good and they also have awful attendance.
People don’t really want to waste their time and money to see a team lose.
I understand why the French director didn’t want to include the Parti Quebecois’ language laws as a reason dozens of head offices moved out of Montreal, significantly reducing sponsorship and ownership possibilities.
But it played a huge role.
The 76 Olympics also hurt the chances for a new stadium. Quebec was broke.
With the Mafia in Montreal playing a role in the construction. There is no way a new stadium was going to come in under budget.
There will never be a team in Montreal again. Vancouver has a better chance.
Jeffery Loria…JEFFERY FUCKING LORIA
My great pepe loved the Expos and Red Sox.
French Canadians love baseball,
The random overdubbing of voices is extremely fucking weird and so distracting. I do not understand it
I miss my Expos. I have Onions in the eyes tbnk.
Man, I miss the Expos. They were always one of my favorite teams when I was little, and I still love them 21 years later. I really wish they’d give Montreal an expansion team. Just complete incompetence sank that team. Loria and Sampson suck.
It was tough to watch. The terrible voice overs and dubbing, made it seem like a bootleg documentary and done on the cheap.
Should have kept the unis - they were much cooler than the current Nats ones (no offense)
I’m kinda suprised they skipped right from the sale to MLB to the last game, completely skipping over the horrible job MLB did managing this team (with the exception of hiring Frank Robinson, he was great). They actually had a really good team in ‘03 and were in the WC spot until MLB hit them with the road trip from hell (the last 22 “home games” were played in Puerto Rico). Then of course there’s the whole contraction fiasco that was only stopped because the Twins sued the league.
Not that they could’ve done anything to save the team, but at least we could’ve had a great playoff memory on the way out.
I was at one of the last games in Montreal in ‘03 when they beat Barry Bond’s Giants on a bottom of the 9th Grand Slam to take over the WC spot. The place was packed and the atmosphere was insane. Almost (I said almost) Springer Dinger levels. I will always dream of what could’ve been.
I was at game nine when Rick Monday hit his homer , it was devastating.
Just watched it. It felt very disjointed. There wasn’t a super smooth flow to the whole thing. It barely scratched the surface on some of the biggest points of contention, and completely ignored others. It would have been much better as a three or four part miniseries instead of trying to cram the entire Expos story into an hour and a half. Worth a watch if you have time to kill, but if you’re even remotely familiar with the Expos’ saga and are hoping for anything new or revelatory here, you’ll be disappointed.
I cried at the end. Great doc
I cried a bit at the end ngl. Bring back the Expos!
Wasn’t attendance down significantly in the 90’s early 2000’s. It looked like the writing was on the wall..no?
One of the worst documentary ever on anything baseball !
Waiting for the Oakland documentary next.
How long does the documentary take to come to the conclusion its David Samson?
Montreal was a big baseball town way back during their days as a minor league town. Hopefully they get an MLB team again. With a new ballpark in the right area, they’d definitely support MLB there.
Sad watch, seeing the A’s get ripped away from Oakland was the first relocation I remember. Teams should never be allowed to move, what a shame for those fans