It’s time to write a eulogy. (Another first for my blog.)
This Sunday, we will finally commit to history something that has been around for thirty-five years. In recent times, it has turned into a bit of a curio, an entity without a home, seemingly so poorly placed and horribly mismanaged that it’s hard to imagine that a mere decade ago, it was the best there was.
Yes, it’s finally the end of the road for the Montreal Expos.
Many of baseball’s best players in the early 1990s played in a ballpark where the first language was French. The two most recognizable names to fans today would be star pitcher Pedro Martinez, today playing for Boston, and slugger Larry Walker, now with St. Louis. Indeed, on August 12th, 1994, they held the best record in all of Major League Baseball.
Then came the players’ strike. The rest of the season, including three playoff rounds, was wiped out. When the game finally returned in late April of 1995, the fans did not. Eventually, to balance the books, all their quality players were traded or allowed to leave in free agency. Driven away by a team of has-beens and never-will-bes, attendance dipped to an average of 5000 per game in a stadium designed to hold more than ten times that number.
By 2002, the situation was so bad that no one wanted to own the team. It was bought up by the other twenty-nine owners, originally slated to be contracted out of existence, but instead becoming the nomads of baseball, playing more than a quarter of their home games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in an attempt to increase revenues. MLB tried to find a more permanent home for the franchise that was seemingly now a dead man walking. Bids from places like Norfolk, Monterrey (Mexico), and Las Vegas poured in, hoping to land a major league team.
It is now widely expected that the Expos will move to Washington DC in 2005 and become the Washington Senators, a recycled name from two previous franchises that had left town (becoming the Minnesota Twins in 1961 and the Texas Rangers in 1972). If the great 1994 Montreal team been able to complete its season, perhaps win a World Series championship (as their Canadian counterparts, the Toronto Blue Jays, had done the previous two years), perhaps baseball could have coexisted permanently with the old world culture of Montreal.
Instead, they’ve been the annoying little brother that no one wanted, fielding a team of players that not even seasoned baseball fans could recognize. (I know because I saw them play the Phillies just up the road the Friday before last. Surprisingly, however, the visitors pulled out a 12-8 win.) So now, while our nation’s capital will gain a baseball team, which will soon inhabit a sparkling new stadium on the Anacostia that will begin construction shortly, Montreal will lose its franchise, without much fanfare.
It seemed like someone needed to say something.
