It's been almost two decades since MLB left Montreal. Many want to see the Expos reborn, stephenjnesbitt writes, and there are efforts to bring baseball back. Should Montreal get a second chance? And more importantly, would it work?
Ten years ago, William Jegher was in his office at Ernst & Young in downtown Montreal when a managing partner of the accounting firm knocked on his door and asked, “What do you know about baseball?”Jegher had played baseball into high school. He’d been a diehard Expos fan from his earliest memories until the team left in 2004. After that, like many Montrealers, “baseball was kind of dead to me,” Jegher says. He didn’t watch it. He didn’t maintain a rooting interest.
Warren Cromartie, the former Expos outfielder leading The Project at the time, declared, “The numbers don’t lie.” Cromartie believed it was no longer a matter of whether baseball would return to Montreal, but when. Washington D.C. had lost teams twice and regained one. Why not Montreal? Next, Cromartie needed a deep-pocketed ownership group to come aboard, or, as he put it in baseball parlance, “a power hitter to step up to the plate and bring everybody home.
It would make for one of the best and most emotional moments in recent major-league history. There’s no disputing that. The Expos, revived via expansion or relocation, would be a comeback story for the ages.“It would really be something,” says Danny Gallagher, a former Expos beat reporter who has written eight books about the franchise.Whenever MLB elects to expand to 32 franchises, Montreal will deliver its pitch for a second chance. In a vacuum, it’s an almost ideal fit.
From a zoomed-out perspective, trying to make sense of awarding Montreal a new franchise less than two decades later boggles the mind.Montreal baseball historian Patrick Carpentier was a year old when the Expos came to Montreal. His uncle had season tickets, and little Patrick tagged along whenever he could. “I got bitten by the baseball bug then,” he says, cheerily. He still has his first Expos cap, the tri-colored one he bought at Jarry Park in 1972.
And they talk about what could have been. If the Expos had ever had a ballpark built for them. If Gary Carter hadn’t been traded in 1984. If the 1994 strike hadn’t halted the best season in Expos history. If ownership hadn’t shown four All-Stars — Larry Walker, John Wetteland, Marquis Grissom and Ken Hill — the door directly afterward. If they hadn’t traded 25-year-old Pedro Martínez after his first Cy Young Award season in 1997. If Jeffrey Loria had never come along.
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