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This is fantastic. People these days think the Oakland Athletics are the first time that MLB has screwed a great fanbase out of their baseball team, but being Canadian I remember the story of the Montreal Expos all too well.

Playing in Quebec meant a publicly funded stadium was never going to happen. Take as evidence the publicly funded arena recently built for a proposed NHL expansion team in Quebec City, which led to memes (only partially for comedic effect) that the team ought to be named the Quebec Provincial Bankruptcy. This meant that from the start the MLB was always going to be lukewarm on Montreal, and were never going to give it a real chance.

Therefore, when the Expos got stuck with the horrendous (and horrendously located) Olympic Stadium, one likely could've easily predicted that the end was coming. I'm conscious of this as a fan in Toronto as well. We're lucky to have better ownership than the Expos did, but if the Rogers Centre ever becomes unworkable, MLB will not fight for us. In fact, they'll likely go through back channels to make it easier to take our team away, like they've just done in Oakland, and like they did 20 years ago in Montreal.

I love the quote in here: "Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it." It's absolutely correct, with baseball constantly shoving into their fans' faces that there are markets that baseball deems worthy of fighting to keep in the game... and then there's yours, which they will flee from at the earliest possible convenience. Baseball cares nothing about their fans, nothing about the boons that these teams are for their locales, nothing about anything except their pocketbooks, and not even their long term pocketbooks. Baseball don't care about making as much money as they possibly can. They care about seeing as much money as they can possibly see tomorrow, all the time after tomorrow be damned.

Which leads me to this wonderful story. It's an excellent profile of a team who should've been entirely dead, but was full of players who loved the game too much to roll over and die, playing in front of fans that felt the same way. The temporary executives that the league brought in to be cronies also went rogue, and operated in the best interests of the Montreal Expos. Much like the Oakland Athletics this year, this whole situation reads as a middle finger to the overlords of baseball who were being so openly disdainful of Montreal, and the great baseball fans that'd always existed there.

It's a sinking feeling to have the sport so obviously turn against you as a fan. It makes it easy to give up and simply refuse to give baseball any more of your money. Like you said, baseball had breached the trust of the Montreal fans. That kind of thing takes a while to heal, and unless you're in one of the key markets MLB cares about, these things don't get chances to heal. The team either leaves or successfully strongarms the city into bankrupting itself, both of which are very poor outcomes.

Good job buddy. Great read here. It's just such a sad story, that feels both retro and current at the same time.

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Thanks so much for reading the piece. The game was and still is surviving those who own the teams, but you’d have to imagine the game would be thriving if the executive class were better dialled in.

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If baseball's ownership knew what they were doing (like football's ownership mostly does), the game never would've fallen from (by far) the top sport on this continent to now barely second. That's what I meant when I said baseball's owners aren't even trying to maximize profits, which I guess could be interpreted as an acceptable goal in this capitalistic society we live in, but they're not doing that.

They're trying to maximize the profit that they can see today, which leads to terribly short sighted decisions, like believing that contraction would ever work, and feeling no pain over eliminating good baseball fans from the game. It's this type of short sighted decision making that's made sure baseball's fandom hasn't grown since the 1970s.

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