Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is a new sports documentary film streaming on Netflix, with its heart in the right place, as it sets out on a passionate exploration of the history of the Montreal Expos, with the sole intention of finding out who was to be held responsible for the failure of the MLB team. It takes a look into all the factors that caused disappointment and anger among the loyal fanbase, starting from the 1980s to the very end in 2004. Who Killed the Montreal Expos? ultimately accepts its findings with grace and also presents multiple perspectives on the story, making for a highly entertaining and poignant watch.
How had the Expos become an important part of Montreal culture?
A genuine love and passion for the sport of baseball has always existed in the city of Montreal, with baseball being the most popular sport in the province of Quebec from 1900 to 1940. People actively followed the American baseball teams and leagues, while semi-professional leagues were also played in the city. In the 1940s, when the American baseball leagues had to adopt the racist segregation law, due to which Black players were not allowed to play professionally in the country, the teams in Quebec welcomed them. People just wanted to enjoy watching and supporting baseball, and the political and social injustices in the neighboring USA were simply not present in Canada, making it a very safe space for all players as well. The city already had a team in the minor league, the Montreal Royals, but around the 1960s, there was an active push to enter the major league as well.
The passion and love for the sport finally found a solid means for expression when Major League Baseball decided to bring in expansion teams in 1969, and businessman Charles Bronfman jumped at the opportunity. A dedicated baseball fan himself, with immense love for the sport and the MLB, Bronfman, along with a small group of partners, founded the Montreal Expos to be the first baseball team in the MLB from anywhere outside the USA. Named after the Expo 67 World’s Fair, which had taken place in the city two years earlier, the Montreal Expos became a matter of pride to all Canadians, and it immediately had the support and love of thousands of baseball fans in the country.
The team had a humble beginning in the league, failing to make it to the postseason in their first 10 years of existence. Fans were not ecstatic about their beloved team’s performance on the field, and so other measures had to be taken in order to keep them satisfied. After playing for 8 years in the Jerry Park stadium, the Expos moved to a new home in 1977, at the Olympic Stadium, which was significantly bigger and had better facilities. But their woes on the field continued, and their finances naturally suffered, as professional baseball teams heavily relied on their performances, especially at the time. Playing better in the league would bring them greater prominence as a team, which would further lead to better brand endorsements and revenues for the business. However, it was getting too difficult for even a billionaire businessman like Charles Bronfman to hold on to the team, and so in 1991, he had to take the heartbreaking decision to step away.
How did Claude Brochu take over?
By the 1990s, the player wages in the MLB had shot up massively, and the Montreal Expos also had to deal with the struggling Canadian economy. The Canadian dollar had become significantly weaker against the American dollar, and being a Canadian team participating in the MLB, the Expos were suffering losses as they were earning revenue in CAD while having to pay their players in USD. Owner Charles Bronfman stated to those close to him that had it been a matter of a few million dollars each year, he would have still held on to the business out of his extreme love for it. But the team was projected to make about a 30 or 40 million dollar loss every year, which was too heavy for the businessman. Therefore, he appointed the president of the team, Claude Brochu, to try and come up with a solution for this difficult scenario, his sole intention being to ensure that the team would remain in Montreal.
Whenever the sale of a franchise sport team is agreed upon, it is usual custom to first look for buyers in the local market and then to move on to people in the same state or country who promise to not move the team elsewhere. When these measures fail to attract a potential buyer for the team, someone in a different state or country is looked at, with a resigned understanding and agreement that it will definitely be moved from its home city. In the case of Bronfman and Brochu, they did not have much difficulty finding new buyers. Claude Brochu, who appears in the Netflix documentary, admits that the most difficult part was to meet numerous businessmen in a single day, one after another, and convince them to invest in the team so that people in Montreal could still hold on to their sporting legacy.
Brochu, with complete support from Bronfman, had been trying to set up a consortium of businessmen who would all come in together and take charge of the Expos. After months of deliberation in 1991, it was finally announced to the public that the team had indeed been bought over by such a consortium of Montreal-based businessmen, who had promised to secure the franchise and grow it into a successful MLB team. But the kind of ownership that the MLB as a league was used to working with in the United States was a single owner who would take all decisions and be held responsible if anything went wrong. Since the MLB authorities kept demanding such an individual, Claude Brochu stepped up to be a sort of leader of the consortium, who would deal with the league directly and also appear in public the most. But this was sadly not the change that fans of the Expos had believed to have changed the history of their team, as Brochu turned out to be a weak leader and businessman who could not steer the team clear of financial troubles.
What happened in the 1994 MLB season?
After years of mediocre performances on the field, the Montreal Expos finally built a solid team for the 1994-95 season, under the leadership of head coach Felipe Alou, who was already a much revered man in the franchise. When the new season kicked off in April, fans already had high expectations from the team and their star players, and they were pleased to see the team get off to a flying start. By the end of four months of play, the Expos sat comfortably in second position in the league standings, below only their longtime rivals, the Atlanta Braves. This suddenly looked like their year to shine, and it was almost certain that the Expos would make it deep into the postseason, and many fans dreamed of witnessing the team’s first-ever World Series victory as well.
However, fortune was not on the Montreal Expos’ side, as in August of 1994, the league had to be halted because of the players’ decision to strike. Many of the smaller teams in the league felt that the bigger, more established teams, which had much more resources, were simply running away with all the wins and successes. In a sport that heavily relied on finances, it was very evident that teams with more cash to spend were able to buy better players and set up better facilities, placing them well ahead of the teams in lower positions. Therefore, there was a call to introduce a salary cap, which had already worked successfully in the NBA, so that all teams would have a limited amount of funds to use while buying players or renewing their contracts.
The salary cap was arguably much needed to maintain competition in the league, but it also meant that the players would now be getting much lesser salaries, and the increments in their salaries would also be very slow, if not negligible. While the players had the most amount of power in contract negotiations and trade talks, the introduction of the salary cap would curb their power tremendously, which was seen as a great injustice. As a result, the players protested against the terms of the new collective bargaining agreement that was being drawn by the MLB, and totally opposed the introduction of the salary cap, but the owners refused to agree to their terms. With both sides unwilling to move from their demands, the players called for a strike, and the season came to a screeching halt after just 4 months.
While many eager fans all over the country hoped that the strike would be called off in the months to come, this was not the case, and for the first time in over 90 years, the MLB Postseason and the World Series were canceled. The Montreal Expos had unfortunately been caught in the middle, as the best prospect they had had in years, of performing well and possibly even winning the title, could not be fulfilled. By the time the strike was over, and the new season began in 1995, the team had lost more money, after having relied on the revenues that they hoped to have generated in the previous year. As a result, a number of star players had to be sold, which instantly had an impact on their performance, and the fans now started to lose patience with the management.
How did the stadium fiasco hurt the team?
In an effort to turn things around, Claude Brochu decided to build a new stadium in Montreal to move away from the Olympic Stadium, which had its fair share of problems. The roof was inadequate to keep water out whenever it rained, and so the stadium and its stands were quite frequently flooded. The water obviously seeped onto the field as well, damaging the artificial turf and making it quite dangerous for players, some of whom even suffered serious injuries while playing at the stadium. Building a better stadium with more modern amenities and facilities would not only have increased morale for the fans and the players, it would have also brought in crucial finances for the business, as higher prices could be charged for the tickets.
Therefore, Brochu and his men started to hold talks with the erstwhile premier, or mayor, of Montreal, Lucien Bouchard, since a significant amount of financial assistance was needed from the government. Unlike in the American cities, there were not enough corporate billionaires in Montreal to privately fund the construction of a stadium, and so Brochu approached Bouchard for help. However, Montreal and Quebec as a whole were going through financial difficulties in the 1990s, struggling to keep public hospitals and schools running. Ultimately, Lucien Bouchard perhaps took the more humanitarian decision in such a situation, as he publicly announced that whatever funds the city council had needed to be used for hospitals and schools, and there was simply no more for the construction of new stadiums. This failure to build a new stadium did not only hurt the business financially, it also immediately led to a falling out between Brochu and the other stakeholders in the consortium, which ultimately led to Brochu leaving the consortium.
Who were the new owners of the Expos?
When Claude Brochu left, he was replaced by a billionaire art dealer from New York named Jeffrey Loria, who bought about 24% of the business, with the other Montreal-based businessmen holding the rest. However, what the others failed to notice was that in the agreement that had been signed by the investors, a certain clause had mentioned that Loria, being the primary owner, could make cash calls at any time, essentially asking for more funds from the existing investors. The clause also mentioned that if the investors were unable to pay the money at the time, Loria was allowed to bring in his own money and buy the shares of the said investors from them. Because of this sly move, Jeffrey Loria ended up owning about 92% of the Montreal Expos in just a few years, and fans claimed that he and his stepson, David Samson, had cheated the other businessmen and were trying to sabotage the team.
Samson, who appears extensively in Who Killed the Montreal Expos?, argues that he had tried his best to turn the fortune of the Expos around but could not do anything about it. He states that he had also made a significant attempt to get a new stadium built in the city and had even built a model of it to showcase during a press conference, but he simply received no bids from potential investors and so was left to scrap the idea. Things started falling apart, as Loria refused to significantly lower offers from TV broadcasting channels, demanding that they pay the team as much as the American teams get. As a result, the Expos suddenly had no broadcast deals, and their games were no longer televised. Fans were already distraught with the new owners, and they started to realize that their worst nightmare was possibly about to come true.
What ultimately happened to the Montreal Expos baseball team?
In 2002, the Canadian partners in the business sued Jeffrey Loria for having cheated them with his dubious business practice, but there was nothing legally wrong with what Loria had done. David Samson still argues that the businessmen could have used the same money to invest more in the team than to sue him and his stepdad at the time. However, the men from New York ultimately turned out to be only money-minded, with reaping profits having always been their sole intention. When Loria became an owner of the Montreal Expos in 1999, he had invested around 18 million dollars. But in 2002, he decided to sell off the team for a whopping 120 million dollars and instead moved to Miami, buying the Marlins baseball team at a huge profit.
The Montreal Expos failed to get any buyers at all, and the MLB itself decided to take over ownership in 2002 and continued to run the team for a couple of years. Since the owners of the other MLB teams were now part owners of the Expos, the team from Montreal could not really take its own decisions and therefore could not succeed on the field either. Finally, in 2005, the franchise was moved to Washington, the biggest American city without a baseball team, and was rebranded as the Washington Nationals. The Expos fans were told of this move mere hours before what would be their beloved team’s final game in Montreal. Fans of the Expos still hold yearly conventions to this day, in which old players, coaches, and fans are commemorated, and they all hope that someday their beloved team will return home.
