Montreal mayor to meet with MLB commish
Montreal’s mayor plans to meet with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred later this month.
Does Montreal want baseball back? It sure seems that way.
The Mayor of Montreal, Denis Coderre, is planning to meet with Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred in New York City later this month. The purpose of the meeting, at least partially, is to express Montreal’s desire to have a MLB team back in its city.
“We will show Mr. Manfred our love for the sport,” Mayor Coderre said during an interview with the Canadian Press. “I don’t want to negotiate openly, but we’ll clearly talk about Montreal.”
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It’s been 11 years since Montreal’s last major league team, the Expos, left to become the Washington Nationals. One of the reasons the Expos left in 2004 had to do with lackluster attendance. In each of the team’s final seven seasons, the Expos failed to draw one million total fans to Olympic Stadium. To put that in perspective, major league teams usually use two million as the litmus test for good attendance.
Whether the city’s indifference revolved around baseball generally or the Expos specifically, that sentiment appears to be lifting.
A total of 96,350 fans attended a pair of exhibition games between the New York Mets and the Toronto Blue Jays, currently MLB’s only Canadian-based team, back in March of 2014. Additionally, last month, 96,545 fans attended a pair of games between the Blue Jays and the Cincinnati Reds.
“We need a plan. We need a step-by-step approach,” Coderre continued per the Canadian Press. “You don’t pull the flower to make it grow faster.”
The question is if Manfred is intrigued and wants to get a team back into Montreal, where does it come from? There are teams with old stadium struggling to draw, but not a ton of them. The most likely candidate to move would be the Tampa Bay Rays, who are a forgettable franchise now that Joe Maddon is managing the Chicago Cubs. It seems the thought of expansion would be a non-starter, with the MLB-level talent pool already thinning. Additionally, you would need to create two more teams for scheduling purposes.
The potential of a meeting between Manfred and Coderre leaves us with a lot of questions. How receptive will Manfred be to Coderre’s proposal? How hard with Coderre push the issue? Will Coderre come prepared with a PowerPoint deck?
That meeting should be an interesting one.
More from MLB
- Braves-Red Sox start time: Braves rain delay in Boston on July 25
- Yankees: Aaron Boone gives optimistic return date for Aaron Judge
- MLB Rumors: Yankees-Phillies trade showdown, Mariners swoop, India goes to Seattle
- MLB Rumors: Insider names Braves’ most likely player to be traded
- MLB Trade Grades: Dodgers reunite with familiar face in Red Sox deal