Baseball: 7 potential MLB expansion cities and team ideas
By Ryan Morik
Montreal
Nickname: Expos
Closest team: Boston Red Sox, 307 miles
As you can tell, I got very creative with this name.
The argument against this is we’ve seen baseball in Montreal before, and attendance was never great. Before moving the Washington to become the Nationals, the then-Expos’ highest single season attendance average was 28,650 in 1982. That season, the Expos finished 86-76. The year prior, they lost the National League Championship Series in six games — it was the franchise’s lone postseason appearance.
But the Expos narrowly missed the postseason in 1993, going 94-68-1. In today’s postseason format, they would have been a wild card team. In perhaps the franchise’s potentially best season, in 1994, the season was cut short. At the time of the strike, they were 74-40, leading the Braves by six games in the NL East.
Attendance at Olympic Stadium climbed above 20,000 when they were good The problem was, they were never consistently good. But, as the saying goes, “if you build it, they will come.”
We’ve seen exhibition games in Montreal sell out in recent years. Remember when Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. hit a walk off in his dad’s old home ballpark? The place went crazy.
The city is clearly hungry for baseball. It’s time to make it happen again.