Baseball | Twenty years later, still our Z’Amours

(20 years ago this week, the Expos played their last local game in Montreal. I was there. It was heartbreaking, like Dédé Fortin’s cry of despair in Just a short night.) So Câlisse stays, just a little night
And we’re going to love each other, until the morning
You have to leave, I know well
But you don’t have to leave right away

Except that after five seasons of misery marked by the terrible reign of Jeffrey Loria, threats of dissolution and anemic crowds, major league baseball was on its last legs. He had decided to divorce unilaterally. That evening, at the Olympic Stadium, 31,000 baseball fans were left behind for good.

The mood was somewhere between nostalgia and bitterness. Yes, we revisited our best years. We sang Take Me Out to the Ball Game And Valderi Valdera at the top of his voice. But the national anthem of the United States was widely booed. Spectators protested by throwing golf balls onto the field. The referees almost stopped the match in the third inning. The Expos were rinsed 9-1, by Jeffrey Loria’s Marlins, what’s more.

By the end of the evening, I was convinced that our relationship with baseball was indeed over forever. That our blue-white-red caps were going to join our Chris Speier and Jeff Fassero cards in a box in the back of the basement closet, behind the Halloween costumes and school notebooks secondary. That our baseball parks were going to empty. It was already off to a good start; in the central neighborhoods of Montreal, the City replaced diamonds with soccer fields.

I was completely wrong.

Twenty years later, the Expos are still in the conversation. Even that the brand is more attractive than when the club was in town.

Who was walking around with a tricolor cap in the city center in 2004? Hardly anyone. It was corny. Category Elvis Gratton, listening to the replay of an Expos game against the San Diego Padres on Santa Banana Beach. Today ? Young and old wear it proudly, from the Bell Center to Royalmount, schoolyards and student bars. It has become a symbol of good taste.

Quebec fans also show their colors abroad. I’ve encountered them in stadiums in Boston (a lot), New York, Chicago and Denver, among others. Éric Beaudoin, a sports fan from Montreal who was once in the same baseball pool as me, was in Los Angeles last week for a game of Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers. For the occasion, he wore a powder blue sweater and a cap stamped with the Expos logo.

“If I wear my Gary Carter t-shirt and my tricolor cap, it’s to keep the team alive in a sense,” he told me. It is a representative symbol of Montreal. You wear the cap, people recognize it and ask me if I come from Montreal. It doesn’t go unnoticed. »

A Dodgers fan approached him to tell him about Rick Monday’s home run, which allowed his team to eliminate the Expos in the 1981 series. “He cried. I was too young at the time, but I told him that I know our side was crying too — for the opposite reason! »

“What I remember,” continues Éric Beaudoin, “is that everyone has nothing but positive things to say about the Expos. We’re not talking about fire sales or the bad luck of 1994. Just good memories. »

How can we explain that the Expos brand is still so popular? That at exhibitions for collectors in Montreal, the displays of Expo cards are always among the most popular? That one of the most popular cards of the last year in the United States was that of Topps showing Tom Brady in an Expos uniform?

In other North American cities, transferred or dissolved clubs do not arouse as much enthusiasm – except in Brooklyn, where we still mourn the departure of the Dodgers, 67 years later. An interesting exception. In Montreal as in Brooklyn, no professional baseball club quickly replaced the Expos and the Dodgers. The Mets established themselves further north, in Queens. While elsewhere, new franchises have relegated the old ones to oblivion. Think Seattle (Mariners and Pilots), Milwaukee (Brewers and Braves) or Kansas City (Royals and Athletics). In hockey, Cleveland and Hartford lost their teams in the National League, but they regained them in the American League. Quebec? The Nordiques brand remains popular, but the capital also cherishes its Remparts, one of the most popular junior clubs in the world. The Expos remain Montrealers’ last link with major or affiliated baseball.

Another hypothesis: the Expos stayed here long enough for us to become attached to them – 35 years – but not long enough for us to have the impression of having reached the end of the adventure. A bit like artists who die in the prime of their life. When we think of Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly or Kurt Cobain, we wonder what careers they might have had if they had lived 50 years longer. The history of Expos is also marked by “what if…”. What if Charles Bronfman had remained the owner? What if the 1994 strike had been avoided? What if the new stadium had been built? What if the franchise had held out until the new revenue sharing formula?

With our Z’Amours, we are left with this unpleasant impression of not having tried everything to save our relationship. We believe that our best years were perhaps ahead of us, even if major baseball, to quote Dédé Fortin again, has been telling us the same thing for 20 years.

Sorry, no compute.

But beyond fashion, beyond nostalgia, the most likely reason for our persistent attachment to the Expos is the strong bond that unites us with baseball. Its roots in our country run deep. They began to grow in the courtyards of our colleges in the 1860s. At the beginning of the following century, each neighborhood, each trade, each large family had its own team. Until the 1940s, baseball was the most popular sport in the province.

Even today, baseball fields are generally at the heart of life in our cities and towns, near schools, city halls and churches. On summer evenings, they are teeming with people. Since 2009, the number of federated players has almost doubled, from 19,200 to 36,500 — and that doesn’t include softball players, like those on the The Press.

These are remarkable figures for a sport rarely taught in our schools, and which does not benefit, in Greater Montreal, from a powerhouse like the Expos. The growth potential remains immense. As long as the roots remain healthy, I remain hopeful of returning to see professional baseball in the city, in a more festive context than that of the last Expos game.