In the year 2000, Alex Anthopoulos was working for a heating and air conditioning company in Montreal and he wondered if the next forty years (he was 23) would resemble the tepid routine his life had become. He decided no, shook himself and gathered at Olympic Stadium to volunteer to go through Expos fan mail. Today, he is the general manager of the Atlanta Braves, who, under his leadership, won the 2021 World Series, and who have just finished the season with the best record in major league baseball: 104 wins, 58 losses.
I love this story, so American and perfectly Quebecois, and not only because I was a kind of Braves fan in a previous life, hoping and suffering with Chipper Jones and the others — including a rotation of starting pitchers who bet out of three Cy Young Award winners — when, in the 1990s, they reached the World Series five times only to topple Gros-Andruw Jones as lead four times. If I love this story of a man who listened to the voice of passion, it is also because it passes through our Zamours and the pharaonic “toilet bowl” which, with the orange cones, is the main ornament of the Quebec metropolis.
I was determined not to talk about baseball this fall, when so much is happening in the wonderful world of sports: the shortage of the Montreal CF, the friendly Alouettes, a women’s hockey league, the romance of the hour between a tight winger and a global starlet, in addition to the endless full-page speculations on the chances, strengths and weaknesses of the Flanelle and on the quality of the French-speaking hopes ignored by the CH scouts, but who, vengeful, will come and win the Stanley in our faces next spring.
But when 10,000th-hand information started popping up on my phone regarding the return of the Expos, I began to experience, as the good Jean Dion said, palpitations in the region. And when, stunned, I read that it might be up to Tom Brady to bring baseball back to Montreal, I was torn between skepticism — was it really such a good thing to have legalized cannabis? — and the very sincere desire to shed tears of anticipated happiness.
I then learned some indisputable facts: 1) Brady, before choosing football, played catcher on his high school baseball team; 2) the Expos drafted him at 18e round (!) at the 1995 auction; 3) the best quarterback in football history sometimes dons a Montreal Expos vest to walk around New York; 4) Major League Baseball is currently considering adding two teams to its 30 franchises, and Montreal represents, in the opinion of some experts, “the largest market still available in North America for the MLB”, nothing new. less.
And so, after seeing our leaders inject more than seven billion piastres of our taxes into a Swedish factory, will we relive the national psychodrama of the modern stadium-with-corporate-boxes-to-be-financed-at-large -public-fundraising-otherwise-no-team? I can already hear fans singing the virtues of the “beautiful little new stadium” capable of helping to revitalize a city center afflicted with a historic vacancy rate of 17.4%.
And the chorus of laments from the social left responds: are we really going to let arrogant multimillionaires come and steal tons of money that could be used to bail out our health services and our education system? A confrontation so predictable that the fingers instinctively seek the zappette. We have already acted in this film.
Jean-Nicolas Blanchet, in The Montreal Journal of September 25, noted that the three richest teams in baseball missed the playoffs this year. That’s almost a billion in payroll that is “swinging” in the butter. That said, we are still far from voluntary simplicity. However, if there is a professional sport which, in 2023, would really need to come back down to earth and get closer to its audience, it is baseball. In the very heart of the land of sun, oranges and palm trees, where, in the languor of sticky evenings, baseball seems at home, the Tampa Bay Rays have just played a playoff game in front of less than 20,000 spectators, a pity .
The problem is well known: how can this game, which panegyrists agree is a celebration of the slowness and ritual quality of time and space, and which is to American football what classical dance is at blitzkrieg, could, in the absence of a Taylor Swift to sit in the stands, reach out to this young audience who thrives on the clicks of screens and the methodical orgies of basketball points?
In 2014, in a letter to New York Times, an exegete of the ball, the writer Paul Auster, proposed a reform consisting of granting a free pass after three balls and transforming the third foul ball into a catch, so as to limit the number of throws per presence to five. stick. His idea was taken seriously enough to be tested in a lesser senior league, but ultimately rejected.
On September 20, Major League Baseball inaugurated, during a match between the same Rays and the Los Angeles Angels, a “virtual stadium” where spectators evolving in the metaverse could follow, thanks to 3D images, a game baseball contested in reality.
What if the Expos 2.0 became the first virtual team in major league baseball?
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.