The Rise and Fall of the Montreal Expos

The Montreal Expos were born in 1969 as one of four expansion teams added that year. They were the first major league franchise based outside the United States. They played at Jarry Park, a converted municipal stadium that seated 28,456 and had a public swimming pool visible beyond the right field fence. The fans were loud, bilingual, and devoted.

The Expos spent their first decade building through their farm system, which became one of the best in baseball. By the early 1980s, they had a roster loaded with talent. Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Tim Raines, Steve Rogers, and a young outfielder named Tim Wallach. They won the NL East in the strike-shortened 1981 season but lost the NLCS to the Dodgers.

In 1994, the Expos had the best record in baseball. Their roster included Pedro Martinez, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, John Wetteland, and Marquis Grissom. They were 74-40 when the players' strike began on August 12. The World Series was canceled. The Expos never recovered.

The strike destroyed the franchise's economic model. Attendance, already declining because of Olympic Stadium's cavernous atmosphere and poor sightlines, plummeted further. The team's ownership group, led by Claude Brochu, began selling off players to cut costs. Martinez was traded to the Red Sox. Walker left as a free agent. Grissom was traded. By the late 1990s, the Expos were a shell of the 1994 team, and efforts to build a new downtown ballpark had failed.

In 2002, MLB purchased the Expos from the ownership group for $120 million. The league itself became the team's owner, the only time in modern history that MLB has owned a franchise. Under league ownership, the Expos operated as a money-losing placeholder. They played a portion of their 2003 and 2004 home schedules in San Juan, Puerto Rico, further alienating their Montreal fan base. The roster was gutted. The front office was skeletal.

After the 2004 season, MLB relocated the franchise to Washington, D.C., where it became the Nationals. The Nationals played three seasons at RFK Stadium before moving to Nationals Park in 2008. In 2019, they won the World Series.

Montreal has been without baseball since 2004. Periodic efforts to bring a team back, including discussions about a split-city arrangement with Tampa Bay, have produced no results. The Expos' brief history contains one of the great "what if" questions in baseball. What would have happened if the 1994 season had been played to completion?