Expos de Montréal

[MtlMan]

Again, the obese troll is unmasked as the untrustworthy preacher that he is.

 

Just bitchin his way through the truth as always.

 

Good thing you're all here to rectify the shot, guys.

[andre md]

Un reportage au washington post tres interessant sur le baseball. Un sports de mononcle et de hasbeen selon moi.

Age median des spectateurs le plus eleves des sports majeurs.

 

Et on a la nostalgie de nos zamours les expos.

 

Cette equipe se trouve justement a Washington maintenant sous le nom des Nationals.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/baseballs-trouble-with-the-youth-curve--and-what-that-means-for-the-game/2015/04/05/2da36dca-d7e8-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/baseballs-decline-in-america/2015/04/05/a18bce94-dbee-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_graphic.html

[Catpuke]

Tiens, parlant de troll..

[IluvMTL]

Link about possible site for new stadium where Children's is

 

http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2015/04/montreal-childrens-hospital-could-we.html

 

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[vivreenrégion]

Je crois que si on veut revoir les Expo et un nouveau stade downtown, c'est la big shot qu'il faut. Il doit être relié au transport en commun, et si le stade est à Griffintown, le SLR devra passer par là. Il n'y aura pas de place pour du parking, et il ne faut pas seulement pouvoir aller au stade à pied. Le stade ne servirait pas seulement au baseball, mais aussi pour des show de musique et autres.

[MontréalYul]

Aucune chance de voir les Expos marcher à Montréal. 30,000 + 80 fois par année..? S'il y avait 1-2 par semaine ok mais même là.

 

Les gens rêvent en couleur. L'argent est juste pas là. Avez-vous vu les salaires des joueurs de la MLB? Il faut dépenser des 10M$ pour des no-names au Quebec. Faudrait payer Crosby 600 M$ si les salaires représentait l'importance du joueur.

[vivreenrégion]

Aucune chance de voir les Expos marcher à Montréal. 30,000 + 80 fois par année..? S'il y avait 1-2 par semaine ok mais même là.

 

Les gens rêvent en couleur. L'argent est juste pas là. Avez-vous vu les salaires des joueurs de la MLB? Il faut dépenser des 10M$ pour des no-names au Quebec. Faudrait payer Crosby 600 M$ si les salaires représentait l'importance du joueur.

 

tu marques un point dans le sens où les québécois sont très regardeux de combien d'$ le ''monde'' fait. Si tu fais venir un team ici et qu'ils voient des salaires de 20M$, yen a plusieurs qui vont être scandalisés et la mentalité des années 50 va ressortir, surtout en cette période ''d'austérité''. Je suis d'accord que ce n'est pas demain la vieille qu'on va les revoir. à voir combien les salaires montent dans tous les sports, on a ici le même phénomène que le prix des maisons à Vancouver, ça monte à l'infini ?

[denpanosekai]

Link about possible site for new stadium where Children's is

 

http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2015/04/montreal-childrens-hospital-could-we.html

 

sent via Tapatalk

 

Can't happen anymore what with S sur le Square. The Evangel Pentecostal church is being fully renovated as we speak but I guess they could be bought out with big bucks.

[IluvMTL]

http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/04/the-baseball-stadium-montreal-never-built/389859/?utm_source=SFFB

 

The Baseball Stadium Montreal Never Built

A downtown site once held the promise of keeping the Expos in "la belle province."

 

MARK BYRNES @markbyrnes525 4:05 PM ET 4 Comments

Image Provencher_Roy

 

A rendering of Labatt Park, a facility Expos ownership hoped would keep the team in Montreal. (Provencher_Roy)

 

Nearly 100,000 people (96,545, to be exact) attended two exhibition Major League Baseball games in Montreal's Stade Olympique last weekend. That paid attendance figure in fact constitutes a slight increase over last year's successful first effort in bringing professional baseball back to Quebec.

 

With the Blue Jays serving as the home team for each installment, the series allows Toronto's baseball club to further cement itself as Canada's Team. For Montrealers, it's also a time to remember what it was like to have their own MLB team—one that might still be there had the downtown stadium the team's owners wanted been built.

 

This season marks 10 years since the Montreal Expos left town for Washington, D.C. Expos fans had been bracing themselves for years, but the final home game, on September 29, 2004, was nonetheless an ugly affair—some of the 31,395 fans threw golf balls and plastic bottles on field during the 9-1 loss to the Florida Marlins. Others, including stadium employees and former players, simply watched in tears.

 

In the aftermath of the 1994 strike, the Expos quickly descended from being one of the best teams in Major League Baseball to being a franchise that gave even the most loyal fans little reason to emotionally or financially invest. Over its final 10 seasons, the front office earned a reputation for being painfully stingy. They made unpopular trades. Eventually, the team struggled to get their own games on local radio or television while claiming some of the worst attendance figures in the Majors.

 

And yet despite all of that, the Expos might still be around today had the downtown ballpark they coveted in their final years ever come to fruition.

 

 

Then-Expos president Claude Brochu presents the team's downtown ballpark proposal in 1997 (video in French).

In the middle of the 1997 season, then-team president Claude Brochu unveiled his plans to move out of Olympic Stadium in the city's east end and into a new, nostalgia-soaked downtown ballpark. Without a new stadium, Brochu argued, baseball in Montreal would be doomed.

 

As Jonah Keri retells in Up, Up, and Away, his stellar look back at the history of the Expos, Olympic Stadium wasn't just the city's most problematic megastructure, it was also inconveniently located. "Fans who lived in the western suburbs lost interest in schlepping all the way to the stadium. People from other parts of the city didn’t want to cross bridges or tunnels," writes Keri. "The large business community downtown was geographically closer, but—with no fun restaurants, bars, or ancillary activities of any kind nearby—the Big O wasn’t appealing to them either."

 

 

When Montrealers want baseball badly enough, they'll fill up Olympic Stadium like they did last weekend. After years of poor management and on-field results, however, fans stopped turning out for the Expos' final few seasons. (Photo: Mark Byrnes)

The indoor, concrete stadium experience was an especially tough sell when the product on the field wasn't any good. With the exception of the 1996 and 2002 seasons, the Expos finished in 4th or 5th place every single year after the 1994 strike and ensuing player selloff.

 

A downtown stadium, Brochu estimated in 1997, would cost $250 million, plus $100 million more for a retractable roof. With a site donated by the federal government and naming rights acquired (it would have been known as "Labatt Park"), the rest of the funding would come from the provincial government and revenue from the sale of personal seat licenses.

 

 

A model of what Claude Brochu had in mind for the Expos and downtown Montreal as seen at his 1997 press conference. (YouTube/RDS)

Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, however, was never interested. Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Summer Games, had still not been fully paid for and wouldn't be until 2006. Designed by the French architect Roger Tallibert, Olympic Stadium had famously suffered from significant cost overruns, construction issues, and an endlessly frustrating retractable roof that never retracted. It is now permanently enclosed.

 

In the winter of 1997, the Expos traded away Pedro Martinez, one of the best pitchers in baseball history, in a one-sided deal with the Boston Red Sox. Attendance plummeted in 1998 (from 18,489 per game to 11,295) and never rebounded. More than ever, a new stadium was critical to the team's survival. Brochu's proposal remained on the table but, unable to strike a deal with Bouchard, he resigned from the Expos after the '98 season.

 

The man who bought Brochu's shares on the way to eventually owning 94 percent of the ball club picked up the torch and added a whole lot of kerosene. Jeffrey Loria, aware that the team needed a new stadium to ever be viable again, pushed for provincial funding and submitted a radically new stadium design concept.

 

 

(Provencher_Roy)

In an era when everyone wanted (and for the most part, now has) their own version of Baltimore's Camden Yards, the Montreal architecture firm Provencher_Roy, in consultation with the architect (and friend of Loria) Richard Meier, chose glass and metal over brick. It was a decidedly more modern concept, and a cheaper one, too. Eugenio Carelli, one of the architects who worked on the project, says they were able to bring the cost down from $250 million to $200 million. "We were certain it was going ahead," says Carelli.

 

But Bouchard still wouldn't bite, and eventually Loria gave up. He sold the Expos to Major League Baseball in 2002 and took ownership of the Florida Marlins instead, bringing Montreal's staff and office equipment with him. The Expos spent their final three seasons under league ownership. Funnily enough, if there's any stadium today that looks like what Provencher_Roy had in mind for Montreal, it's Nationals Park in D.C.

 

 

An aerial view of the site where Labatt Park was once proposed.

Today, Carelli laments that the site was once "perfect" for a stadium, but no longer. The boundaries of Notre Dame, de la Montagne, St. Jaques, and Peel streets now support housing and a technology school instead of Labatt Park. Construction cranes around nearby Windsor Station and the Bell Centre (where Montreal's storied NHL team plays) are adding to what would have been one of the best skyline views from any stadium in baseball.

 

Still, there are forces at work in Montreal who are hell bent on finding a way to bring baseball back. These days, Carelli's firm is looking around for potential locations for a new stadium with a group headed by a former Expo, Warren Cromartie. Carelli says that his firm originally hoped to unveil some new renderings coinciding with last week's games, but are now shooting for next year. Finding a perfect site isn't easy anymore.

 

"There are a number of possible sites downtown but they're not quite as feasible," Carelli told CityLab before listing off a handful locations and the complications that come with each one. "The most realistic are probably in Griffintown [just southwest of downtown] right now."

 

These past two years of exhibition games in Montreal have proven that baseball fans still live in Quebec. What remains is, well, everything else: finding an ownership group, building a new stadium, and, most likely, breaking the heart of some other city with the same problems that doomed the Expos.

 

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[peekay]

The naysayers on this forum and elsewhere are annoying. People forget or don't know that baseball now has an awesome revenue sharing deal even better than any other sport. Also, Bell (if it is Bell) will pay a lot of money for broadcast rights in Canada. Plus, there is a huge difference from the Montreal of 2004. People are much better off and the population increased significantly.

 

They will be back by 2030.