Nice article. The Expos have a couple of fans in London, England, so you can tell the Montrealers about them, too. We might even get out to see some games this year, and tell them ourselves.

Rooting for laundry!

I see Primer has taken the quality over quantity route. Nice job, Stephen.

Great read Stephen,

Our family really enjoys the culture, the French language, the best food in the world, and our awesome Canadian friends who live in Saint-Georges.

I second the food in Montreal, amazing to say the least, and Canada in general. I used to have a camp on Rangley, and I have been fishing on Moosehead Lake (among others) many times. Wonderful area of the world. The way life should be. Speaking of which, the Sea Dogs up in Portland get quite a bit of press, I wonder if the Expos would be better off in Maine??? I always thought the New England market was strong enough for more than one team.

I went to an Expos game myself last year, along with 33,235 others. Might have been their best crowd of the year. This is just a hunch, but I suspect the crowd was there more for the dollar hot dogs than they were to see me, or possibly the baseball. Great game too, ended with a walk-of HR in the bottom of the ninth.

Of course, the problem with Montreal--as its sadly been for years--is that they only drew a combined 26,534 for the other two games of the series

Nice article. Interesting that virtually no local sports journalist has put the history of the fans' relationship with the Expos so well...
At the end of the strike-shortened 1994 season, the Expos owners promised a run at the championship in '95... at the same time that they let Walker walk, traded Wetteland for a bag of cash, Ken Hill for Bryan Eversgerd and Grissom for Tony Tarasco. Now that's a commitment to win! Expos fans have been dealing with that kind of 'vision' for 14 years. And from 1992 local reporters have nagged and threatened fans, saying the team would go if we didn't show. That may have been true (well, partly true) but it's hardly a motivating tactic. Reporters would have done better to do some investigating into Loria's background, say, to see what his likely motives might be... or to look a little more closely at what the new downtown ballpark proposal was really about. Instead, they tended to blindly jump on those (and any) developments as the saviours of the team. But there was a lot more going to decide the fate of the Expos (that's another story). Anyway, the survival of a baseball team is only partly based on fan attendance: notice that all the new ballparks of the past 15 years have a lower ratio of "cheap" seats to luxury loges than they used to? And if the number of fans meant everything I'm not sure there'd be a rejuvenated Tigers team to watch in 2004, nevermind the Devil Rays!

eremela
montreal

This is an open invitation to all who are able to visit the Big Owe. Come sit in the "yellows" with us behind home plate and make some noise. We're here every Thursday and Friday.