Baseball pit stop at Big O revives hopesBaseball is back. For two scrumptious days this weekend, we will bask in the smell of popcorn, the crack of the bat, the strains of Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
The cavernous Big O will seem as intimate as your living room. Old friends will wave and hug and talk about how wonderful it feels to have the game back in town. When the Toronto Blue Jays and the Cincinnati Reds take the field Friday and Saturday, we’ll be gearing up for the season as we did when Felipe was in the dugout, Pedro was on the mound and Vlad was patrolling right field.
Of course, it’s all an illusion. Major League Baseball is here for a pit stop, not a season. The Blue Jays are Toronto’s team, not ours. And as Ted Bird said this week: no matter how many people stream into Olympic Stadium for this weekend, it won’t matter unless one of them is a billionaire with a hankering for a baseball team to call his own.
Still, with more than 80,000 tickets sold and counting, it’s conceivable that the organizers will top the 96,350 in total attendance for last year’s exhibitions between the Blue Jays and the New York Mets, in yet another remarkable show of support for Major League Baseball. It’s possible that the Jays will be playing in front of their biggest “home” crowds of the entire season here and a certainty that the Montreal crowds will be the noisiest.
Given that ticket prices range from $37.76 to $272.93 on StubHub for meaningless exhibition games, this represents an extraordinary show of support, not for the Blue Jays but for a reborn Montreal baseball franchise: the return of Nos Amours.
Wonderful, right? Well, yes. But the dispiriting part is that in real terms, we’re exactly where we were a year ago. Enormous public good will? Check. Support from Hizzoner the Mayor and other politicians? Check. Major-league teams (Tampa Bay, Oakland) in need of a new home? Check. A hundred thousand people willing to put their hard-earned cash on the line to watch the Blue Jays play exhibition games? Check.
Billionaire and ballpark? No checks.
There were rumblings two months ago that a major baseball announcement was expected in March — but March is no longer with us and there has been no announcement, period. Perhaps those behind the Bring Back the Expos movement are saving a blockbuster for this weekend but if that’s the case, there have been no leaks — which is unusual with an operation like this.
And as newly minted Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred made spectacularly clear this week: no ballpark, no team.
Manfred was only stating the obvious. There was never a serious question of repatriating a baseball franchise in Montreal without a new ballpark. There are a few diehards who believe that baseball could still work in that grotesque white elephant at Pierre de Coubertin and Pie-IX.
Either they’ve never seen the game in a real ballpark or they’ve been off their meds way too long. The Big O is the wrong stadium, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It could serve as a temporary home for two or at most three seasons until a new ballpark can be built.
Longer than that and the insidious rot that killed the Expos the first time around would begin to set in. It’s too far, too cavernous, too gloomy, too dark on summer days when Montrealers cooped up through the interminable winter months are looking to drink in fresh air and sunshine.
Baseball in Montreal didn’t die. It was murdered, through a three-pronged combination of an unworkable ballpark, venal and incompetent ownership and the indifference and occasional outright hostility on the part of Major League Baseball itself, in the person of former commissioner Bud Selig Jr.
As Felipe Alou often pointed out, Montreal had Major League Baseball for 35 years without building a ballpark. The Big O was built for the IOC’s quadrennial debt extravaganza, a.k.a. the Olympic Games. That it might sorta, kinda serve as a ballpark was more or less an afterthought in Jean Drapeau’s megalomania.
The stadium, the strikes, the fire sales, the near misses and the bumbling Claude Brochu squandered all the public goodwill the Expos once enjoyed. Jeffrey Loria and David Samson are justly reviled as the carpetbagging hustlers who closed the shop for their own profit but really, they just performed euthanasia on a critically ill patient after Brochu did the real damage.
Ten years ago, it looked as though baseball in Montreal was dead forever. The recent resurgence is already remarkable, a stunning turnaround even for this notoriously unpredictable city. The trick now is to find an owner and to get a plan in place for a new ballpark, assuming first that a suitable location can be found. An adequate baseball stadium here is an expensive proposition in part because it would require some form of retractable roof. Indoor baseball (see Olympic Stadium, the) will not work in this city.
The ballpark problem could be solved if the province and the OIB were to come to their senses and stop pouring tax dollars into that money pit on Pierre de Coubertin. Le Devoir has reported that of the $88 billion set aside for infrastructure renewal in the budget last week, $220 million was for repairs to the Olympic Stadium – not counting at least $250 million for a new roof.
Divert the repair expenses and the cost of a new roof to a new ballpark and – voilà – new ballpark. Of course, the OIB will trot out inflated figures to say that it would cost more to tear down the Olympic Stadium than it cost be build the thing in the first place.
Enough. Tear it down. Build a ballpark. Find an owner.
And let’s play ball.
montrealgazette.com/sports/baseball-pit-stop-at-big-o-revives-hopes
