Elias Makos, who used to work in the Expos' marketing department before the franchise moved in 2004, moderated a panel at the recent sports journalism workshop at Concordia University looking at Montreal's major-league baseball team.
And, fortunately for us, his work teaching Concordia students to handle video has come in handy here, and the entire hour-long discussion is available on YouTube:
It has more to do with the Expos and sports business than journalism, but it's still a fascinating look at what went wrong with this franchise from people who know.
The panel includes:
Elliott Price, Team 990 host and former Expos broadcaster
Jack Todd, of course, also has some thoughts on the matter, which he shared in a column. His talk at the conference is recorded audio-only here, though there's a lot of noise.
39 years ago this week, major league baseball came to Canada for the first time with the creation of the Montreal Expos. For those unfamiliar with the story, they began in 1969, with the greatness of Expo 67 still in our minds, and played at Jarry Park until they moved to the Olympic Stadium, where they played until the franchise moved to Washington in 2004.
Thanks to the magic of YouTube, we can look back on the great moments of this glorious team, including some peeks at individual seasons (1977, their first at the Olympic Stadium; 1981, including the tragedy of Blue Monday, when they failed to make the World Series by a single run in a single game; 1982, including the first-ever major-league all-star game outside the U.S.) or fun little tidbits like a really-really young Céline Dion singing the national anthem or Fernand Lapierre performing the Expos theme song.
But my favourite is this goofy 1988 CFCF piece with Randy Tieman and Rob Faulds doing an Expos parody of Dragnet, "investigating" stolen bases.
If only rampant base theft was still a problem here...
