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.
We can go on and on about how sad it is that baseball is no longer here and how much we want to bring them back, but this is the anniversary of its birth, not its death.
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…
It was excellent times. Never, ever, let anyone tell you that losing a professional baseball team is no big deal. There are all these idiots walking around with bizarre dreams of making Montreal a world class city. The trouble with these fools is that they don’t realize that that is exactly what we once were.
I could wax nostalgic about the ‘spos for thousands of words.
But what makes it all so galling is the attendance from games like this recent Monday nighter at the Washington Nationals’ brand-spanking-new stadium: 20,487
20,487
THIS is what they moved the Expos for? So that they could build a $600-million-plus stadium in Washington and draw 20,487 people to the second game there?
Curses: may their stadium remain empty, may their team never win so much as a division title and may the Washington Nationals become the Mexico City Diamond Dogs 20 years down the road.
Most of these wonderful clips have been removed at the request/threats of the pricks at MLB.