LOVERRO: Montreal is a great city, but baseball doesn’t work there

OPINION:

There’s a Canadian sentimental streak running through this World Series that goes beyond the presence of the American League champion Toronto Blue Jays.

It’s about the absence of another team — the Montreal Expos.

The series has spawned stories about the departure of the Expos, who left Montreal after the 2004 season to relocate to the District to become the Nationals.

It’s been fueled by a documentary on Netflix released this month called “Who Killed the Montreal Expos?”

“As good as we are in hockey, Montreal is a baseball city,” Hall of Famer and former Expo Pedro Martinez said in the documentary, directed by Jean-Francois Poisson.

Montreal had its moments, bringing in more than 2 million fans four times, with highs of 2.3 million in 1982 and 1983, good for fourth in baseball. And there remains fond and bitter memories of the talented 1994 team with stars such as Martinez, Larry Walker and Moises Alou that averaged 22,400 fans and were in first place in the National League East when the baseball strike began in August.

But Montreal was a baseball city as long as the Expos’ financial benefactor allowed it to be a baseball city. When liquor magnate Charles Bronfman bowed out in 1989, that, for all intents and purposes, was the death of the Montreal Expos.

Everything else was just a painful wound.

In 1968, the Expos were nearly dead on arrival, with their funding collapsing before they were to take the field in 1969 as one of four expansion teams.

“When in 1968 the newly birthed Expos franchise was on life support and about to die in the cradle, Charles Bronfman was the man the city turned to,” Danny Gallagher and Bill Young wrote in the book “Ecstasy to Agony — the 1994 Montreal Expos.”

“Major League Baseball’s first international experiment is going to flop, and Montreal’s National League expansion franchise will be forfeited,” the Chicago Tribune reported.

One of the initial investors was Robert Irsay — yes, that Robert Irsay who later acquired the Baltimore Colts after buying the Los Angeles Rams and, in a bizarre deal, swapping NFL franchises with Colts owner Carroll Rosenblum and in 1984, moved the Colts in the dead of night to Indianapolis. He appeared to try to squeeze Bronfman out of Montreal’s group, announcing publicly that Bronfman had dropped out, and helped to nearly torpedo the deal.

Bronfman would put up the money to save the Expos before a game was ever played, acquiring 45% of ownership and becoming principal owner and chairman of the board. But things were still so shaky in the early days of the Expos that they had to borrow $2 million from a concession company that allegedly had ties to organized crime, according to congressional testimony.

Bronfman committed his support out of civic pride and carried the franchise financially. But in 1989, the costs of losing money year after year and the changing economics of the game drove Bronfman to put the team up for sale.

Two years later, Claude Brochu, who came on as team president in 1986, bought the Expos with a group of investors, but the financial commitment always hung by a thread after Bronfman’s exit — like it did before Bronfman saved the franchise from nearly folding before it ever got started.

The team hung on until 2002, when Major League Baseball, in a remarkable three-way franchise swap, bought the team from then-owner Jeffrey Loria, who in turn purchased the Florida Marlins from John Henry, who then became part of the group that bought the Boston Red Sox. At the end of the 2004 season, the MLB moved the Expos to Washington.

I made numerous trips to Montreal in those final years of the Expos. It is a wonderful city, among the best in North America. Baseball writers lamented the day Montreal no longer became a road trip for them.

I sympathize with the pain that Expos fans felt when the team moved to the District. I grew up a few blocks from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn and lived in a National League house. There may have been no greater tragic move than the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Nearly 70 years later, the Brooklyn Dodgers remain a compelling story with a devoted fan base.

Washington fans should certainly sympathize with Montreal fans, after two versions of the Senators left town in a span of 11 years.

Baseball eventually returned to Washington after 34 years. It is not coming back to Montreal, despite MLB’s cruel carrot of hope they are holding out that the city is a candidate for expansion.

There is a simple answer to “Who Killed the Montreal Expos,” despite the theme that runs through the documentary that it’s a complicated answer with many reasons: Brochu, the baseball strike, the takeover by Loria, the very existence of his executive vice president, David Samson, a lousy Olympic Stadium to call home, no support from local government to build a new one, and a business community with neither the ability nor interest to step forward.

As painful as it may be to hear, like Samson said in the documentary, “Baseball in Montreal doesn’t work.”

• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.