Who Killed the Montreal Expos?: Turns Out It Was A Team Effort
Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Now is October, when we all can act like baseball fans. On Monday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Seattle Mariners, sending a Canadian team to the World Series for the first time in 32 years. Hurrah!
On Tuesday, timed to baseball’s climactic month, Netflix has released Jean-Francois Poisson’s snappily paced, time-jumping documentary, Who Killed the Montreal Expos? It’s an account of how, 21 years ago, Major League Baseball cancelled the Montreal Expos, known to their adoring Montreal fans as “Nos Amours” (Our loves), and relocated the franchise to Washington, DC. Booooo!
Poisson’s film, which has been well-covered by press south of the border, is both a Canadian story and a broader exploration of the dysfunctional relationship between hometown fan identity and the puppet-master owners who run the sport. Metaphorically, it’s the story of a marriage ending in painful divorce and a losing custody battle. (No other MLB team would move until the 2025 season, when the Oakland Athletics moved to Sacramento in advance of their planned transfer to Las Vegas.).
Who Killed The Montreal Expos? reminds us of how emotional the relationships between sports fans and their home teams can be, as we watch middle-aged and senior men grow teary on camera at the memories of their loss of that cherished connection.
For nostalgia buffs, the film offers an all-star line-up the old heroes, including the beloved, now 90-year-old former manager, Felipe Alou Hall of Fame pitcher, Dennis Martínez, Canadian star, Larry Walker, and fielder Vladimir Guerrero Sr., whose son just won the Most Valuable Player prize as he led the Blue Jays to the American League Championship.
The heroes are supported by a chorus of sports journalists, mostly speaking French, who watched the Expos rise and fall in the salad days of their own careers.
But if Who Killed the Montreal Expos? were an actual murder mystery, it would be one of those Murder on The Orient Express type plots where everyone is somewhat guilty. The suspects list includes the sympathetic Claude Brochu, who headed up a consortium of Canadian owners in the ‘90s, but could never build the team a decent ballpark to replace the crumbling Olympic Stadium.
When there was an ownership change in the late ‘90s, there was a culture clash between the collectivist Canadian style and the brash individualism of the American owners, wealthy art dealer Jeffrey Loria and his cocky stepson, David Samson. They took over the team promising a new stadium and a new lease on life, but skipped town three years later.
Samson, who gets a lot of self-serving screen time, contends the Expos could not have been saved: “The fact of the matter is baseball in Montreal doesn’t work.”
In fairness to his perspective, the franchise was not in good health before Samson and Lore executed its coup de grace. In 1994, the Expos had the best record in baseball. But the player’s strike killed the World Series that year, and in the following year, the Expos had a fire sale of much of their talent.
Attendance dropped. The franchise was losing money every year, earning revenues in Canadian dollars and paying players in American funds in one of the smallest media markets in Major League Baseball.
There were also cultural differences between the Americans and Canadians on the respective roles of the private and public financing of pro sports: Premier Lucien Bouchard couldn’t see the wisdom of using tax-payer money to support millionaire American baseball players when the province was closing hospitals.
Though Who Killed The Expos? isn’t much of a mystery, it’s a good baseball story in the cry-in-your-beer tradition, of what has often been described as a “game of failure.”
As Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti, a uniquely qualified professor of English Renaissance literature and former commissioner of Major League Baseball, once wrote, the mythical ritual of baseball season, which follows the passage from the budding spring to the chill of autumn, “is designed to break your heart.”
When there’s no next spring to revive hope, that heartbreak doesn’t heal so easily.
Who Killed The Montreal Expos? Directed by Jean-Francoise Poisson, With Felipe Alou, Pedro Martinez, Larry Walker, Victor Guerrero Sr., Claude Brochu and David Samson. Available now on Netflix.