Pitcher Pedro Martínez played for the Montreal Expos from 1994 to 1997.Ludovic Rolland-Marcotte/Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
It’s the most harrowing true-crime documentary of the year – if you grew up in Quebec and are a fan of baseball.
Who Killed the Montreal Expos? certainly was an emotional wallop of a watch for me as someone who fits that description.
There’s plenty of crying in baseball in the town where I come from, starting from the 1994 Major League Baseball strike, anyway.
Watching the Expos go from first place that year to last place the next as a teenage Montrealer was like getting drilled in one kneecap after the other by errant fastballs.
Young and naive, I hadn’t realized that the Expos were about money before that; feeling betrayed, I gave up any interest in professional sports for the next decade.
Jean-François Poisson’s Netflix documentary did bring me some smiles with its interviews of 1994 Expos would-be World Series heroes such as pitcher Pedro Martinez and homegrown outfielder Larry Walker.
Every clip of beloved manager Felipe Alou warmed the cockles of my heart.
I hadn’t realized that baseball went back as far as it does in la belle province, long before Montreal landed the first MLB team outside the United States in 1969.
I knew about Jackie Robinson’s time with the Montreal Royals, but not that between 1900 and 1940, the so-called “great American pastime” – not hockey – was the most popular sport in Quebec.
The Expos, like any sports franchise, were about more than just the game, of course. For me, they’re about those afternoons listening to the radio with my grandfather and the Youppi! figurines my mom would give me after trips to the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
So, their murder is personal. The list of suspects that Poisson gives for offing the Expos is long – and, ultimately, he lands on a kind of Murder on the Orient Express answer. A lot of people had a hand in it.
Money is the underlying problem. The Expos were never particularly profitable – but the economics of the club really got tenuous as costs rose sharply in the 1980s as the Canadian dollar sank.
When owner Charles Bronfman (pin his suspect photo to the bulletin board) decided to sell the team, he was unable to find a local businessperson willing to buy it.
Claude Brochu (Suspect 2) then cobbled together an unusual ownership group – including individuals, a bank, a union and the City of Montreal – who agreed to be silent partners and let Brochu, as the MLB wanted, make all the decisions.
For a while, anyway, the Expos’ collective ownership zipped their lips.
The Expos, like any sports franchise, were about more than just the game for many fans in Montreal.La Presse/Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
But then the glorious 1994 season went from being a long-awaited financial return on investment to a total disaster when the postseason was cancelled, leaving a $20-million hole in the yearly accounts.
Brochu held a fire sale of many of its stars the next year – and the knives of the owners soon came out like in Julius Caesar.
I remember the following decade as a slow-motion death – but Poisson’s documentary, cruelly, dredges up the attempts to reinvigorate the franchise by moving the team from the crumbling Olympic Stadium to a new ballpark downtown.
First Brochu failed to get one built, then Jeffrey Loria (Suspect 3), an American who inveigled his way into becoming the managing partner, failed again, maybe on purpose.
If you believe a new ballpark was the answer, Lucien Bouchard, premier of Quebec in the late 1990s who emphatically refused to fund pro sports over hospitals, is the butler who did it and the ultimate reason the team was sold and moved to Washington in 2004.
The documentary otherwise avoids any other mention of politics or politicians.
But the flight of capital and head offices from Montreal in reaction to rising Quebec nationalism through the 1970s to the 1990s – including two referendums – is certainly part of the backstory of an economic situation Poisson identifies as the root cause of the Expos skipping town.
His documentary focuses on Montreal in the mid-nineties but doesn’t even flick at the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty.
Former Expo Vladimir Guerrero, father of the Blue Jays star, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018.Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix
Among the unwritten books in my head is a counterfactual novel where the Expos actually win the World Series in 1994 – and the optimistic vibes in town tip just enough voters over the next year so the results are 50.58 per cent Yes and 49.42 per cent No instead of vice versa.
I departed Montreal around the same time the Expos did and eventually rediscovered my love of baseball in Toronto.
First I started rooting for the Boston Red Sox after Martinez – true story – found my flip phone in a cab. I went to get it from him at the SkyDome.
But I only got into the Blue Jays a decade later when my now-wife and José Bautista’s bat flip won me over.
So, why aggravate an old sports injury and watch Who Killed the Montreal Expos? when my new team is giving me an entertaining postseason run?
Well, Who Killed The Montreal Expos? ends with a little flicker of hope that an MLB team might come back to city that is, in all other respects, way better off now than it was two or three decades ago.
I teared up listening to Martinez talk about this possibility: “I believe it. I’m dreaming about it. Because I’ll be one of the first fans stepping into the stadium to watch the game.”
All those who are from or have spent significant time in Montreal dream of a return.
Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is on Netflix on Tuesday.