For better or worse, history tends to remember things differently than they were, though it’s tough to recall much good about the final years of the Montreal Expos.
Canada’s other Major League Baseball team had its attendance woes late in its life, which everyone knows (even after a 2,000-odd fan increase, for instance, the Expos still drew just 10,031 per game in 2002). But what’s lost in sappy odes to the Montreal team of years past was that, during its final two seasons, support for the Expos was so lousy it actually had to play more than a quarter of its games in Puerto Rico just to stay afloat.
Mercifully, the Expos were taken from Montreal after the 2004 season, when they moved to Washington, D.C., and became known as the Nationals, the team that now has the best record in baseball.
It was the end of the sport in Montreal, but it shouldn’t be, according to a new report from the Conference Board of Canada.