Baseball: the practicalities
As the Radio-Canada writer here observes, enthusiasm here for baseball peaks with the Blue Jays exhibition games played here at the stadium in springtime; it’s a series of brief interviews with people concerned about the potential profitability of returning a professional team to this city.
Fact is, baseball is declining in popularity all over. Putting up an expensive stadium here would be a hobby for a few billionaires, with the public purse inveigled into footing the bill. A stadium that would stand empty most of the time. Please let us not be idiots about this.
Kevin 10:36 on 2019-03-23 Permalink
The contract Mike Trout just signed is a nail in the coffin of this silly exercise. $426 million over 10 years.
The best paid hockey players get a quarter of that.
There will be lots of baseball news over the next week, but I want to hear these people explain how baseball in Montreal will be able to afford these salaries
Uatu 10:53 on 2019-03-23 Permalink
It would be good to see how many young people are interested since they’re the future fanbase to keep a franchise viable. Right now the only ones who are enthusiastic are nostalgic baby boomers and rich speculators.
Faiz Imam 12:03 on 2019-03-23 Permalink
While I’m super against the expos coming back, I have to push back a little bit on this hate.
I’ve gone to my share of blue Jay’s games in Toronto, and I know the league data pretty well. The Jays games are very full and lean extremely young and very multicultural.
In a city where sports tickets are unaffordable, baseball is realistically cheap.
This is an older article, but it reflects what I’ve seen:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/baseball/a-new-generation-of-baseball-fans-in-toronto-are-young-hip-and-cool/article13329854/
While baseball doesn’t belong in Montreal, the sport is in a period of transition and I’d say it’ll come out of it just fine.
Kate 15:15 on 2019-03-23 Permalink
“Hate” is a harsh word. I simply think it’s a bad idea.
Chris 19:22 on 2019-03-23 Permalink
Baseball is too slow and boring for today’s attention span.
GC 09:52 on 2019-03-24 Permalink
I’m actually a fan of baseball, but I still want us to be realistic about the viability of another Montreal team. We tried it once and it failed. What reason is there to think it will be more successful a second time?
dhomas 15:03 on 2019-03-24 Permalink
I am fully against this project. I don’t think a single red cent of public money should be spent on it. However, the whole “we tried it before and it didn’t work” narrative is a poor argument against it. Nothing would ever improve if we stopped trying after every failure. Failure leads us to get better by figuring out what doesn’t work. Unfortunately in this case, I’m worried that the folks who want to bring a new MLB team to Montreal have learned that they need more government incentives to make this second go-round work.
GC 20:22 on 2019-03-24 Permalink
I agree with you to a point, dhomas, but we try something different the second time or there’s no point. What’s going to be done differently this time?
Josh 16:28 on 2019-03-25 Permalink
Kevin – the thing is the TV money. The TV contracts are worth a lot more now than they were in the Expos’ day, across the board. Small cities like San Diego and Tampa, where they don’t sell out, are able to sign big stars to large contracts because of their regional TV deals. Also: Revenue sharing exists in a way now that it didn’t when the Expos left (the case of the Expos was in fact part of the impetus to change that structure).
This information is all out there for anyone who wants to actually do some research!