Hypothetical:

The '94 strike is resolved.
The Expos win the Series.
Do they still sell the team a decade later?

chopjob wrote:This got me to thinking about Youppi! vs. Ribbie, but I found that it, among many others, had already been done:

http://homerderby.com/archives/1105

"After the Expos left Montreal in 2005 to become the Washington Nationals, Youppi! couldn’t get a visa to work in the States. Fortunately he found work in Canada as the new mascot of Les Habs, the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League."

Huh, I didn't know this. I wonder if that's the first time a mascot switched sports.

The Expos actually outdrew the Yankkes at one point in time. That sentence might look like it was written in some weird moonman language, but it's true.

It's weird -- the 1994 strike is generally thought to have been the main reason for the demise of professional baseball in Montreal. However, the attendance bubble didn't burst in Montreal until 1998-1999, which was the time of the McGwire/Sosa-fueled baseball "renaissance". Compare the Expos post-1994 attendance records to those of, say, the White Sox, where the pre- and post-strike attendance numbers are pretty distinct.

I'm confused!

The Expos could draw when they played well, but nobody paid much to get in and the weirdness of the stadium meant that even with a solid 25,000-person crowd it looked deserted. The giant upper deck was nearly always empty, and it was a big, boomy cavernous space.

The franchise not being popular enough to be viable makes sense when you consider an owner's view of popularity as synonymous with willingness to pay high ticket prices. Wages are much lower here, particularly in the (traditionally, anyway) working-class francophone end of town; to get the souvenir- and food-buying, splurge-minded family man demographic they would have had to be situated closer to the wealthier, more anglophone west end of the island. The stadium was well sited for mass attendance but not for maximum gate revenues.

Olympic Stadium incurred lots of capital costs through its bad design and chronic roof problems, leaving the provincial bureaucracy that ran (and still runs) it little capacity or appetite to sink even more money into facilities that would increase the revenue stream for the team's owners. The local telecoms conglomerates didn't see much potential for the team to become the centerpiece of an expensive cable package, so that angle was out.

The other component of the mendacious Selig-era revenue model -- a half-billion-dollar public facility controlled by the team's owners -- was simply not an option in the political climate here, as people were sensible enough to find the idea of spending 30 years paying for a "state-of-the-art" sports facility out of the public purse to be obscene. We've already done that, and with hospitals being shut down all over the place in the 90's the prospect of doing it again held little appeal. No level of government -- not even the giant provincial pension fund, which has a history of losing large sums on "prestige" projects -- was dumb or intimidated enough to pony up, and MLB told the world that the political success of their bully tactics was the same thing as "love for the team". Nobody wanted to be associated with wealthy assholes playing such ridiculous Mametesque mind games in such a transparent attempt to rip off as many people as they possibly could.

Bradley R. Weissenberger wrote:However, the attendance bubble didn't burst in Montreal until 1998-1999, which was the time of the McGwire/Sosa-fueled baseball "renaissance".

I'm confused!

I think about a third of fans in any market would respond to a Pedro Martinez - Carl Pavano/ Tony Armas Jr. trade with, "Fuck this shit."