POSTCARD FROM MONTREAL: Boston Invaders Turn Heads

MONTREAL—By July 16, 2001, Red Sox Nation’s invasion of Montreal was already two days old. Hours before the evening’s Olympic Stadium showdown, a French-Canadian tour guide was surrounded by a rowdy mob donning the traditional red-B headwear of the city’s transient majority. Initially the Expos employee concludes his tour with the customary “I hope you all enjoy the game tonight,” but then sensing the opportunity for last-second tips from the privileged throwing around their foreign currency like play money, he awkwardly adds the phrase, “Go Red Sox!” He fails to receive even six silver quarters for his charade.

At least 20,000 Red Sox fans crossed the Canadian border to witness their team’s 8-5 victory over the Expos on July 15. Before the Sox came to town, Olympic Stadium was averaging just 8,172 fans per game. The Sunday afternoon contest drew 32,965, the Expos’ highest mark since opening day. When the first batter of the game, Red Sox second baseman Jose Offerman, steps to the plate, he receives a standing ovation from the crowd. A young wife cheering for the psuedo-home team turns to her husband and whispers, “This is embarrassing.”

The incentives driving the Bostonians to Expoland were obvious. Recently, the Red Sox have been producing record attendance numbers despite having the highest ticket prices in baseball. In contrast, Olympic Stadium’s attendance is reaching record lows, and its V.I.P. seats behind home plate cost CAN$36, slightly cheaper than the US$25 obstructed-view outfield grandstand seats at Fenway Park. The favorable $1.50 Canadian-for-U.S. exchange rate enhances the visitors’ ability to acquire their respective hedonistic pleasures—families expose their children to French-Canadian tourism and culture, young couples wine and dine on the St. Lawrence waterfront and young males sample the infamous wares of St. Catherine’s Street.

For many Red Sox fans, humiliating the Expos in their own home park was the ultimate ego-building experience. But that rush of self-esteem in Bostonian veins was sucked straight out of the Montreal faithful, victims of a seemingly doomed franchise. In Monday’s game, a grandmother escorted her nine-year old grandson to the V.I.P. section. The child, wide-eyed with an Expos cap and baseball glove, looked bewildered as he was surrounded by six-foot tall Red Sox fans. The grandmother frowned every time they stood up to cheer and did not utter a word to them all evening. More poignantly, an aging Expos supporter became infuriated as a Red Sox fan built like a linebacker stood up in the bottom of the ninth, blocking his view. He tried to force him down by assaulting him with food wrappers, strategically equivalent to attacking a tank with a paper airplane. The Sox fan was annoyed enough to turn around and yell, “What’s wrong with you? Sitting down in the bottom of the ninth?” Then he adds the clincher, “No wonder you guys are in last place!”

Ironically, the high exchange rate and the condescending attitude that brought Red Sox fans so much pleasure that day may, in the long run, ensure that St. Catherine’s Street will never again erupt with chants of “Yankees suck!” at three in the morning. The same exchange rate that brought Red Sox fans cheap liquor is pressuring one unprofitable Canadian sports franchise after another to scurry across the border. And the misperception that the Expos’ fan base is inadequate, believed by all levels of the corporate hierarchy, will prevent any real initiative to save the team.

Baseball franchises have risen from the dead before. The Braves and Indians eliminated league-low attendance levels in the ’80s thanks to new stadiums and television revenue streams in the ’90s. The concrete monolith known as Olympic Stadium is among the dying breed of domed arenas boasting a stuffy indoor atmosphere, an artificial surface and a retractable roof that could never retract. But when team owner Jeff Loria, a New York city art dealer, decided against renewing his lease on the land earmarked for the new Labatt Stadium and failed to negotiate any English-language television deal, almost no one outside of Montreal blinked.

Because sports offer such a controlled environment where winners and losers are declared every day, they often provide clear insights into humanity. All of the insights involving the Expos’ position are depressing. French-Canadian natives are more than happy to sell out their team for a short-term profit. Boston natives take great glee in exploiting the Expos’ current situation while caring nothing about their future. Major League Baseball has shown no outrage at the possibility that Quebec, Eastern Ontario and Northern New England could be left without a local team, leaving the sport with fewer fans in the long run. What’s best for New York isn’t always what’s best for baseball.

Only one team since 1904 has ranked as the best in baseball during a year in which the World Series was cancelled—the ’94 Expos. Since then, the Expos have been through fire sale after fire sale, while the Yankees have won all but two World Series. When the Canadian Press tabulated the top 50 sports teams of the century, the ’94 Expos ranked just 41st, placing behind several curling teams. If the Expos do ultimately join baseball’s historical wasteland of anonymity, then the strike-shortened 1994 season may be the appropriate symbol of the team’s history: an endeavor that was never allowed to grow to its full potential, done in by avarice and myopic horizons.

David R. De Remer ’03, an applied mathematics/economics concentrator in Eliot House, is associate sports editor of The Crimson. He is still infuriated that the new Harvard Athletic Director was named on the one weekday that he happened to be away from Allston.