What Would It Take For Major League Baseball To Return To Montreal?

By Koby Mitchell

The team sitting atop the American League East is riding a wave of momentum. As the Toronto Blue Jays thrive, another Canadian city 300 miles away is dreaming of its own baseball revival.

Baseball isn’t just a game in Montreal, it’s a cultural legacy. For years, fans have held on to hope for the return of Major League Baseball.

“Montreal is a sports town and we love it,” said Stephen Bronfman, a Montreal businessman and philanthropist. “We have room in the summertime for another professional team, and we always grew up with that.

“So we’re trying our best to see what we can do to bring baseball back to where it belongs.”

The city is ready for the next chapter in its rich history, but what stands at the crossroads of turning a dream into a reality? Although the timeline for expansion remains unclear, commissioner Rob Manfred has said he hopes to have a plan in place for the league to expand to 32 before he retires in 2029.

The history

Canada has a rich history with MLB. Twenty-two current players in the league were born in Canada, including first baseman Josh Naylor, whom the Arizona Diamondbacks recently traded to the Seattle Mariners. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo was a first base coach for the Blue Jays from 2011-12.

Quebec’s professional baseball legacy is woven into its cultural fabric, where the game’s history has flourished for generations. In 1897, the Montreal Royals began their tenure in the city. By 1928, Montreal became one of the largest minor league baseball cities in North America.

The Royals became an affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939. Legendary players such as Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella came up through the minor league system in Montreal.

The Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1958 and moved to Los Angeles where they had other minor league affiliates. This left the Royals expendable and the team eventually folded by 1960.

In 1969, Montreal was awarded an expansion team by MLB. The team played at Jarry Park for eight seasons.

Les Expos de Montréal, better known as the Montreal Expos, were owned by Bronfman’s father, Canadian businessman Charles Bronfman who owned the team for 22 years before selling it in 1991.

After the departure of Charles Bronfman, the team was plagued with poor ownership decisions that saw a rapid decline in attendance. The city was also subject to a deteriorating stadium. In 2004, the organization announced that it was relocating to Washington, D.C.

Olympic Stadium attendance numbers in the Expos’ final few years were meager. The team had always struggled with attendance. At the peak in the 1980s, Montreal’s attendance averaged just shy of 30,000 fans each night. In its final decade in Montreal, the team never eclipsed an average over 20,000 fans per game.

With an average attendance just over 9,000 fans per game in the Expos’ final season, Olympic Stadium became more and more desolate,

“It was a souvenir ball night, not because they handed them out as you went in,” sports economist Victor Matheson said. “ It’s just that there were so few people there. Pretty much everyone got a foul ball at some point in the game.”

Matheson specializes in the economic impact that sports have on cities that support major events, such as the Olympics, World Cup and the Super Bowl. He analyzes stadium financing, public subsidies for teams and broader economic implications of professional sports.

The Expos moved into Olympic Stadium, which was built for the 1976 Summer Olympics, when the 1977 season began. The way-too-big stadium had a capacity of 66,000 spectators.

“That stadium was never a good stadium.” Matheson said.

Matheson highlighted various issues of the stadium, ranging from the infamous retractable roof, bad lighting, poor luxury box facilities and its lack of concession stands.

“I’ve been to a huge number of Major League Baseball stadiums and stadiums for other sports,” Matheson said. “And almost certainly it is the worst Major League stadium.”

Designed by French architect Roger Taillibert, the stadium was built around a retractable roof. It was opened and closed by cables suspended from a 540-foot inclined tower.

Maheson said a key hurdle to bringing baseball back to Montreal is the lack of a viable stadium.

“They clearly need a new stadium.” Matheson said. “They would need some sort of Major League equivalent stadium. It would be about a billion dollar project at the minimum.”

Stephen Bronfman echoed this sentiment.

“Olympic Stadium was not built for baseball. It’s an antiquated dome of cement,” Bronfman said.

Time for a return

Bronfman has spent years trying to bring a team back to Montreal.

“It’s a legacy thing from the family’s point of view,” Stephen said. “It’s not really legacy from my point of view, but I had such a great childhood growing up.”

Bronfman believes that the city can strike a balance between having hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer but Montreal would need a new ballpark.

In 2019, Bronfman proposed building a new stadium in the Peel Basin region of Montreal that would seat 32,000 spectators. The plan included constructing a modern and sustainable facility. It was designed to integrate the surrounding community while minimizing environmental impact.

“We designed a new ballpark for Montreal and it was ready to roll,” Montreal businessman William Jegher said.

With a lack of public funding, the estimated $1 billion project was ultimately dismissed by the Quebec government.

Jegher has continued to partner with Bronfman on various projects involving bringing baseball back to Montreal.

Although a new stadium has yet to come to fruition, it’s still something that the city desperately needs to make hosting a major league team feasible.

“I would want to see something that is intimate,” Jegher said. “It’s been controversial because a lot of people won’t agree with me, but it’s open air. I think open air, despite the climate in Montreal, is the way that baseball was meant to be played.”

Not everybody condemned Olympic Stadium. To some, the stadium was quite whimsical at times. The turmoil surrounding the team didn’t halt the passion of the Expos faithful.

“When that place was rocking, we were screaming and banging on our yellow seats and everyone was making noise,” former Expos fan Jason Davidson said. “It was just like a crescendo around the ballpark. And it was incredible.”

Davidson grew up in Montreal, and his grandparents’ house was just a bus ride away from Olympic Stadium. He looks back fondly on those days but recalls the team’s grim ending.
“I think we could call it a slow death,” Davidson said.

As the team continued to regress in its final years, it became more apparent that Olympic Stadium needed to give locals more of a reason to attend games. A new stadium in the Peel Basin region has the potential to change that.

“You want people to come because it’s fun,” Jegher said. “You don’t want them to necessarily come because they’re baseball fans. We don’t care if you’re a baseball fan.

“We want you there because you just like being outdoors in Montreal in the summertime, doing something fun and cool with your friends.”

Other options

The idea of bringing a major league team back to Montreal began to pick up more traction after the initial stadium proposal was shut down. Bronfman and Jegher later made a proposal to the league that would have had the Tampa Bay Rays split their season between Florida and Montreal. It was aimed to begin around the 2024 season.

The partnership with Rays owner Stuart Sternberg had the Sternberg group continuing as majority owners. While Bronfman and Jegher’s group in Montreal planned to be minority owners, the deal also included plans for a new stadium.

“That was a good deal for us, because it wasn’t a billion dollar or two billion dollar deal.” Bronfman said. “It was, you know, affordable.”

Montreal is a vibrant city. It’s known as a hub for shopping, hospitality and nightlife. The city has a population of almost two million people.

“I know that guys who were on the Expos, back in the day, they loved Montreal,” Bronfman said. “Montreal is a cultured city. They loved it. … When we were polling the players in Tampa, they were like, “Hey, you know, this is a nice place to go.”

The deal was ultimately rejected by MLB.

“It fell apart because, you know, it just fell apart, which is too bad,” Bronfman said. “We thought we had a deal done and the major league kind of shook its head at the end of the day.”

That decision came as a shock to Bronfman and Jegher.

“We became close personal friends with a lot of people in Tampa,” Jegher said. “They’re people that I feel very close with. Even our families hang out and get together and know each other at this point. It was upsetting.”

Year in and year out, the Rays continue to have some of the lowest attendance records. In 2024, the team saw an average of 16,000 fans per game. That’s third-worst in all of baseball.

A split season between two cities has never been done before but it still doesn’t seem out of the question.

“Maybe it was just too big of a wrestling match with that split season.” Bronfman said. “The idea of shared ownership I think is going to be something in the future, because at the end of the day, these leagues just want more eyeballs.”

It was a lack of eyeballs that plummeted the Expos deeper into their demise. Before the 2000 season, former Expos owner Jeffrey Loria failed to sign a local television contract for the team. He also failed to reach an agreement with an English-speaking radio affiliate, which hindered the non-French speaking audience outside of Quebec.

In Canada, Rogers Media and Bell Media are the two biggest media conglomerates that dominate how Canadians watch sports.

Rogers owns SportsNet and Bell owns TSN. SportsNet is the official broadcast partner of the Toronto Blue Jays while TSN has its own French broadcaster based out of Montreal called RDS.

“There’s only a select few in Canada who would have the resources to buy and support a Major League Baseball franchise with the prices being what they are now,” Toronto Star reporter Gregor Chisholm said.

The Baltimore Orioles were the most recent MLB franchise to sell. A David Rubenstein-led group bought the team for $1.7 billion in 2023. The NHL’s Ottawa Senators were the most recent Canadian franchise to sell. Michael Andlauer and his group purchased the team for $950 million in the summer of 2023.

Montreal is currently home to three other professional sport franchises in the Canadiens, Alouettes and CF Montreal.

“You look at a small market,” Chisholm said. “Bell Media is the obvious company that could follow a similar structure to what Rogers did for buying the Jays. They would have the money to do it.”

Chisholm, who covers the Toronto Blue Jays, has an expertise in Canadian baseball and is known for contextualizing the Blue Jays’ impact within MLB and Canadian sports culture.

“Quebec being its own market to a certain extent, it would revitalize baseball in Quebec.” Chisholm said. “Quebec goes back a long way with producing some of Canada’s top talent.”

According to the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, just 9% of Canadian youth ages 5 to 17 play organized baseball.

“It would take some of the next generation of athletes away from focusing as much on hockey or football, which is also really big in Quebec,” Chisholm said.

Showcasing the support

Growing the game of baseball is something that Baseball Canada works tirelessly toward. Each year, MLB sees a new star come out of the Great White North, including Naylor his brother, Bo, and Tyler O’Neill in recent years.

Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman has opted to represent Canada at both the Olympics and World Baseball Classic to honor his late mother. With more star players representing Canada, another pro baseball team could boost the sport’s popularity and growth.

“It would be something that from a Baseball Canada perspective would only help grow and enhance the overall amateur sporting system in the country,” said Greg Hamilton, the coach and director of Baseball Canada. “The desire for youth to pick baseball as a sport of choice, I think it would have a huge impact on the country.”

Hamilton has been involved with Baseball Canada for three decades. He’s overseen teams that have won three Pan Am Games medals and all four World Baseball Classic teams.

He’s worked with and developed big league players such as Jason Bay, Russell Martin, Justin Morneau, Michael Saunders and Mike Soroka.

Hamilton believes the success of Canadians in MLB inspires youth to play, as they see role models they want to emulate.

“You would obviously have a compound effect on the number of games that you would see as a young person in Canada on TV,” Hamilton said. “You’d see more baseball that would be national in the sense of the country of Canada. So you would have a greater identity with more and more players, and obviously two major league teams. It leads to interest, it’s highly visible.”

In October 2024, Hurricane Milton devastated Tropicana Field in Tampa, leaving the Rays without a home and with repairs costing an estimated $55 million, delaying reopening until 2026.

While fans hoped the Rays might play in Montreal for 2025, Olympic Stadium’s renovations ruled it out until late 2027.

Had Bronfman and Jeghers’ 2022 proposal for a new stadium been approved, Montreal could have offered a solution.

Although there is no immediate proposal that could bring a team back to Montreal today, the door is still open.

“We all keep the dream alive,” Bronfman said. “Life is long, and we’re pretty bummed about the last time around, but we always keep the glass half full.”

Bronfman believes the foundational work his team has done over the years will go a long way in bringing baseball back to Montreal.

“We built a lot of goodwill,” Bronfman said. “We built some great relationships. We worked on it for years. And we’re not pushy, you know, I think we’re not overly aggressive. “I think at the end, you know, it’s a long game. And you know, one of these days, all that goodwill might come back in our favor.”

Bronfman’s efforts to bring MLB back to Montreal represent a vision fueled by determination and love for the game. His commitment to reviving the city’s baseball legacy, despite challenges, reflects a deep belief in Montreal’s potential as a thriving baseball hub. As the journey continues, his message to fans is simple yet powerful.

“Keep the passion going.”