
Advertisement
Advertisement

When the Expos were in their death throes, most fans blamed team owner Jeffrey Loria and his wretched stepson David Samson as the culprits. One baseball writer called Jeffrey Loria “the Voltron of awful baseball owners.” But the rot went further than that: Commissioner Bud Selig is now considered the black-hearted architect behind the team’s decline and fall, the grey, cancerous eminence who okayed the cancellation of TV and radio broadcasting of Expos games, who refused to allow the team September call ups for a post-season run, who spat in the few remaining fans’ face by scheduling 22 “home” games in Puerto Rico and who engineered cushy loans to Loria so he and Samson could buy the Florida Marlins—which they did, and went on to pillage Miami even worse than Montreal.

Baseball was fucked in the mid-90s. As with hockey in most American markets today, fans were so turned off by the 1994 strike that attendance dropped by something like 20 percent the following year. Hence, the blind eye Selig’s league turned to juicing. As Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire’s testicles shrank and their home run numbers grew, the league criminally turned a blind eye to a growing culture of steroid use in its ranks, a culture that pissed on sportsmanship and fair play. It fought tooth and nail against testing, and when, in 2002 it instituted drug policy, it was considered laughably weak. Following the explosive BALCO investigation, the policy was strengthened in 2005. But that certainly hasn’t stopped the problem.
Advertisement

And who can blame them? In 2004, our baseball fans—including me—were saddled with a team crippled by years of disinterested if not downright hostile owners, a crumbling, inaccessible stadium and generally lousy teams (despite the occasional bright spots). Most fans hated the Olympic Stadium and its cavernous emptiness: attendance towards the end was often well under five figures. And any team that would come back would be constant second fiddle to the Habs anyway. We loved “Nos Amours” when they were winning, or at least had the opportunity to. When the team had its hearts and guts and hopes torn out of it, fans got the idea. Major League Baseball didn’t give a shit about us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t return the sentiment.Follow Patrick Lejtenyi on Twitter @PatrickLejtenyiPreviously:Brett Lawrie, the Toronto Blue Jays Superstar, Is Still Sad about High School Sports
