MLB | The Best Team in Baseball, Dismantled (Olympic Stadium, Montreal)

Fans found out three hours before the first pitch that this was the last one. On 29 September 2004, 31,395 people came to Olympic Stadium for the 2,786th and final Montreal Expos home game. They lost 9-1 to the Florida Marlins, who were owned by Jeffrey Loria, the man who had owned the Expos four years earlier. Terrmel Sledge popped out to third base. Nobody left for a long time.

Montreal had been the first city outside the United States to hold a major-league franchise, from 1969. The Expos played at Jarry Park until the Olympic Stadium was ready in 1977, and through the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Gary Carter and Andre Dawson, they drew more than two million people a year.

Then 1994. The Expos were 74-40 on 12 August, the best record in baseball by a clear margin, six games up in the National League East, with Larry Walker, Moises Alou and Marquis Grissom in the outfield and Pedro Martinez fourth in the rotation. The players struck, the season was cancelled, and there was no World Series. Over the winter the club sold off its best players. It is the most cited what-if in the sport, and it is not really a hypothetical: the team that was leading baseball was dismantled before it played another game.

The decade after was a slow unwinding. Attendance fell below ten thousand a game. Loria could not get a downtown ballpark funded and sold the club to Major League Baseball itself in 2002, in a three-way transaction involving Florida and Boston. That November the owners voted to eliminate the Expos and the Minnesota Twins outright before dropping the plan. In 2003 and 2004 the homeless club played 43 of its home games in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

The stadium did not help. Built for the 1976 Olympics, it acquired the nickname the Big Owe for a public debt not cleared until 2006. The roof never worked properly, the artificial turf wrecked knees, and baseball seating was cut from nearly 60,000 to under 44,000 in 1992 because the emptiness was conspicuous.

Gary Carter said in 2010 that the place had torn up his knees and Dawson's.

The franchise became the Washington Nationals in 2005. Olympic Stadium still stands and still fills for other things; Montreal has hosted exhibition games since, and the case for a return has never entirely gone away.

Coordinates are Olympic Stadium, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: an Expos game at Olympic Stadium, August 2004, weeks before the end, photographed by Mike Durkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: an aerial view of the stadium in 2022, photographed by Wilfredor, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.