Tampa Bay/Montreal experiment is not without precedent

One of the topics of discussion during the first English Cinco Razones Podcast was the Tampa Bay Rays’ plan to play half of its home games in Montreal beginning in 2024.

The location sounds completely and idiotically random but considering the fact that the Expos left Montreal after the 2004 season to became the Washington Nationals and Olympic Stadium has remained intact for the use of the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League and the Montreal Impact of Major League Soccer.

The Toronto Blue jays also play exhibition games at Olympic Stadium just before Opening Day in recent years. Vlad Guerrero Jr., who’s father was the Expos last superstar, put his name on the map when he hit a walk-off home run against the St. Louis Cardinals in his old man’s stomping grounds.

So the fact that it’s the only other MLB ballpark that is without a team makes it understandable that it is the first place the Rays would look towards to as a vacation home. There aren’t that many other big league capacity facilities that are without a tenant.

This idea is not without precedent. Ironically, the Expos tried this in 2003-04 with Puerto Rico, playing 22 home games in Hiram Bithorn Stadium. Those were also the franchise’s last two years in Montreal. In 2003, the Expos started the season in San Juan for 11 games before their “home” home opener in Montreal on April 22 against the Arizona Diamondbacks. That game netted an attendance total of 36,879 but most of the games were below 10,000. The San Juan games ranged between 10,296-17,906.

Miami Marlins catching coach Brian Schneider began his playing career with the Expos during that time. From his experience, it seemed to be a successful experiment.

“The first year I really enjoyed it,” Schneider said. “The fans were awesome. They came out. It’s different playing there, playing the music, it was a different atmosphere so we had a good time.”

The attendance figures in Montreal were similar to what the Marlins are actually getting now but in a state of the art ballpark, which wasn’t the case with Olympic Stadium. They returned to San Juan in June for six games between two long road trips. As much as they were embraced as the home team in San Juan, it wasn’t the home of the Expos. The team played 22 game away from Montreal from May 25-June 20.

This was actually a competitive team in Montreal, despite being own, operated and neglected by Major League Baseball. The Expos entered September at 71-67 and still in the wild card race with the Florida Marlins. Their last series of the season was in San Juan and the Marlins took three of four games and went on to win the World Series. By that time the nostalgia of playing in Puerto Rico have worn off, once it was realized to be an extension of a long road trip.

“It got really tiring towards the end of the season down there because we were going back and forth,” Schneider said.

The Expos finished the 2003 season with an 83-79 record. With no Vlad Guerrero and no Javier Vazquez, the Expos finished 67-95 in their final season. The Expos started the 2004 season playing six games in San Juan, three games in Montreal and the rest on the road during the month of April and went 5-19. They spent the first and last week of May in Montreal but attendance never reached the 10,000 mark and even dipping as low as 3,609.

Montreal had only one homestand in June and July. The Expos returned to San Juan in July but only topped 10K once. The Expos finally had a normal final two months of the season, staying in Montreal instead of having to go back and forth. The Expos played their final home game against the Marlins and Carl Pavano, who debuted in Montreal but made his bones in Florida, got the win.

Interestingly so, the Puerto Rico experiment wasn’t a sign to the players that the Expos were eventually going to leave town. It wasn’t until their home finale that the relocation to Washington was announced.

“We actually had no idea that was going to happen,” Schneider said. “We know we made some trades, with the Bartolo Colon trade and getting rid of Cliff Lee and Grady Sizemore, they thought our team was getting dissolved. So we didn’t know if we were going to go to Washington or not. We didn’t even know if we were going to have a franchise in a couple years. We were just enjoying it and going down there (to Puerto Rico). We had no idea what was going to happen to the franchise.”

Jeffery Loria was actually the Expos’ last owner before selling it to MLB after the 2001 season and using that money to buy the Marlins off John Henry, who went from that to owning the Boston Red Sox. Contraction was on the table in 2002 around the time of the aforementioned trade for Colon, until the CBA put the kibosh on that idea until 2006. By then it wasn’t necessary.

The situations between what Schneider’s Expos went through with Puerto Rico and what Rays owner Stuart Sternberg plans to do in Montreal will be completely different. The Rays have been locked into a 30-year lease in Tropicana Field since their inaugural season. That ends in 2027, which would be three years going into this proposed plan.

Unlike the Puerto Rico prototype, the Rays reportedly plan to build a new open-air stadium in each city for less than the reported $1.2 billion cost of the Rangers’ new retractable-roof stadium in Arlington that is set to open in 2020. The plan in terms of scheduling seem to be to split the season in half, starting in Tampa Bay during the spring and Montreal during the summer. It’d be interesting to know how the playoffs would be divided up. The Rays could be the first team ever with homes field advantage.

Schneider said he’s happy for Montreal potentially getting a second chance at big league baseball and said if the city were to have a new ballpark downtown, it would be “a home run.”

However getting the Players Association to sign off on the idea seems to be the biggest complication. The union and MLB are already disagreeing over whether needing to have two “homes” falls under rules of the National Labor Relations Act. That might be what puts an end to it before it ever begins.