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Over the course of a baseball season, every fan experiences some sort of loathing for their team. A winless road trip, a particularly annoying relief pitcher, a confounding manager who incorrectly zigs when he’s supposed to zag: It’s all baked into the adventure. No matter how bad it gets—no matter how many balls don’t bounce your team’s way—there’s always another game, another season, another wave of minor leaguers who might finally turn the tide.
But for baseball fans in Quebec, that tomorrow never came. On October 3, 2004, after 36 eccentric years, the Montreal Expos played their final game. It’s a loss that still reverberates throughout Canada. In the new Netflix documentary Who Killed the Montreal Expos?, streaming now, director Jean-François Poisson presents the Expos’ downfall not so much as a failure, but as a murder that needs solving.
As a sports documentary, it’s a heartwrenching depiction of a fallen institution. As a true crime chronicle, it allows the viewer to follow threads and build their own theories. And for those who can still conjure memories of their raucous home games, it’s a letter from a long-lost friend.
“The DNA is still here even though they’re gone,” Poisson tells me, calling in from Montreal, where the Expos are still omnipresent. “Everyone has a T-shirt, a logo, a hat. There are murals on the walls about the Expos and Youppi!” For the uninitiated, Youppi! (yes, the exclamation point is part of his name) was the furry, orange bon vivant who served as the Expos mascot and later got rehomed to the Montreal Canadiens. Marie-Christine Pouliot, an executive producer on the film, was at Olympic Stadium for that final, tear-soaked game. At their peak in the early ’80s, the Expos were drawing over 2 million fans per year. By the end of their lifespan, that number had dipped under 800,000. Being in the building for their last home game gave Pouliot perspective about the wonders of having a baseball team at all.
“Sometimes we forget,” Pouliot says, “but it’s really a privilege to have a sports team in your town.”
Rather than simply retelling the story of Major League Baseball’s wacky northern stepchild, the documentary takes an investigative route. Poisson, who has experience in the true crime genre, says the decision to frame the Expos’ tale as a whodunit started early in the production process. Along with presenting evidence and walking through the list of figures who have Expos blood on their hands, there’s also plenty of color, nostalgia, and quirks that highlight why the Expos become nos amours to an entire province.
A prevailing theme of Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is that of familial bonds. There’s the relationship the young players had to longtime, grandfatherly manager Felipe Alou. For the Latin American players who were living extremely far from home—both geographically and culturally—having a Dominican, Spanish-speaking manager was a godsend. And most importantly, there’s the interwoven connection of the team and the city. Each game was clearly a party for the folk of Montreal. Pouliot refers to the multilingual city as a “big village,” while Poisson acknowledges that the Quebecois can “feel a little bit outcast sometimes.” While other teams had yearlong summer weather, or a lineage dating back to the 19th century, or multiple banners hanging from the rafters, here were the lovable Expos, with their stadium announcements in French and a venue so unfit for baseball that they once had a rain delay despite playing indoors.
About that stadium, by the way….
“Well, that was a shithole, and I don’t think anybody can deny that,” Expos legend Larry Walker tells me. The rocket-armed outfielder wore the Expos cap for six seasons, made an All-Star team, and won two Gold Gloves on his way to becoming the greatest Canadian baseball player of all time. “Place was falling apart, chunks of concrete falling that kept us on the road for three weeks one time, little trap doors out in right field that I’d step on. Every now and then, I’d think the ground was going to cave in.”
Now that the ground has caved in—figuratively, not literally, as Olympic Stadium still stands—the conversation centers on culpability. Walker is certainly not at fault for the Expos having been stolen from Montreal and rebranded as the Washington Nationals. He was part of the fabled 1994 team that had the best record in baseball when the players’ strike canceled the season. This is another load-bearing piece of Expos lore, and also one of the potential culprits for the team’s no longer existing. Had the season continued, Montreal would have been a favorite to win the championship, which would have made Canada the unquestioned epicenter of the baseball world following the Toronto Blue Jays’ back-to-back romps through the ’92 and ’93 postseasons. “Listen, nobody is guaranteed to win the World Series,” Walker says. “We had a better than average chance of competing in it. If we win that year, perhaps the team stays together, people aren’t let go—including myself—and maybe there’s more than one World Series, maybe there’s more than two World Series. Maybe the team is still there and I’m not talking to you about this right now.”
Walker—who didn’t speak a word of French when he signed with Montreal for $1,500 out of his British Columbia high school and, in his words, “sucked” at the time—has one of the most personal affinities for the Expos as anyone who ever donned their uniform. The affable Canuck who was, along with Pedro Martínez, Marquis Grissom, and Felipe Alou’s son Moisés, part of the franchise’s most talented roster, still thinks about the fact that they never got a chance to host World Series games on Quebecois soil.
“It never goes away,” he says. ”That you got to be shitting me feeling.”
In addition to interviews with Hall of Fame players Pedro Martínez and Walker—who were both traded out of Montreal during the prolonged white flag waving that defined the Expos’ final decade—team executives Claude Brochu and David Samson also sat for interviews in the doc.
Brochu and Samson, both reviled for their own reasons among Expos fans, are a fascinating yin and yang case study. Brochu, now 80 years old, was born in Quebec City and served as the executive VP of marketing for Seagram, the Canadian beverage giant. He was the largest shareholder in a pack of investors that bought the Expos in 1990, only to sell eight years later to an ownership group led by New York art dealer Jeffrey Loria and his stepson, David Samson. At the time of the purchase, Samson was in his early 30s, cocksure, and perhaps most crucially for the purposes of this story, American. To a large faction of mourning fans, Brochu’s selling the team to a bunch of yanks was the first death knell. After Brochu’s many futile attempts to secure a downtown stadium and keep the Expos in Montreal, the Loria and Samson regime was in charge for just over three years before Major League Baseball took control of the floundering franchise in 2002. In the film, Samson emphatically states that baseball does not work in Montreal, despite ample evidence to the contrary from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. (While Poisson and Pouliot say they approached everything about this project objectively, it’s hard not to watch the documentary and think, of Samson, Does this guy know he’s considered the bad guy?)
“We didn’t want him to be the villain,” Poisson says of Samson, who followed his Expos tenure with a stint as president of the Marlins, an appearance on the 28th season of Survivor, and now hosts a podcast. “His answers are valuable and comprehensible. It’s just another perspective.” Pouliot chimed in on the brash, unapologetic businessman as well, saying, “We knew exactly what we were getting into when we interviewed him. At least he showed up and he really answered every single question.”
That 1994 labor disagreement, an American C-suite (which came partially as a result of Canada’s lack of billionaires with deep-enough pockets to buy the team), playing in a city that prioritizes hockey and has horrendous weather—all of it combined to create the Expos-less world we inhabit today. As the Jays prepare for the World Series, their Francophone neighbors are still grieving. They know that baseball has a place in Montreal. Poisson and Pouliot both believe that if the city is ever given another chance, the party-like atmosphere would return immediately upon first pitch. The prevailing feeling among French Canadian baseball fans, according to Poisson, is “a bit of shame and even a sense of betrayal.” None of the men in suits who oversaw the Expos’ demise broke any laws, except in the court of public opinion. Poisson and Pouliot understand that the business side of sports can get murky and vicious, but are in agreement that there isn’t just one grim reaper to blame.
So, who did kill the Montreal Expos? Viewers worldwide can now relitigate this case thanks to Poisson and Pouliot’s documentary. Walker acknowledges that it’s difficult to ever “know the truth and the bullshit and which is which,” but said he’s heard Loria’s name more than any other when playing the blame game. While there was no actual homicide, no case to present to a judge, one thing is clear to any baseball fan: Montreal being in its 20th year without a professional baseball team is a miscarriage of justice. It’s no wonder fans are still hung up on the loss—and Who Killed the Montreal Expos? helps everyone else understand why.
“It’s not an unresolved crime,” Poisson says. “But I guess it could be an unresolved grief.”