If you were a baseball fan channel-surfing during the past month, there was a decent chance you’d tune into Canadian baseball programming of some kind.
Without burying the lede, the Toronto Blue Jays played
in their first World Series since they were back-to-back champs in 1992-1993. Alas, Toronto could not quite get Louie Varland his ring. But it took a dramatic 7-game series (including an 18-inning contest the Blue Birds lost) for the Los Angeles Dodgers to clip their wings and retain possession of the Commissioner’s Trophy.
I’m happy for Toronto fans, they having waited roughly as long as Minnesota Twins fans have to be in the MLB Final Two come October (or November, as it were). The Jays could have pulled back from their recent run of contention after a last-place finish in the 2024 AL East. Instead, they went all in on Vlad Guerrero Jr and developed a solid top-to-bottom roster to give themselves a chance in the postseason. What a concept.
Meanwhile, the documentary “Who Killed the Montreal Expos?” dropped on Netflix around World Series time. It tells the story of the Expos franchise and theorizes on the biggest reasons for its downfall—lack of cash flow, inability to procure public financing for a new stadium, the 1994 strike (neutering the best team Montreal ever rolled out onto Olympic Stadium), the Jeffrey Loria & David Samson regime, and a complete lack of a TV deal by the end (2004) before they moved to become the Washington Nationals.
Truth be told, it isn’t the greatest doc you’ll ever watch from a technical perspective. But seeing how Montreal still holds a yearly “Expos Fest” to this day made the hair on the back of my neck stand up a bit thinking about how close we all here at Twinkie Town were to being that displaced fan base. Would we still be having Twins Fest 20-some years after a franchise dissolution? Thank you, Harry Crump!
Heck, even Canadian comedy hero John Candy got a recent prestige doc! All in all, quite a fall for the benevolent land of Mounties and maple syrup.
