Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said on Monday that Montreal needs a new stadium to have any chance of bringing the sport back to the city.
Manfred said that a pair of exhibition games between the New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays that drew 96,350 fans last year demonstrates “a real interest” in baseball in Montreal, but the league would need a strong commitment from the city before it could seriously consider relocating a team or expanding there.
“The key thing in Montreal would be to have a plan for an adequate facility that could support baseball over the long haul,” he told The Canadian Press just a few days before Montreal hosts two exhibition games between the Toronto Blue Jays and Cincinnati Reds at Olympic Stadium.
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“I don’t expect people to go into the ground and build a facility without some sort of commitment that they are going to get a team, but I do think that you need a plan and a commitment to how that plan is going to be executed,” he said.
More than 80,000 tickets have already been sold for the upcoming exhibition games between the Blue Jays and the Reds. Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Games and home to the Montreal Expos starting in 1977, holds 45,757 fans when configured for baseball.
Exhibition games in non-MLB cities are an important litmus test for the potential viability of a market, Manfred said.
“When you have the kind of success you’ve had in Montreal, you kind of pass the first initial test of whether it’s a market that could support baseball,” he said.
The Expos joined the National League for the 1969 season and remained in MLB through 2004 before moving to Washington and becoming the Nationals. The team failed to draw 1 million spectators to Olympic Stadium in any of their final seven seasons.
Manfred, who replaced Bud Selig as commissioner in January, said that the MLB is not looking in the short term to increase the league from 30 to 32 teams.
However, he did say that if the league expands beyond the continental US, the likely new markets will be in Mexico or Canada.
“Mexico and Canada present the most fertile ground just in terms of the level of baseball interest and the proximity to our existing franchises,” he said.
Manfred said the league prefers to make baseball work in existing markets, despite the troubles some MLB cities have been facing, such as in Tampa Bay and Oakland.
However, “we have always been realistic,” he said. “At the end of the day, relocation to another market could be the only solution.”
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