Baseball could return to Montreal if there is a sound stadium plan in place

With the two upcoming exhibition games between the Cincinnati Reds and the Toronto Blue Jays in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, Montreal shows that it is craving for MLB baseball. Especially with more than 80,000 ticket sold. Last year 96,350 tickets were sold for the two exhibition games between the Blue Jays and the New York Mets.

A packed Olympic Stadium during the 2014 exhibition games between the Blue Jays and the Mets

But commissioner Rob Manfred told the Canadian newspaper Canadian Press that a good stadium plan should be in place before MLB is coming back to Montreal. Not that he wants the city to build a stadium before they got the commitment of a team to play there, like they did in St. Petersburg, but a good facility that could be home for a ball club for a long time to come is a condition.

The question is if this should be a publicly funded ballpark or one that is paid for by the owner of the ball club. The only teams that are still looking for a new home are the Oakland Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays. The first one is free to go. But we all know that the owner rather pockets the money he gets from revenue sharing than invest it in his team. So I don’t think that he will ever invest in an own stadium. The Rays on their turn, are stuck in St. Petersburg for a long time to come, 2027 to be exact. A couple of times the Rays have negotiated about a clause in the lease contract of Tropicana Field, but the city council of St. Petersburg opposed during the latest vote.

So with the Rays not going somewhere any time soon, the Athletics seem to be the most likely team to move, barring the possibility that they will get a stadium in Oakland. And to be honest I think that the chance of the A’s getting a ballpark in Oakland or Alameda County is bigger than the chance that the club will move to the province of Quebec.