MAJOR BLOGS of MLN Sports - www.majorblogs.net - OPINION - Montreal, CANADA - If you want to know the health of a professional sports franchise in any city, you have to visit a few bars and diners.

When I hit the ground in Nashville, the Sounds have their colors repped at the airport bar.

Drive around town and hit a 'cue joint or a sports bar in Memphis, or Albuquerue, or Round Rock/Austin or Pawtucket or Brooklyn and you will find the minor league team gets its props.

Logos, photos, jerseys, memorabilia and even in-season promotions can be found in healthy baseball towns, and even the ones that are struggling.

The Florida Marlins, whose stadium pigeon population exceeds their paid gate, get their strokes from the area elbow-bending establishments and eateries, which keeps them in the public consciousness in ways that advertising, whining, begging and pleading simply do not.

On the bar and beanery count, Expos baseball here in Montreal is not dead, but in hibernation. The Alous, Ayalas, Battistas and Bullingers; Cerrone, Grudzielanek, Dwyer, Oil Can Boyd, Galarraga, Tatis and many others find themselves enshrined in old posters, photos, and dusty bobble heads. Souvenir stores around town still sell Expos merchandise~

Mention Oil Can Boyd or Alou (Alou!), and you will get a gusher of joyous memories.  Mention the name of former Montreal Expos owner and current Marlins magnate Jeffrey Loria, and you will see the storm clouds gather on that same face. When I mentioned his name in Montreal, I heard a lot of gros con! (Roughly: "fat bastard!") and a few other epithets far less printable.

Still, Montreal baseball fans believe that Mr. Loria is always welcome in their city:  Just give them 24 hours to gather up the tar and feathers.

Back in the waning days of Expos baseball, it was too easy for both Loria and Selig to blame the city, its fans, and Canada for the direly low attendance that plagued the club, even when they were fielding some great teams.

Is it not interesting, in hindsight, that Mr. Loria's third-rate front office can still generate top baseball teams on the field, but has fared no better at building a large, loyal fan base in sunny South Florida, an area that is equally baseball enthusiastic, and, like Montreal, is one of the most affluent markets in the world?

There are a lot of folks in Fish caps who never make it to a game at Dolphin Dump that never get converted into paying customers, just, as Expos fans will point out, was the case, lo those many years ago, when Mr. Loria's group was driving the final nails into the coffin of Expos baseball.

As Senators fans could welcome the Nationals with open arms, fans in Montreal have not forgotten baseball:  They feel that MLB has forsaken them.

Likewise, fans in Calgary and Ottawa, among others, have a bone to pick with the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (MiLB). Visit their epicurean establishments and hooch hutches and you will find that they too, miss professional baseball attached to the major leagues.  Sure, Ottawa has a Can-Am team, which is enjoying some success, but many of the baseball faithful will tell you that Can-Am games are to baseball fans what the guy in the dress in those old Apple Mac vs. PC commercials was to the Swedish bombshell in the same attire.

To be fair to Mr. Loria, the Mr. Bean of major league owners, and Pat O'Conner, the new Darth Sidious of MiLB, the governments of Canada over the years have done more for Moose hunters than professional sports fans.

The inability to work out equitable tax situations with both players and owners alike in all sports has turned the great metropolitan cities of Canada, other than Toronto, into league lepers that lead to the shut down of both major and minor league sports in city after city.  Even the NHL largely abandoned the pays de pucks.

A large part of the problem rests at the doorstop of the Canadian Parliament, which is notorious for not being quick to make a decision. Heck, their parliament building in Ottawa was picked by the Queen of England because they couldn't make up their minds.

 

Tough Sledding in Canada for All

It was hard, when you were a minor league player barely scraping by, to get hit with Canadian, American, and sometimes even a third country tax on your payroll or income because the Canadian government was after the fat salaries of the few big league MLB players, and they change the tax code about as fast as some of their glaciers move.  A minor league player making $50,000 might see more than half of that disappear. What, then, is the incentive to play?

For owners not native to Canada, the Looney has also not been so lucky. Canadian dollars, while strong now, have fluctuated and performed poorly over time, leaving Loria less money to work with than his fatter American-club counterparts had he stayed.

Toronto has found work-arounds to some of these situations, but the stigma of playing pro sports in Canada remains for all but the Canadian Football League.  The Canadian-American League (Can-Am) an independent baseball league, has struggled, but could be the key to a new era of baseball in the provinces.  The Canadian Baseball League, which plays in much smaller cities, could function as a feeder to a Triple-A all-Canada system as the Academy league has in Mexico.

"Jour Nouveau" for Canadian Baseball?

While it is difficult to say how many people would make their way back to baseball in Montreal, for example, MLB seems perfectly content with spending 850+ million dollars US on the revival of MLB baseball in Florida with the construction of two new stadiums for the Marlins and the Rays to bring all of those paying customers back to the ballpark.  They spent nearly that much in public, league and bribes to appease Baltimore Orioles ower Peter Angelos to revive baseball in Washington, D.C.

Fans in Montreal scoff and say that if MLB can find money to revive baseball in Miami, which can barely draw fans, why not in their city, where they contend far more people would turn out for a new facility and a return to either the American or National League.

At the very least, Montreal and the other forsaken Canadian baseball cities, are good minor league towns. Playing in the PCL or the IL has been a financial and logistics nightmare, hence their departures from the Great White North, but would new minor league teams have to re-enter one of the existing American minor leagues to come back into professional baseball?

MiLB has a sanctioned Triple-A league in Mexico, the LMB, that has no direct affiliations to any baseball club in MLB. The LMB does not play in the United States, does not even participate in the Triple-A championships even though they are AAA classified.  If they can make that arrangement in Mexico, in this post-NAFTA world, why not Canada?

An all-Canadian triple-A , with its own all-Canadian feeder league, would enhance baseball in North America. Played in Canada for Canadians, like the LMB, it could revive an interest in MLB-centric pro baseball in cities like Montreal and Calgary and Ottawa, and keep baseball growing in small communities throughout the provinces.

It might also provide a fourth team in Triple at at the end of the season and a new wrinkle for a North American championship at Bricktown Ballpark.

The Triple-A Championship, first as the Triple-A World Series and now as the Bricktown Ballpark event  between the IL and PCL, particularly after MLB takes its call-ups, has often been an affair that has struggled to create the appropriate air of a true championship event.

Add in the LMB and an All-Canada League (ACL) and you have a two day event that pits the bragging rights for top-Triple-A club in North America into a television audience that stretches from Coral Harbour to Tapachula.

It would not be hard to revive baseball in Canada quickly, either. MLB, always quick to want to extinguish independent professional leagues, could bite the bullet and have either Bud Light or MiLB's new prez Pat O'Conner put in a call to Miles Wolff, the baseball impresario and commissioner of a chunk of independent baseball leagues, including the Canadian-American League and the Northern League.  A realignment or two and MLB can have Le base-ball canadien once more.

It is a nice dream. Between the current tensions between the affiliated leagues, MLB, and MLB's political lap-dog, MiLB, and the general myopia of the MLB owners, such a revival of the sport in the land of the maple leaf seems unlikely.

MLB and the governments of Canada's provences, and the national government have had difficult working relations over the recent decades. There is no baseball Ghandi in Parliament there to help them usher in a new era for fans.

Squeezing the Can-Am league, which has a number of franchises in the Northeast that are bothersome at best to MiLB, has been the game plan for some time, and is likely to stay that way as MiLB enters perhaps its most significant round of Affiliation Monopoly at the Winter Meetings in December.

It is ironic, at best, that Selig and his cronies can be so entrenched in reviving where clubs have always struggled, and they work like dogs to expand the game into Asia, China in particular, where it has mixed success, yet they cannot see any value in rewarding the loyalty of generations of existing baseball fans in Canada whose fields may be dormant, but whose fire for the game of baseball lives on, in spite of the large blind eye turned to them by the baseball powers of the United States.

To my Canadian friends who love baseball, who want their kids to play baseball, and who long to see stadiums reopen with players who are major leaguers, or have a great hope of becoming major leaguers, I say:

"Vive baseball.  Vive baseball canadien!"

Your time will come. Just not very soon, quel dommage.