Canada might get a second MLB team again...but where?

This may not be what Montréal Expos fans are hoping for.

My beloved and well-worn Montréal Expos cap, which I wear to every baseball game I attend. I’m a Blue Jays fan first and foremost, but Montréal deserves their stolen team back. Baseball feels empty without the Expos. | Copyright © Jake Landau, all rights reserved.

I haven’t yet seen the new Netflix documentary, Who Killed the Montreal Expos?, but coming from a Montréal family the story is already well-known to me.

The Expos, experiencing their best season in history in 1994, led the entire league with a 74-40 win/loss record, only for the season to be cut short by a labour dispute, without any World Series champion. Losing that momentum, most of the team’s best players would be traded away to maintain a low payroll, and the Expos would die a long and slow death.

In 2001, the owners of 28 MLB franchises voted to contract the league, getting rid of the Minnesota Twins and the Montréal Expos as a cost-cutting measure. This includes, shamefully, the Toronto Blue Jays, which adds a more sinister overtone to calling themselves “Canada’s team”; the Expos were a team before the Jays, and are only gone because the Jays colluded with the league to get rid of them.

Mind you, that contraction didn’t actually work; the Twins were forced by a lawsuit to continue playing at the Metrodome for the duration of their lease, and the Expos were kept because an odd number of teams would make it impossible to properly balance the schedule of games.

Owner Jeffrey Loria would then sell the team to the other 29 MLB teams in 2002, using that money and an interest-free loan from the league to buy the Miami Marlins, and literally stealing the Expos staff and office equipment from Montréal to bring to Miami. And now that the Expos were literally owned by their 29 competitors, there were massive conflicts of interest.

The league forced the team to play half their home games outside Canada, in Puerto Rico. Somehow, General Manager Omar Minaya was able to keep the team in playoff contention in 2003, only to be struck down by an absurd decree from the other 29 teams refusing to allow the Expos to spend $50,000 USD to call up their minor league players for the September playoff race like every other MLB franchise could.

Finally, ten years after their 1994 miracle season, the Expos played their final game, and Major League Baseball announced they would be renamed and relocated to Washington, D.C. The MLB sabotaged the first Canadian MLB team, and then cannibalized it. They stole a Canadian team so they could give one to D.C., which already had the Baltimore Orioles right next door.

It’s fair to say that Canadians have a chip on our shoulder about how Major League Baseball treats us. It’s probably not incorrect to say there are some MLB owners who would try and relocate the Toronto Blue Jays to Nashville or Salt Lake City if they got the opportunity.

So, is it really possible that a second Canadian team could return to the Major Leagues?

Believe it or not, yes. But “possible” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and it’s a very different category from “likely”. Speaking with Rogers Sportsnet before Game 2 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and our Blue Jays this past weekend, Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred said “another city in Canada clearly could work for us.”

But Montréalais should hold their horses. He’s actually talking about a different city, Vancouver:

“I think Vancouver’s a great city,” said Manfred. “I think that Canada has been unbelievably supportive of Major League Baseball. I can’t say enough about the support that the Blue Jays have received. I happened to be in Western Canada this summer, (and) was absolutely blown away by the Blue Jay gear, the talk about the Blue Jays, how into it they are.

“The Seattle club will tell you, the best series they have year in and year out is when the Blue Jays come to visit and a ton of people from Canada come over to watch the games.”

Vancouver is also a great baseball city, and it’s more than reasonable to propose them for expansion. Indeed, they already host the Blue Jays High-A affiliate in Minor League Baseball’s Northwest League, the Vancouver Canadians. Vancouver recently set a franchise record for a winning streak this season, right after setting a franchise record for a losing streak, which I personally find very funny.

We should consider that Manfred is partially playing to a Canadian audience here, doing an interview with Canadian sports media. But he does speak more effusively about Vancouver than he would if he were merely being polite, and this also isn’t his first time mentioning Vancouver as a potential spot. We must consider as well, however, what Manfred says in this interview about MLB expansion overall.

Firstly, there won’t be any proper discussion on expansion until the expiration of the current contract between the MLB and the player’s union on December 1^st, 2026, as league expansion affects the number of jobs available for players in both the MLB and MiLB, as well as creating a valid concern for current players about who will be protected from relocation in an expansion draft.

On the topic of current teams looking to relocate to new stadiums, the Athletics are abandoning Oakland for Las Vegas, but while the Tampa Bay Rays have new ownership from Jacksonville and need to build a new stadium in a new location, they’re planning to keep the team in Tampa due to the larger population and media market. Even if they do relocate, it appears they’ll stay in Florida. Sorry Montréal, but we won’t be able to grab them.

MLB wants to sort out mechanics with the player’s union, while also ensuring that all 30 existing teams have proper roots laid down in a stadium for the long-term. That’s more than fair, because the pool of cities that would take a relocated team is the same as the pool that would take an expansion team. But what’s the next criteria that Manfred sets out?

“We definitely need an eastern timezone city and we need a western timezone city, just for format purposes. Even if you don’t realign, you still want to do that.”

Well, that’s reasonable for whatever divisional realignment would have to happen…but it’s also going to complicate things a bit for Canadian baseball prospects.

At first glance, this would appear to present an opportunity for both Vancouver and Montréal to get a team, if they’re each going for separate spots. But think about this for a moment: MLB has always been hesitant to support Canadian teams, both at the major league level with the Expos, and with Vancouver being the only remaining MiLB team in Canada after the Ottawa Lynx ceased play in Triple-AAA after 2007.

It would already be a coup for Canada to get one team in that climate; we should be thankful that Manfred actually does seem to appreciate baseball’s rising popularity in the Canadian market. But we are most certainly not getting both teams…and we may not even get either.

Of the various teams with serious expansion prospects floated, the East would see Montréal competing in the Eastern and Central Time media markets with Nashville in Tennessee, backed by the Music City Baseball group and touted by Manfred this April as “a candidate — and a good candidate,” a tone in which he does not speak for every city, and a more positive tone than his lack of interest in Montréal. Orlando has made some musings, but it’s more in the direction of luring the Rays away from Tampa if a stadium proves impossible rather than attracting an expansion team.

In the West, however, Vancouver faces heavier competition for the Pacific Time and Mountain Time markets. Before the Athletics have completed their permanent new home in Las Vegas, they are taking a temporary stint for a few years at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, California. This is a Triple-AAA ballpark which is primarily home to the Sacramento River Cats, affiliated with the San Francisco Giants and playing in the Pacific Coast League.

The Mayor of Sacramento, Darrel Steinberg, is explicitly calling this an “audition” for a permanent expansion team. If they can make a compelling case for attendance at Athletics games, they’ll certainly be in the discussion. But Vancouver and Sacramento will also have to compete with Salt Lake City in Utah and Portland in Oregon, offering lucrative taxpayer subsidies.

And there’s one more aspect to consider here, one which is why I no longer consider México City or Monterrey to be candidates for expansion, and why Vancouver and Montréal could also find themselves frozen out.

Donald Trump is President, and America is no longer a democracy.

México is not getting an MLB team, despite their extremely popular domestic baseball league and despite the MLB playing multiple games in México, because America is seized in a xenophobic fit of bigotry. That is also why Vancouver is more likely than Montréal, because they speak English rather than French, and any letter in the alphabet with àççénts makes Americans go insane.

And it is why depending on Donald Trump’s mood, including whether the Blue Jays win or lose the World Series, he could use political levers to demand both expansion teams be inside the United States…or even that the Blue Jays be relocated south!

One tactic at his disposal would be threatening the antitrust exemption that MLB has been granted by Congress. Utah and Tennessee are solid red pro-Trump states, and could see themselves granted teams not because they deserve them, but as transparent rewards from Trump’s regime for political support.

So, could Canada get a second MLB team again? Possibly. Rob Manfred is amenable to Vancouver, if unfortunately not Montréal. But as Commissioner, Manfred is accountable to 30 owners who will vote as they decide, and as an American-based organization with American-located financial assets, all of them are ultimately under the thumb of Donald Trump.

By all measures, Canada should have major league teams in both Vancouver and Montréal. After all, it is with the Montréal Royals that Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in Triple-AAA in 1946, before debuting with the Brooklyn Dodgers the following year and ending segregation in the major leagues.

Robinson said in 1964 that “I remember Montreal as the city that enabled me to go into the Major Leagues…the fans there were just fantastic, and my wife and I had nothing but the greatest of memories.” It is with him that Montréal won the Little World Series in Triple-AAA, and after the game the people of Montréal literally carried him atop their shoulders in joy and celebration.

And his wife Rachel wrote for the New York Times in 1987 that in contrast to the racism and bigotry of the American South, “Montréal and then Brooklyn became special havens where we gradually regained our sense of ourselves and our dignity.”

There is something very special to me about the history of baseball in Canada. I haven’t even began to scratch the surface of it. Whether all the stars align for a second Canadian MLB team isn’t as important to me as the plethora of baseball teams we already have at the professional and semi-professional levels.

Outside MLB and MiLB, Canadian teams play in independent baseball leagues, including the Intercounty Baseball League which hosts all eight teams in Ontario, and the Frontier League and American Association, which are largely based in the United States but include the Winnipeg Goldeyes, Ottawa Titans, Trois-Rivières Aigles, and Québec Capitales.

We don’t need to wait for Americans to give us permission to play baseball. The Expos may be gone, but Québec is still playing the game. Winnipeg isn’t anywhere near contention for an MLB team, but they’re still playing the game. Toronto already has the Blue Jays, but you’ll still see fans at Christie Pits for Toronto Maple Leafs baseball.

So if we get a second MLB team, great! I really do want Vancouver to have a new team, and Montréal to get their old team back! But if we don’t get any expansion teams?

Well, maybe then Canada should consider a league of our own.