Poor attendance-blame the owners and MLB not the fans

People in baseball are so quick to blame the fan for the problems of
the expos. In my mind there are two reasons for low attendance. One
being that with the exception of the first owner Mr.Bronfman, most
owners have neither the money or the will to keep a good team on the
field. Look at 94 for a perfect example. Rather than keeping a team
together that may have won for many more years and drew more and more
people like in the 80's when Rick Monday broke our hearts. They did
not sign their free agents or management traded players and montreal
fans felt that the team was not serious about winning. (IF you want an
example of how winning gets bums in seats look at the Alouettes). This
past year has been the same. Not signing Vlad sent a sign to fans that
baseball does not care.

the seconds reason is MLB it's self. Why MLB you ask. Glad you asked.
Major league baseball owners will never allow a team owned by all 30
teams to actually win anything. They may have thought they were doing
the spos a favour by moving all the Puerto Rico games to the first
part of the season. However as this team was just awfull on the road;
it condemed them to a poor start and poor attendance. Should they
actually had the same record as last year they would leading the
division with at least 45 wins.

now there is talk about Montreal trading players. IF you want to scare
people away from the park keep talking like that and you may actually
get a game where everyone in the park is cheering for the other team
or the team may play in a actual empty stadium. Puerto Rico is not
baseball panacea as they had only an average of 9,133 so that country
is no better but then they get $350,000 per game so who cares who
shows up. Maybe if Baseball left Montreal in Montreal and actually
tried to put a winner on the field maybe given several years
attendance would actually rise as fans get back into the game. A
better team will get a better price when it is sold. At least that
always works in the real world.

In article <2161343d.0407050446.f7547a8 RemoveThis @posting.google.com>,
expoes RemoveThis @excite.com (Fred) wrote:

> Look at 94 for a perfect example. Rather than keeping a team
> together that may have won for many more years ... They did
> not sign their free agents or management traded players

According to Brochu's book (so take it with a grain of salt), without
playoff money (the kind that all the teams share, not what the Expos
would have earned if they had made the post-season) 1994 turned into the
team's first money-losing season. Brochu says that no Quebec bank would
give a line of credit so he was forced to turn to less-appealing US
banks that wouldn't have the patience for the team to come back -- they
wanted positive cash flow immediately.

> the seconds reason is MLB it's self. Why MLB you ask. Glad you asked.
> Major league baseball owners will never allow a team owned by all 30
> teams to actually win anything.

No kidding. It was said here many time that to make things fair, the
Expos should have been assigned a salary range at the median salary
level for all 30 teams. Instead we're at the bottom.

> now there is talk about Montreal trading players.

Yeah, so much for the "We'll keep the team together if you agree to go
back to Puerto Rico promise.