Why People Are Still Obsessed With the Montreal Expos

Over the course of a baseball season, every fan experiences some sort of loathing for their team. A winless road trip, a particularly annoying relief pitcher, a confounding manager who incorrectly zigs when he’s supposed to zag: It’s all baked into the adventure. No matter how bad it gets—no matter how many balls don’t bounce your team’s way—there’s always another game, another season, another wave of minor leaguers who might finally turn the tide.

But for baseball fans in Quebec, that tomorrow never came. On October 3, 2004, after 36 eccentric years, the Montreal Expos played their final game. It’s a loss that still reverberates throughout Canada. In the new Netflix documentary Who Killed the Montreal Expos?, streaming now, director Jean-François Poisson presents the Expos’ downfall not so much as a failure, but as a murder that needs solving.

As a sports documentary, it’s a heartwrenching depiction of a fallen institution. As a true crime chronicle, it allows the viewer to follow threads and build their own theories. And for those who can still conjure memories of their raucous home games, it’s a letter from a long-lost friend.

MLB/Courtesy of NetflixCourtesy of Netflix

“The DNA is still here even though they’re gone,” Poisson tells me, calling in from Montreal, where the Expos are still omnipresent. “Everyone has a T-shirt, a logo, a hat. There are murals on the walls about the Expos and Youppi!” For the uninitiated, Youppi! (yes, the exclamation point is part of his name) was the furry, orange bon vivant who served as the Expos mascot and later got rehomed to the Montreal Canadiens. Marie-Christine Pouliot, an executive producer on the film, was at Olympic Stadium for that final, tear-soaked game. At their peak in the early ’80s, the Expos were drawing over 2 million fans per year. By the end of their lifespan, that number had dipped under 800,000. Being in the building for their last home game gave Pouliot perspective about the wonders of having a baseball team at all.

“Sometimes we forget,” Pouliot says, “but it’s really a privilege to have a sports team in your town.”

Rather than simply retelling the story of Major League Baseball’s wacky northern stepchild, the documentary takes an investigative route. Poisson, who has experience in the true crime genre, says the decision to frame the Expos’ tale as a whodunit started early in the production process. Along with presenting evidence and walking through the list of figures who have Expos blood on their hands, there’s also plenty of color, nostalgia, and quirks that highlight why the Expos become nos amours to an entire province.