Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
shyduck
Oct 3, 2003


They should do one about the 1994 Expos.

94 Expos Wikipedia posted:

In 1994, the Expos team — and Larry Walker — appeared to be rising to its potential. Led by rising young stars Pedro Martínez, Moisés Alou, Cliff Floyd, Mike Lansing and Jeff Fassero, Montreal was off to a 74-40 start, leading the National League Eastern Division. They had scored 585 runs (5.13 per game) and allowed 454 runs (3.98 per game) through 114 games by Friday, August 12.

Walker, with 86 RBI, was well on his way to his first 100-RBI year; Ken Hill was on pace to win 23 games while Pedro Martinez was on pace to strike out more than 200 batters. Moisés Alou was hitting .339 and on pace to collect more than 200 hits for the first time in his career. Marquis Grissom was on pace to score 137 runs. Two other Expos, namely Alou and Walker, were also on pace to score more than 100 runs. The team was also drawing well at home: through 52 home games in 1994, 1,276,250 fans had attended Expos games, for an average of 24,543 per game. At that pace, the Expos would have had a good chance of drawing two million fans for the first time since 1983. The season, however, was stopped due to the 1994 players' strike. The World Series, for which the Expos appeared to be destined, was never played and Montreal lost many of its players during the next season due to free agency and salary constraints and the team never recovered. The 1994 Montreal Expos team that could have been remains one of baseball's hot discussion points. The collapse of the Expos would eventually lead to the team moving to Washington D.C. ten years later.
To sum it up, after a few seasons of steady improvement, they had broken out into this scary good team of all-stars and a potential HoFer or two, only to see it all end with the late-season work stoppage. Everything they had built years towards, including rising attendance figures that were their best in over a decade, came to an immediate halt.

After the stoppage, they lost a lot of talent due to salary constraints and the FA market, and they just never recovered. Pretty much from that point on, give a season, they dwelled in the bottom half of the NL East with horrible attendance and a crumbling ballpark, until they got moved to DC.

edit: Another thing I just noticed that could be possibly it's own story, and that's the monetary exchange rates. In the winter of 94/95, the Canadian dollar was at it's weakest point in decades, and it only kept weakening until around 2003 when it bottomed out. I wonder how much of an effect that had, with not only the Expos situation but I know there's been NHL teams that had struggled to compete with large US market teams for players throughout those years. I know it's a big reason why there is a salary cap in hockey now if I'm not mistaken, which came about after the 2005 stoppage. It probably had an effect on the Nordiques and Jets leaving in the mid 90's.

shyduck fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Sep 10, 2012

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

shyduck
Oct 3, 2003


How do you blow $400M :stare:

shyduck
Oct 3, 2003


A goal without a plan is a wish.

shyduck
Oct 3, 2003


:siren: You Don't Know Bo is starting now :siren:

shyduck
Oct 3, 2003


I wish somebody would do a doc about how much of a oval office Brian France is

  • Locked thread