As Major League Baseball looks toward the future, commissioner Rob Manfred has been open about his desire to eventually expand to 32 teams. While MLB needs to sort out the stadium situations with the A’s and Rays before they can fully focus on adding additional franchises, a handful of markets have emerged as potential options for new teams. This week, we’ll take a look at four of the biggest ones. Our previous installments focused on Nashville, Portland and Las Vegas. Today: Montreal.

Ten years ago, William Jegher was in his office at Ernst & Young (EY) in downtown Montreal when a managing partner of the accounting firm knocked on his door and asked, “What do you know about baseball?”

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Jegher had played baseball into high school. He’d been a diehard Expos fan from his earliest memories until the team left in 2004. After that, like many Montrealers, “baseball was kind of dead to me,” Jegher says. He didn’t watch it. He didn’t maintain a rooting interest. He didn’t talk about it at the water cooler. But now the managing partner was telling him the Montreal Board of Trade had asked EY to run a feasibility study regarding MLB returning to Montreal.

“I have two reactions,” Jegher recalls telling his superior that day. “No. 1: That’s the stupidest idea I’ve heard in my life, because baseball will never come back to Montreal. And No. 2: I need to be involved in this project. I’m your guy.”

Jegher didn’t expect that request to result in him working for the next decade on bringing baseball back to his home city. But it did. “The Project,” as he refers to those efforts, occupied his nights, weekends and vacations. He loved every minute. Scouting real estate for a ballpark. Researching what went wrong with the Expos. Searching for creative solutions to help a franchise thrive where one already had failed. It all started, for him, with the 2013 feasibility study.

The study determined The Project was plausible; Montreal could be a baseball city again. 69 percent of Quebecers and 81 percent of business owners surveyed supported MLB’s return. To do so, the study concluded, would require $1.025 billion in government and private funding, a strong ownership group, a 36,000-seat ballpark constructed within two kilometers of downtown, and a spot in the American League East for regional rivalries and a better media rights deal.

Warren Cromartie, the former Expos outfielder leading The Project at the time, declared, “The numbers don’t lie.” Cromartie believed it was no longer a matter of whether baseball would return to Montreal, but when. Washington D.C. had lost teams twice and regained one. Why not Montreal? Next, Cromartie needed a deep-pocketed ownership group to come aboard, or, as he put it in baseball parlance, “a power hitter to step up to the plate and bring everybody home.”

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That power hitter was Stephen Bronfman, the Canadian businessman whose father, Charles, was the original Expos owner. The arrival of the younger Bronfman and his team of investors, the Montreal Baseball Group, lent legs and legitimacy (and significant financial backing) to The Project. Bronfman set to work repairing the relationship between MLB and Montreal damaged in their ugly divorce, and he waited for a chance to acquire or woo a franchise.

In 2019, an odd opportunity arose: a split-city timeshare, with the Rays spending half the season in Montreal and the other half in Tampa. Montreal summers. Florida sunshine in the spring and fall. Neither relocation nor expansion, exactly. It was inventive, innovative, disruptive and, to many in the baseball world, completely bananas. Bronfman and his team, however, felt it was their best shot, and once MLB commissioner Rob Manfred gave the green light to explore the idea they poured almost three years into making it work.

Jegher lent his real-estate expertise to plan a ballpark district. The Project rekindled his love for baseball. Then it broke his heart again. The split-city plan was suddenly scotched a year ago, shot down on a January morning by MLB’s executive council. Bronfman’s team was stunned. “Devastated,” Jegher says. “We were going 120 miles an hour, and we slammed into a brick wall.”

Before that, like every Expos fan, the members of the Montreal Baseball Group dreamed of Opening Day: the first game back home in Montreal. In their imaginations, there’d be a sellout crowd packing a gleaming new Montreal ballpark to the brim and untold millions more fans without tickets watching on TV. There’d be a Canadian flag unfurled across the outfield as the Expos were (re)introduced. And there’d be Charles Bronfman, who is now 91, throwing the ceremonial first pitch to welcome baseball back to Montreal.

It would make for one of the best and most emotional moments in recent major-league history. There’s no disputing that. The Expos, revived via expansion or relocation, would be a comeback story for the ages.

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“It would really be something,” says Danny Gallagher, a former Expos beat reporter who has written eight books about the franchise.

“Lots of tears,” Jegher adds. “A lot of hard work and water under the bridge.”

Whenever MLB elects to expand to 32 franchises, Montreal will deliver its pitch for a second chance. In a vacuum, it’s an almost ideal fit. There’s already an established Expos brand, a beloved logo, a hungry fan base, a rich history of baseball in both the majors and minors, and a city with a metropolitan population of 4.3 million situated not far from MLB’s current East Coast footprint, where MLB exhibitions in the past decade have been well attended.

“The people really love baseball,” former Expos pitcher Dennis Martínez told The Athletic in 2019. “Montreal knew baseball, and baseball knew Montreal.”

But Major League Baseball in 2023 does not exist in a vacuum. While each city that will be a candidate for MLB expansion faces financial and logistical hurdles, Montreal will endure a whole other set: like explaining how a franchise that adhered to Murphy’s Law — whatever could go wrong, did — deserves a sequel. For some, a sour taste remains. It’s been 22 years since all but two MLB owners voted to contract the Expos, 21 years since they were sold to MLB, 20 years since they started playing some home games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and 18 years since they left Montreal for good.

The Expos exited to a dirge. It was Sept. 29, 2004, and 31,395 packed Olympic Stadium to say goodbye. (Only 5,416 attended the previous game.) “A lot of people showed up to see the funeral,” Gallagher says. Earlier that day, MLB had announced the franchise was relocating to Washington D.C. At Olympic Stadium, there were tears, resignation and fury. The game was delayed briefly after a fan chucked a golf ball onto the field. The Expos got smoked.

From a zoomed-out perspective, trying to make sense of awarding Montreal a new franchise (or even half of one) less than two decades later boggles the mind.

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Then you hear the stories.

Montreal baseball historian Patrick Carpentier was a year old when the Expos came to Montreal. His uncle had season tickets, and little Patrick tagged along whenever he could. “I got bitten by the baseball bug then,” he says, cheerily. He still has his first Expos cap, the tri-colored one he bought at Jarry Park in 1972. He remembers the early 1980s when the Expos, with Tim Raines and Gary Carter and Andre Dawson, were as popular among his friends as the Canadiens.

Stephen Bronfman was 5 when his father brought MLB to Montreal. He grew up around ballplayers, like Rusty Staub stopping by the Bronfman family apartment for lunch. Before weekend home games, Bronfman and his father would pick up a bucket of chicken at the KFC on Parc Avenue, then sit behind home plate to watch batting practice and eat. Bronfman, now 58, can still see that scene, smell the fried chicken, feel the peanut shells beneath his sneakers.

“There’s a lot of memories, a lot of my life that’s gone into it,” Bronfman told The Athletic a few years ago, “and that’s why I’m really trying to reinvent it.”

Nostalgia is perhaps the most powerful narrative in the attempt to bring baseball back to Montreal. It has immense pull. It is laced through almost every answer from those rooting to restore an MLB franchise to the city. They talk about the best days of Expos fandom, about their fondest memories at the “Big O,” about the players whose batting stances they mimicked in the backyard.

And they talk about what could have been. If the Expos had ever had a ballpark built for them. If Gary Carter hadn’t been traded in 1984. If the 1994 strike hadn’t halted the best season in Expos history. If ownership hadn’t shown four All-Stars — Larry Walker, John Wetteland, Marquis Grissom and Ken Hill — the door directly afterward. If they hadn’t traded 25-year-old Pedro Martínez after his first Cy Young Award season in 1997. If Jeffrey Loria had never come along.

“If this had happened in another market, they’d have lost their team too,” says Matthew Ross, who in 2011 founded ExposNation, a group that worked closely with Bronfman and promoted the efforts of the Montreal Baseball Group.

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The story nostalgia tells about the Expos is one of rotten luck, catastrophic leadership and unfinished business. Strip away the nostalgia and the notion that the Expos reborn would flourish still requires at least a small share of blind belief. When it comes to the Expos, though, there’s no shortage of believers.

What was most striking about the implosion of the Rays’ split-city concept a year ago was the disconnect between the reactions of casual fans — many of whom thought the idea far too outlandish to ever be implemented — and the men on either side of the nixed deal. They really thought it would work.

Rays owner Stu Sternberg called the decision “flat-out defeating,” like he’d been “betrayed” by his fellow owners. He said a two-city plan would be the “wave of the future in professional sports.” (When asked to elaborate on that thought for this story, Sternberg, through a spokesperson, declined the interview request.)

Bronfman called it a “bloody eulogy,” like Montreal had gotten “slapped in the face.” He spoke with reporters for more than an hour and sounded genuinely hurt.

Stephen Bronfman repeatedly mentions The Athletic's MLB fan poll which ran yesterday where 45.4 percent of roughly 11,500 respondents wanted to see Montreal get the next franchise.

Here's the poll:

— Arpon Basu (@ArponBasu) January 20, 2022

“This chapter’s closed,” he said. “At this point, I kind of put my hands in the air. I was really sold on the project we were working on. It’s not happening. I’ve not given much thought to anything else. Would I love to see Montreal have a baseball team? Of course. How is it going to happen? I don’t know. Is it viable? I think so, (but) I don’t know. We’re a major-league city. People have my email. They have my number. I’m happy to help and discuss — but not today.”

And still not yet. Bronfman declined an interview for this story. (He did, however, permit Jegher to participate.) The day the Tampa-Montreal plan was scuttled, Bronfman indicated it was time to take a break from baseball and resume his regular business. He has not spoken publicly about the episode since.

To Jegher, the purpose of the split-city plan, and the point worth taking away from it, was that innovative solutions are available and viable, even if the league isn’t yet ready for them. A split-city concept is an answer to a problem not everyone would admit is an issue at all: that MLB, with the longest season in pro sports, has a supply problem. If you take the product — a team’s 81 home games — and move it around, sharing the season between two mid-sized markets, the thinking goes, you’d see better attendance on the balance and reap the benefits of a much larger combined media market.

Thanks for your value-add thoughts. Thinking outside the box is not dumb; what's dumb is people who think that there's no room for innovation in a sport that's literally been doing things the same thing for 140 years. Have a nice day.

— William Jegher (@wjegher) July 20, 2022

In Montreal, reactions varied. Having half a team would be bizarre but “better than nothing,” Gallagher said. Carpentier saw more support for the split-season plan than he had expected: “There were a lot of people in Montreal rooting for it, because they thought it was the only way baseball would come back.”

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“I think there were two schools,” Jegher says. “There was a school of people who were diehard Expos fans. They don’t want to hear anything other than bringing back my Expos, my tri-colored hats, the great unis, everything like that. I fully respect that. I was one of those people too. But when you start thinking about the economics behind it, you start saying to yourself, ‘Can you really make this work?’ There is no doubt in my mind that if you brought the Expos back tomorrow, the place would be sold out. It would be the biggest party in Major League Baseball for a solid five years. And then, like anything, the excitement wanes a little bit, and the team could have a couple bad seasons, and all of a sudden you’re looking around and there’s nobody here.

“The other school just wants baseball back, in some shape or form.”

Jegher heard the conspiracies floated in Montreal baseball circles at the time that the Rays splitting the season between Montreal and Tampa was simply Step 1, and Step 2 would be the Rays moving to Montreal full-time. “That was never discussed,” he says. “That was never the plan.” The split-city plan, for all its complexities, was a simple timeshare. And then it was toast.

An alluring aspect of the split-city concept, it should be noted, is that it would not require an exorbitant expansion fee, which Manfred has estimated could be in the ballpark of $2.2 billion — a remarkable sum for any city or ownership group to fork over.

For that reason, Bronfman always favored relocation. It’s unclear whether he and his investment partners would even pursue an expansion opportunity. “That’s a completely different business plan (and) model,” Bronfman said after the Tampa-Montreal plan was axed, according to the Montreal Gazette. The cost of building a ballpark alone would be an expensive enough endeavor for an ownership group.

The Expos never had a ballpark built for them. It’s an issue as old as they were. They had such trouble finding a temporary first home during expansion talks in the 1960s that the National League owners nearly revoked the franchise from Montreal and awarded it to Buffalo, N.Y. The Expos played at Jarry Park for eight seasons, then moved to Olympic Stadium, which was built for the 1976 Summer Olympics — an all-time public works boondoggle that saddled Montreal with $1.6 billion in debt and taught many Montrealers to be wary of publicly subsidizing sports.

“People remember that,” Carpentier says, adding that it took 30 years for Montreal to repay the construction cost of Olympic Stadium — known locally as the “Big Owe” — and “people would think once or twice” before contributing a dime to the building of a new ballpark in Montreal. They’ve been burned before. Montreal mayor Valérie Plante has remained supportive of the Montreal Baseball Group, but she has said no taxpayer money will be used on a stadium.

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Olympic Stadium still stands — it hosted MLB exhibitions from 2014 to 2019 — but MLB expressed to Bronfman that landing a team again would require a firm plan for the financing and construction of a new ballpark.

In recent years, the Montreal Baseball Group targeted a parcel of federal land at the Peel Basin, about two kilometers from the Bell Centre and downtown Montreal, to build a 32,000-seat stadium. They commissioned architectural renderings, geotechnical studies and water-table studies, and they drew up a development plan for an open-air ballpark and a surrounding ballpark district.

All for naught. The land will now be for something other than baseball.

For the past year, there has mostly been silence from the Montreal Baseball Group. Then, this past fall, Mitch Garber, one of the group’s lead investors, indicated he has no interest in bringing a full-season franchise to Montreal.

“Playing 162 games is a lot of games in today’s culture and the short attention span,” Garber told Gallagher in an article for Canadian Baseball Network. “I believe baseball is dead for us and I don’t want to have to perpetuate that.”

By the time MLB is ready for formal expansion conversations in the coming years, maybe the Montreal Baseball Group will change its tune, or perhaps another potential ownership group will emerge. The expansion timeline is moving at a glacial pace, and a lot can happen while the baseball world waits.

Jegher isn’t in a position to speak for Bronfman and the Montreal Baseball Group’s future plans, but he does know you can’t create a ballclub out of thin air. There must be opportunity for expansion or relocation, and, currently, there is none. “In order for there to be a reason to keep going,” Jegher says, “we have to have something tangible to grab onto.”

It’s like what Bronfman told The Athletic’s Arpon Basu almost five years ago: They were at a tipping point, he said, and an opportunity — something concrete — needed to arise soon to keep momentum alive. “I’m an optimist, but a realist,” Bronfman said. “You can only keep that flame burning for so long.” Then came the split-city concept. It felt concrete to him, but, in the end, crumbled.

However it would happen, Jegher still dreams of the day the Expos come home. Less for his sake than for the kids growing up in Montreal today, like his 16-year-old son, who have no local MLB team to adore and obsess over as he did.

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Interest in baseball declined precipitously when the Expos left in 2004. Youth baseball participation in the province declined by 30 percent from 2004 to 2007, according to Quebec Baseball. But just like the rallying cries for an Expos comeback, participation has rebounded significantly since then, with twice as many players registered in 2022 (35,845) as in 2008 (17,848). The foundation has been laid for the next generation of Expos fans.

About a decade ago, when Jegher’s son was 6, he woke up one morning and asked, “Dad, did we win last night?”

“Who’s we?” Jegher asked.

“The Jays,” his son said.

He has since sworn to switch allegiances if the Expos ever come back.

(Top image: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: iStock)