Montreal: a successful weekend, but what did it get them?

The Expos drew over 90,000 people to two exhibition games involving two pretty pedestrian teams over the weekend. That has Sean Fitz-Gerald of the National Post assessing where that places Montreal on the continuum of cities without Major League Baseball. He notes that MLB officials were quite pleased with what they saw, but ...

And for the foreseeable future, moving beyond the stalking horse phase — the phase where baseball can use Montreal’s name to shake money from cities nervous about losing their teams — will be difficult for Montreal.

That’s the real takeaway here, I feel. At least from baseball’s point of view. Gaining a city that can serve as a plausible alternative for current teams if and when they want to try to shake sweet stadium deals away from their cities. Washington D.C. served in that role for years, but eventually did get a team. Las Vegas, Portland and various places in North Carolina aren’t nearly as attractive as that, or as Montreal could be, in the event someone needs to bluff a move.

Most people in Montreal,I imagine, don’t want to play that role given how their team was taken away under such circumstances. But there’s no escaping that this past weekend -- in addition to being an enjoyable one for a lot of baseball-staved folks in the city -- put it on the map for such uses.