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Monday, October 09, 2006
Montreal doesn’t want you Washington
In the cold world that is baseball statistics, the human element is ignored. Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference and likely many historians have decided that Washington Nationals and Montreal Expos belong to the same franchise, like here:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/
It makes me sick, and likely makes all Expos fans sick. It’s a tiny scale version of “And to the victor goes the spoils”. Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, and Gary Carter will never be voted part of Washington’s greatest players in franchise history. Some baseball historians will make you think that they should, based on their definition of what constitutes a franchise. I understand why they define a franchise as they do. That doesn’t make it right.
The Montreal Expos are a franchise on their own, from 1969 to 2004. They should be afforded the same respect as all the other defunct franchises. To live in their own history, without being a footnote to their conquerors, in the cold world that is baseball statistics.
It’s reality that should be represented, and not the shenanigans of who owned Jose Vidro’s and Frank Robinson’s contract to establish what makes a franchise.