What is Reddit's opinion of Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Until there's a plan to put a team back in Montreal, it's just being a cocktease.

And for those of who were too young or too drunk or just apathetic when the Expos were around (I'm in the first and second groups), go read Up, Up, and Away by Johnah Keri. He released it last year, and it's a great history of a team that could have been great but got the shaft in a lot of ways.

From Jonah Keri's Up, Up, and Away!:

> Chalk it up to the Jays’ shrewdness, the Expos rolling over, an inevitable decision once Toronto got its own franchise, or all of the above. Whatever the case, Kuhn’s decision ravaged the Expos franchise, causing more long-term harm, arguably, than Blue Monday or anything else that happened on the field.

> While the Montreal metro area, then as now, ranked around middle of the pack in terms of major league cities’ market size, the Expos would later face obstacles that other teams didn’t have to overcome. The widening gap between the American and Canadian dollars became a problem, with the Expos collecting local revenue in Canadian dollars but paying the bulk of their expenses (most notably player salaries) in American funds. While the Expos remained mired at Olympic Stadium, the attendance and ticket price booms that rival teams got from building new ballparks widened the gap between Montreal and the rest of the league. The Big O’s deteriorating condition and generally unappealing backdrop for baseball was one of several factors that drove fans away. These and many other poor business conditions would later make it impossible for the Expos to stay afloat (much less turn a profit or even“) unless the team slashed payroll by trading away star players and letting them leave via free agency. Had those other problems not cropped up, sure, maybe the Expos could’ve subsisted on TV and radio revenue derived primarily from Quebec and the Maritime provinces. But with all those factors collectively working against them, they couldn’t afford to lose the southern Ontario market.

> “As soon as they lost access to southern Ontario, they lost the heart of the Canadian commercial business, corporate support, and sponsorship support,” said Van Horne. “All of a sudden, the Montreal Expos were exactly that. They were Montreal’s team. They were no longer Canada’s team, and they couldn’t survive just being Montreal’s team.

That was 1984 or 1985, but it was a key in the decline of the team. It stung especially bad for Montreal, because the Expos had petitioned MLB to bring the Jays to Toronto.