Expos fans swarm Toronto to urge return of MLB

About 1,000 Expos fans attended the game in Toronto Saturday. (Facebook ExposNation page)

About a 1,000 diehard Expos fans attended a game at the Rogers Centre in Toronto Saturday to show their support for the return of baseball to Montreal.

The Tampa Bay Rays, one of the MLB teams considered most likely to relocate due to their chronically weak attendance, was in town to play the struggling Jays.

However Expos Nation organizer Matthew Ross, a Montreal sports broadcaster who organized the event, said that his group is not intentionally angling to get the Rays to move to Montreal.

Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper tweeted his support for the cause Saturday. "I hope that the efforts of @ExposNation will one day be rewarded with a team in Montreal," he wrote.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, a Montreal MP who attended Expos games with his prime minister father as a child, sent out a series of messages supporting the cause.

"Good to see more than 1,000 members of Expos Nation attending the Blue Jays game today," Trudeau wrote on Twitter. "Gone but not forgotten!"

In recent years baseball pundits have repeatedly urged the return of baseball to Montreal, one of the largest cities in Canada and the United States without a MLB  team.

The supporters were largely clad in the still-popular Expos logo and attempted to snag as much attention as they could for their cause.

Professional baseball in Montreal thrived from the 1880s, starting at the old Driving Grounds on Mill St., one of several locations that has been mused as a possible site for a future downtown stadium. Since the Expos left after playing in the city between 1969 and 2004, no professional baseball has been played in or around the city.

Ross said the pain of the Expos 2004 messy departure has begun to dissipate.

These days, people are more focused on joyful memories, and the team's great like Andre Dawson, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2010, he said.

Last summer, several former Expos returned to Montreal to pay tribute to Hall of Famer Gary Carter, a fan favourite. A Montreal street was named after him earlier this year.

With a report from The Canadinan Press