The Washington Nationals have a complicated history with respect to their Montreal Expos origin story. As in, they don’t pay all that much attention to it. They’ve retired the numbers of a couple of Expos greats and have put them in their ring of honor -- and of course the Expos’ franchise records are, officially, part of the Nats history -- but it’s not a super close thing. Some Nationals fans go beyond ignoring that history to being downright hostile to the idea that the club they root for is carrying on the Expos’ tradition somehow.
Given that the Expos were intentionally run into the ground in a Major League Baseball-led gambit to reward Jeffrey Loria with a new franchise and relocate the team to a market the league had long been hungry to re-enter, Expos fans from back in the day put it in starker terms. From an article in the Washington Post a couple of years ago:
So, yeah, it’s not exactly a nostalgia-fest when it comes to the Expos and Nationals sordid historical stew.
For those of you more familiar with the Vlad Guerrero-era Expos livery, here’s what the 1969 throwbacks will look like:
Pretty sweet, even if it makes a lot of people kinda grumpy. Feelings don’t matter that much when there’s merch to sell, however.
The real question is how Stuart Sternberg and the Rays are gonna react to this given that the Nationals are trying to muscle in on what is, apparently, now their new market.
