Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante will meet this Friday with two men trying to bring a Major League Baseball team to the city: Stephen Bronfman and Mitch Garber.
The investors have been in talks with the MLB for years and said the league has already laid down some ground rules: a new stadium will be necessary, but wouldn't need to be built before a team moves to Montreal.
Bronfman and Garber do, however, want the city of Montreal's support and Robert Beaudry of the Montreal Executive Committee said the goal of Friday's meeting is to determine exactly what they want.
"We want to know where they are, right now, because actually we don't have much information, So it's going to be the first meeting to see what the project is about and how the city can be a partner of this project," said Beaudry.
Bronfman has said that if a team comes to Montreal, his group of investors would not ask the city of Montreal to contribute to the construction of a stadium, and building a stadium after a team is placed in the city would avoid the Quebec City boondoggle, where the provincial government and Quebecor built a $400 million hockey arena in the mistaken belief that it would house an NHL team; three years after it opened the arena is used about a dozen nights each month, most often by the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
Plante and other Projet Montreal members have advocated for a baseball team to play in the Olympic Stadium, but the MLB says the Big O is unsuitable as a permanent home for a baseball team, although officials have reportedly said it would be an acceptable temporary home while a new stadium is under construction.
Last month, for the fifth year in a row, the Blue Jays held exhibition games at the Olympic Stadium. Each game was attended by roughly 25,000 people.
