Nos Amours

a baseball sonnet

Notes:

1. Nos Amours (“Our Loves”) was the popular nickname for the Montreal Expos, MLB’s first franchise outside the United States, founded in 1969 and named after Expo 67, Montreal’s World’s Fair. The team relocated to Washington, D.C., after the 2004 season and became the Nationals.

2. In 1994, the Expos had the best record in baseball at 74-40 — on pace for 106 wins — when the players’ strike cancelled the remainder of the season and the World Series. Unable to absorb the financial losses, the team sold off its core players. Many fans and historians regard the strike as the beginning of the end for baseball in Montreal. When the team was honored at Olympic Stadium in 2014, a banner read On se souvient Édition 1994 — “We remember the 1994 season.”

3. In 1946, Jackie Robinson played for the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate, the year before he broke MLB’s color barrier. Montreal embraced Robinson warmly — his teammate Jean-Pierre Roy recalled that “in Montréal, he was always respected as a baseball player.” After the Royals won the Little World Series that October, fans carried Robinson on their shoulders and then chased him joyfully through the streets. Sportswriter Sam Maltin wrote it was “probably the only day in history that a Black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

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