The Short Answer
There was no Montreal Expos team in 1967. The National League awarded Montreal a franchise in May 1968, and the Expos played their first games in the 1969 season. Their first home park was Jarry Park, a small ground in the north of the city. So the “1967 Expos” in the title is best read as a question about Montreal in 1967, and about how the city went from hosting a world’s fair to hosting a major league club within two years.
The confusion has an obvious source. The name “Expos” came from Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal from April to October 1967, and the two are easy to blend together.
Montreal in 1967
Expo 67 opened in late April 1967 and ran into the autumn on islands in the St. Lawrence River. It was part of Canada’s Centennial year, marking 100 years since Confederation, and was widely considered a success. It drew tens of millions of visits over the season, with pavilions from dozens of countries and a theme drawn from a French book title, usually rendered as “Man and His World.” Mayor Jean Drapeau was the public face of the project, and the fair gave Montreal a new international profile. A separate article on this site covers Expo 67 itself.
The summer also had its political moments. French President Charles de Gaulle visited in July and delivered a speech from the balcony of City Hall, ending with a line about “free Quebec” that caused a diplomatic row. It is a reminder that 1967 in Montreal combined celebration with tension over Quebec’s place in Canada.
For baseball, the significance was practical. The city had shown it could host a very large event, had a growing infrastructure, including a new subway system opened in 1966, and had a civic leadership eager for a major league identity. Drapeau in particular was determined to bring a team to the city.
Baseball in Montreal Before the Majors
Montreal already had a long minor league tradition. The Montreal Royals, a Dodgers affiliate in the International League, had played there for decades, and Jackie Robinson spent the 1946 season with them before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers the next year. The Royals left in 1960. So the city had a baseball past, but not a major league one.
How Montreal Won a Franchise
Through the mid-1960s the National League was looking to expand. The Mets and Houston Colt .45s had joined in 1962, and by the end of the decade there was strong pressure to add more clubs. In 1967 the National League’s owners were considering expansion, and the American League was planning its own after the Athletics’ move to Oakland left Kansas City without a team.
The National League voted on its new cities in May 1968 and chose Montreal and San Diego, to start play in 1969. The Montreal bid was led by Drapeau and backed by Charles Bronfman, an heir to the Seagram family, who became the principal owner. Bronfman’s money and the city’s recent world’s fair experience helped persuade the league. Montreal thus became the first major league franchise outside the United States. (The Toronto Blue Jays, in the American League, followed in 1977.)
The team’s name was chosen to recall Expo 67, which gave the franchise a link to the summer that had made the case for it.
Jarry Park
The new team needed a stadium quickly. Because Drapeau’s plans for a large new stadium would take years, the Expos started in Jarry Park, a municipal ground in a northern neighbourhood used for amateur baseball and other events. It was expanded to seat roughly 28,000 for the Expos, with temporary stands, and it sat in an open setting with views of the city.
Jarry Park was not ideal: it was small, exposed to the weather and sometimes difficult to reach. But it was also intimate, and the Expos’ early crowds there are remembered with fondness. The club stayed at Jarry Park through the 1976 season before moving to Olympic Stadium, built for the 1976 Summer Games.
The First Seasons
The Expos opened on 8 April 1969 with a win against the Mets at Shea Stadium in New York. Their first home game, played at Jarry Park a few days later, was a win over the Cardinals. They lost more than 100 games in their first year, as new expansion teams typically do. Their first-year standing was poor, and they did not reach the postseason until the strike-shortened 1981 season.
The club remained in Montreal until the end of the 2004 season and then moved to Washington, where it became the Nationals. That later history is outside the scope of this article, but it is part of why the Expos are remembered as a team of promise and heartbreak.
What the 1967 Link Really Is
The Expos’ history does not begin in 1967, but the year matters. Expo 67 gave the city its confidence and its name for the team. The Centennial summer showed that Montreal could stage events on a global scale. And in the years that followed, that confidence was converted into a baseball franchise. So there was no Montreal Expos team in 1967, but the work that created one was being done in that same year.