A little more than two weeks after Michel Laplante decided to leave his position with the Capitals, the mystery about his future projects still persists. His good friend Marc Griffin wants him to decide to devote even more time to the project of establishing a professional baseball team in Montreal, which has been stagnating for years.
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When announcing his departure, Laplante did not specify his ambitions for the coming months. However, he indicated that if there was one unfinished business in his career, it was the baseball project in Montreal which ultimately did not come to fruition.
During the last meetings of the Frontier League, where the Quebec Capitales, the Trois-Rivières Aigles and the Ottawa Titans play, the administrators decided that they would like to see the circuit increase to at least 20, even 24 teams. a few years from now. .
The opening is great for a team from the Montreal region and, in the past, Griffin and Laplante have worked together on this file. They are still part of the board of directors of Baseball Quebec.
“Honestly, I don’t know exactly what Michel has in mind. All I can think is that he’s not the type of guy to work a full-time 9-5 job.
“We’ve been working on this for years. [Montréal] and we want it to succeed. Will Michel try even harder now that he is free as air? I don’t know, but he certainly has an interest. We have already started our business and he will not close the door on that. If he’s a little more available, no one’s going to complain about it,” Griffin said in a phone interview.
The Quebec model
Many young Quebec athletes take advantage of the dome facilities at Canac stadium during the Capitals’ off-season.
Obviously, it is the stadium project that is stumbling. Griffin admires what the Capitales have managed to implement in Quebec with the dome that covers Canac stadium during the Capitales’ off-season and which is used as much by baseball sports studies as by many other athletes in the community.
“Michel has invaluable experience on all the projects he has brought to life in Quebec. We’d be crazy not to use it.
“It’s not easy when we talk about baseball infrastructure projects in Quebec, even if we’re not talking about a major league stadium. It’s always a difficult sell, but I think that with Michel, we will eventually get there,” believes Griffin.
For almost 20 years
Just two years after the Expos left in 2004, stadium plans to bring back an independent baseball team were emerging, according to Griffin.
By banking on the Quebec model with Laplante, he hopes that municipal and government authorities will see it as a project with a very high rate of use by the community.
In Quebec, we are talking about 80 hours per week all year round.
“People in the cities don’t yet understand it well enough, but what Michel did in Quebec is truly community-based. They have the experience and the data. When Michel launched this, he started with a model that didn’t exist. We now know that everything is in place to make it work. I’m confident he’ll want to be involved in that, but it remains to be seen at what level,” Griffin said.
A Border League franchise would cost around a million and a stadium, between 40 and 50 million, according to what Laplante indicated to Journal last August.
