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 put even more time into the project of establishing a professional baseball team in Montreal, which has been stagnating for years.
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When he announced 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 did not end up being successful.
During the last meetings of the Frontier League, in which the Quebec Capitales, the Trois-Rivières Aigles and the Ottawa Titans play, the administrators ruled that they would like to see the circuit increase to at least 20, even 24 teams within a few years.
The opening is great for a team in the Montreal region and, in the past, Griffin and Laplante have worked on this file together. They are still on 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 go off to a full time 9 to 5 job.
“We’ve been working on this for years. [Montréal] and we want it to succeed. Will Michel put in even more effort now that he is free as air? I don’t know, but he sure has an interest. We’ve already started business and he won’t close the door on that. If he’s a little more available, no one is going to complain about that,” Griffin said in a telephone interview.
The Quebec model
Many young athletes from Quebec benefit from the dome facilities at Canac stadium, during the Capitals off-season.
Obviously, it is the stadium project that stumbles. 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 sportspeople 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
Photo STEVENS LEBLANC
Just two years after the Expos left in 2004, draft 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 understand it well enough yet, but what Michel did in Quebec is truly community-based. They have the experience and they have the data. When Michel launched this, he started from a model that didn’t exist. We now know that everything is there for it to work. I’m convinced he’s going to want to get 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.
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