A little over two weeks since Michel Laplante decided to abandon his position with the Capitals, the mystery about his future projects still persists. His good friend Marc Griffin hopes that he decides 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 huge for a team in the Montreal area and, in the past, Griffin and Laplante have worked on this line together. They are still on the board of directors of Baseball Quebec.
«Honnêtement, je ne sais pas ce que Michel a en tête précisément. All I think is that you don’t pass the gaming genre anywhere in 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
Obviously, it is the stadium project that is failing. Griffin admired that the Capitals have managed to establish in Quebec with the dome which covers the Canac stadium during the Capitals’ off-season and which serves as much for baseball sports studies as for many other sports people in the community.
“Michel has invaluable experience in all the projects that make Québec born. We would 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 end up with Arrival,” believes Griffin.
after 20 years
Two years after the departure of the 2004 Expos, the stadium projects are being scrapped to create an independent baseball team that is moving forward, according to Griffin.
By banking on the Quebec model with Laplante, he hoped that municipal and government authorities would see it as a project with a very high rate of use by the community.
In Quebec, for 80 hours per week of the year.
“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 to make it work. I’m convinced he’s going to want to get involved in that, but it remains to be seen at what level,” said Griffin.
A franchise of the Ligue Frontière would cost around a million and a stadium, between 40 and 50 million, according to Laplante at Diary last August.
