The Forgotten Story of ... the world's best baseball stadium – that was never built

The best major league baseball park that was never built now lives forever in a glass case. The case is sealed, protecting the best major league park that was never built from dust and grime and wobbly people who don’t watch their step. This is because the scale model of the best major league baseball park that was never built is too big to tuck away and too precious to destroy so it sits like beautiful but useless furniture on the lobby floor of the Montreal architecture firm Provencher Roy.

The best major league baseball park that was never built was given a name: Labatt Park. It had a site; in downtown Montreal, just southeast of the Bell Center, home to hockey’s Canadiens. The best major league baseball park that was never built was going to be tiny, with only 35,000 seats. It would have given fans in even the worst seats a sense they were close to the field. It would have had a grace unique to any ballpark – modern but not utilitarian. It would have been … perfect.

“Ahhh, it’s a shame it didn’t get built,” Eugenio Carelli said with a sigh. Carelli is one of the architects who designed Labatt Park. Before the late 1990s, when Provencher Roy was approached by the Montreal Expos to create their new home, the team led by Claude Provencher had never built a stadium. This didn’t bother them. They designed grand civic buildings in public places. The Expos park gave them a chance to make something memorable, something distinctive.

Carelli took a trip of a few days around North America, studying the best new sports stadiums. He visited Baltimore’s Camden Yards and was taken by Cleveland’s Jacobs (now Progressive) Field. Then he came back to Montreal and set about designing something great. What sits in the glass case of Provencher Roy’s lobby is a ballpark like none in baseball today.

While Labatt Field would have opened into a downtown skyline like the stadiums in Baltimore, Cleveland, Seattle and Pittsburgh, it would not have the clunky, retro look of a 1930s ballpark. An original proposal for a Camden Yards-type park ringed in brick, was scuttled at the suggestion of legendary architect Richard Meier (a friend of then-Expos owner Jeffrey Loria), replaced with something sleeker. The ultimate design of Labatt Park gave an image of a wishbone rather than the box other stadium designers were making. There was nothing old-fashioned about Labatt Park, nothing to evoke a time lost. Provencher wanted something that would stand out, something more distinctive.

“Baseball is a fluid game,” Carelli said, staring down that the model on the lobby floor. “I think it goes well. It’s not like the Astrodome or the round stadiums. We wanted to make something contemporary. We wanted something that spoke of our times.”

Contemporary is always dangerous when building stadiums. Montreal got contemporary when it built Olympic Stadium for the 1976 Olympics and turned it into the Expos’ home for 27 years. Olympic Stadium was a dreary relic to a modernist view of a sports facility, a monument of concrete and garish yellow seats, covered by an enormous overhang that was supposed to be topped with a retractable roof that never worked. The roof was supposed to fold up into a tower that looms over the stadium. Eventually a permanent blue roof covered Olympic Stadium and the tower remains, awkwardly arcing over the stadium like a huge decapitated swan.

The ball park was going to be a happy place, built for the super low sum of $200m. No space would be wasted. Perhaps the park’s most endearing feature was the intimacy it was going to give. Even though the new ballparks were being built closer to the action, the fans were actually sitting farther away because the new parks put the bulk of their seats in the first tier – giving an impression of being close while not being close at all.

Labatt Park’s bottom tier was small, only about 25 rows.

Because of this, the architects drew a steeper upper deck that dangled low over the field. In the stadium even the fans in the last row of the last tier would feel as if they were hovering over the action rather than being detached observers too far from the players to see their numbers.

Maybe because Provencher had never built a stadium before, he never saw the politics that sabotaged his project. Big league baseball in Montreal had been a three-decade struggle. Once the city had been a thriving minor league city, most famous in game’s lore for being the place that welcomed Jackie Robinson to professional baseball. But stadium fiascos and economic burdens plagued the Expos’ ability to be a winning team. A chance for momentum was lost in 1994 when the season was scrapped by a lockout with the Expos in first place in the National League East. When team president Claude Brochu asked Provencher Roy to design a new home, Carelli had every reason to believe the project would be built.

Carelli found it odd that when Loria assumed control of the team in 1999 that he only attended one meeting about the new park, but shook off any feelings of concern. The project kept moving forward until 2002, when the plans were 75% complete. Then one day he got a call. The stadium was off. Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard did not want to spend any public money – no matter how small – for a new stadium when the old Olympic Stadium was still being paid off. Labatt Park would never be built.

“I have never had a project as advanced as this one without being built,” Carelli said.

Loria cashed out of Montreal, selling the team to Major League Baseball while taking over the Florida Marlins. After the 2004 season, the Expos moved to Washington, and developers began picking at the downtown site that would have been perfect for baseball. Today the skeletons of high rise condominiums rise from pieces of the plot that would have housed the best major league ballpark that was never built.

But even as Carelli gazes forlornly at the model of the perfect stadium, a movement is growing to bring it back – not as the structure under the glass but as some kind of home to another major league team. Former Expos outfielder Warren Cromartie has quietly been gathering potential owners to form a group that could buy another big league team and move it to Montreal. A common belief is that team could be the Tampa Bay Rays, if the Rays are unable to leave their own dreary indoor stadium much the way the Expos couldn’t nearly two decades ago.

Cromartie said in a phone interview that on a trip to Montreal four and a half years ago, someone tapped him on the shoulder and asked where the Expos Hall of Fame was. It was then that Cromartie realized no legacy of the old team existed. He decided to find a new team and build a new history.

“Why not me?” he said. “When I started this it was something I was supposed to do. I am the one.”

For the last two years baseball as staged exhibition games at Olympic Stadium and the response has been tremendous.

“It felt like a huge celebration of baseball the whole weekend,” said Mark Byrnes, a writer for Atlantic’s City Lab who attended this year’s exhibition games and wrote a nostalgic piece about Labatt Park.

In recent months, Cromartie and Carelli have been talking. Provencher is looking at other downtown sites for a possible stadium. To see if they work he lays the plans for Labatt Park over the prospective plots to see if a ballpark will fit. He is probably wiser this time, expecting nothing, careful about his dreams.

But if the right investors step forward and if a team can be bought and baseball agrees to let it move, a new stadium might indeed be built. It just won’t be Labatt Park.

“That was the coolest ballpark that never got built,” Cromartie said softly.

• This article was amended on 6 July 2015. The original article incorrectly stated that there were 15 rows in the lower tier of Labatt Park when there were actually 25. The stadium plans were also 75% complete rather than 90%, while Eugenio Carelli’s travels in North America to look at stadiums lasted a few days rather than a few months.