MONTREAL — Twenty-two years after Frank McCourt fired him as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Dan Evans is in line for a second chance — with a team that does not yet exist. In 2002, Evans' first season as Dodgers GM, the club won 93 games, its most since the Kirk Gibson championship year of 1988, followed by 85 wins in 2003 with a rising farm system and a front office he staffed with scouting guru Logan White, who drafted Clayton Kershaw, and future general managers Kim Ng and A.J. Preller. McCourt bought the team before the 2004 season and replaced Evans with Paul DePodesta, immortalized in "Moneyball" and promptly tagged by Times columnist T.J. Simers as "Google Boy."
In the same year Evans left Los Angeles, the Expos left Montreal to become the Washington Nationals. If the bid to revive the Expos as an expansion team succeeds, Evans, 66, is the choice for president of baseball operations. "I love the idea of trying to put together something from the beginning," said Evans, 66. "I just think it would be a really wonderful place to call my final spot in baseball, to make a difference and bring a team back and set up a franchise for the next 20 years." After owners and players reach a new collective bargaining agreement, probably sometime next year, baseball is expected to invite bids for two expansion teams.
The Montreal effort is led by Karbasfrooshan, who acknowledges civic leaders distanced themselves after the 2022 collapse of the Tampa Bay Rays' proposed team-share concept between Montreal and St. Petersburg, Fla., and that public funds should not be used to build venues. "If we go out there and say we need a billion from taxpayers, it's not going to go anywhere," Karbasfrooshan said. The average MLB team is valued at $4 billion, according to CNBC, while the projected fee for an NBA expansion team in Las Vegas is $7 billion to $10 billion, with insiders anticipating an MLB expansion fee around or above $4 billion. Add roughly $2.5 billion for a retractable-roof ballpark and billions more for surrounding development — including restaurants and shops plus an immersive technology pavilion, an entrepreneurship academy and a "live beer-making process tied to Montreal's brewing heritage" — and Karbasfrooshan has been canvassing old and new money in Montreal, corporations, and private equity funds. "I'm not coming at this like some kind of social dilettante billionaire who thinks he's God's gift," he said. "I'm just a guy. I'm a nobody in many ways, but I'm a guy who built a world-class company and executes and fundraises and all that."
Karbasfrooshan said he is optimistic he has generated enough interest and recently spoke with a sports investment banker about "turning that interest into commitments," with a former NFL executive interested in becoming president of business operations and a former MLB executive in talks about stadium operations. "They wouldn't care if the capital wasn't there," Karbasfrooshan said. "But, if all factors are equal — if Salt Lake has capital and we have capital; if Raleigh has a stadium and we have a stadium — you can then show you have these people committed. In a way, it's doing a bit of their due diligence. They're going to maybe take you a little more seriously than if you're just a guy making noise." For now MLB is keeping an eye on the bid, though without billions in funding and a stadium site the rest remains flowery prose. Montreal is the largest market among projected expansion contenders, with history beyond the Expos — Branch Rickey dispatched Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers' triple-A team in Montreal after signing him to break the color barrier — and the oft-cited lack of fan support is largely a myth, the same playbook the Athletics ran in Oakland of trading away stars and blaming the ballpark.
Even if the bid stalls or a billionaire backer prefers another baseball operations leader, Evans said life has been good since McCourt sent him packing. For the next five years he scouted for the Seattle Mariners. "It kind of control-alt-deleted me and put me in a really good place," he said.