Photo Courtesy of the Thetford Blue Sox
Some sports teams move out of a city and a stadium but can a whole stadium move out of the city? In some cases, this has happened, and one of them is Stade des Caisses Desjardins in Thetford Mines, Quebec, which was once part of Autostade in Montreal, perhaps one of the most infamous stadiums in Canadian Football League history.
Thetford Mines is located 141 miles northwest of Montreal and is known mostly as the asbestos capital of Canada but for some time it was home to minor league baseball in both the Provincial and Eastern Leagues from 1953 to 1975.
However, within a few years, the old wooden stadium would be razed and a CFL stadium in Montreal would be disassembled with parts sent to town to form a new baseball stadium home to softball and amateur baseball.
Autostade opened in 1966 and was composed of 19 identical prefabricated seating stands. It was constructed using prestressed columns and beams. The grandstand had wide gaps between each seating section, which not only separated fans but allowed for chilly winds to sweep through the facility during late fall games.
The Alouettes became the primary tenants in 1968 after moving from Percival Molson Stadium. Due to its distance from downtown Montreal and the frigid winds of the nearby St. Lawrence River, crowds were fleeting at the mod facility. The club would average around 18,000 fans per game during its eight-season tenure.
File Photo
The 33,000 seats sloped towards the field level promising great views anywhere in the stadium. Unfortunately, its oval design seemed better suited for Australian Rules Football than the Canadian version. Two-thirds of the stadium's seating was located behind the goal line, and the venue was accessible only by car.
Its biggest moment might have been the 1969 Grey Cup where a record of 33,172 watched the country’s biggest football game. The game was played under truculent conditions due to ongoing concerns over the FLQ separatist terrorist bombing activities in Quebec. Police officers in full riot gear secured the stadium and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau participated in the ceremonial opening kickoff without incident.
During the Als seven seasons at the stadium, attendance would range from an average of 12,169 per game in 1969 to close to 25,000 during the team’s 1970 Grey Cup championship campaign in what Glen Cole of the Canadian Press referred to as “one of the worst football stadiums in North America.”
Attendance was bleak enough that team owner Sam Berger relocated the Larks back to their original home in 1972. The plan soon proved disappointing with attendance dropping by 60,000; the team would return to Autostade the following season.
“The worst place I ever played in all my years of football. It was always windy, usually colder than most places in the fall, and just plain ugly,” said late Ottawa Rough Rider and CFL Hall of Famer Moe Racine in his memoir “Never My Dream”.
Photo Courtesy of Bill Dutfied (billd@acm.org)
In 1975, nearly half of the seats at the stadium were discounted in hopes of increasing attendance; it was the third time in three years that prices were lowered and attendance increased by 26 percent. The next year the Als would play the first professional event at the brand new Olympic Stadium in front of a record crowd of 68,505, and many including Montreal Gazette journalist Earl McRae would not miss the vapid facility.
“...the miserable, mournful stadium on a desolate section along the St. Lawrence. Rats scurried brazenly throughout the structure, mousetraps were scattered by the hundreds to catch them, lousy food was served by concessions, and rainwater poured through the ceiling of team offices..”
Interestingly, Autostade was almost home to the National League expansion Montreal Expos in 1969. The plan was for the stadium to serve as a temporary venue for the club before a $35 million, 55,000-seat domed stadium would open in time for the 1971 season.
The plan was also to expand the seating from 25,000 to 40,000 and cover it with a domed roof. Initial costs were estimated to be $5 million but quickly swelled to $7 million, a pricey sum for a temporary ballpark that included a paved track around the field.
The choice was then made for the Expos to convert Jarry Park into a temporary major league ballpark and would use it for the next 9 seasons. The dimensions and location close to downtown made it the most logical choice for the baseball club. By 1977, football and baseball were attracting huge crowds to Olympic Stadium, leading to the eventual closure of Autostade.
Around the same time minor league baseball in Thetford Mines was coming to an end after two seasons. The old wooden ballpark was home to the Thedford Mines Miners from 1953-1956 in the Provincial League but had been absent for almost two decades until the Pittsburgh Pirates placed an Eastern League franchise in the city in 1974.
The placement was temporary but the club captured the league championship and featured future All-Stars Willie Randolph and Tony Armas. Randolph, who had played in sunny Charleston, South Carolina, the year before was shocked by conditions in Thetford Mines as he recalled in Yankee Magazine in 2016.
" It was kind of a makeshift situation because the team wasn't planning to play there, but they were forced to. It was really cold, and the ballpark we were playing in didn't even have clubhouses. We had to get dressed at a hockey rink and walk over to the ballpark.
Randolph added that the field was so bad that the team manager Tim Murtaugh--who said in the book Beating the Bushes that “an empty lot was cleared, a canvas backdrop was tossed up and someone hollered, "Play ball!"-- would not allow his players out on the field. He would recant in 1989 to the Los Angeles Times
"It was so bad they had to condemn it. There had been a lot of rain, and they had these big steamrollers on the field. Well, in short, center field, one of the steamrollers sank down about 10 feet, leaving a big crater.
The Bucs drew a season crowd of 22,516 for an average of 322 fans and would leave town at the end of the year. The Milwaukee Brewers replaced them but attracted a dismal 16,000 fans for the final season. Soon, the old ballpark was razed and just an empty grass field remained.
The city, needing a new ballpark, went the unconventional route--they bought themselves pieces of a football stadium. They then reassembled into what would be used as a 5,000-seat baseball stadium that included three sections and a press box from what was once Autostade.
In February of 1978, the City of Thetford Mines handed a memorandum to the Minister of Urban Affairs to purchase five sections of Autostade to replace the old stadium park and revive the land. Five months later, the sections were purchased and construction began in August 1979. A cost of $350,000 was made to acquire, transfer, and reconstruct the bleachers to its new home.
The park would be home to softball for the next 33 years, hosting the 1982 Senior Men's Canadian Fastpitch Championships that attracted large attendance figures. Then in 2010, Francois Lécuyer, a local businessman, brought baseball to the stadium with the Thetford Blue Sox, a semi-professional team in the Ligue de Baseball Senior Élite du Québec.
Photo Courtesy of the Thetford Blue Sox
To prepare for baseball, fences were reinstalled, locker rooms were built, and team headquarters were established beneath the stands. Since 2012, the Sox have won six league championships and draw between 500 and 1,000 fans per game.
Professional baseball returned in 2014 for one game when the city hosted the Quebec Capitales of the Can-Am League for an exhibition game, and 5,000 spectators filled the stands on Canada Day. Baseball is thriving once again during the summer months in Thetford Mines, but one has to scratch their heads and wonder why its existence appears to be an enigma to most people.
It appears to many that the remnants of Autostade make up Stade des Caisses Desjardins but perhaps there is a reason for it. There was little fanfare in Montreal when the CFL stadium was torn down; the stadium was in service for a decade and was quickly put out of mind once Olympic Stadium opened.
Also, the ballpark was never to be converted into a temporary baseball facility for the Expos. This could have thrust the venue’s attention to major league cities and with copious video footage and former players' testimonies, might have left a little more resonance on the public's attention in Montreal.
Photo Courtesy of Google
Sure, it looked decorative for visitors during Expo ‘67; however, there was not too much time for anyone to reminisce or become teary-eyed about the place, especially when the Alouettes averaged over 54,000 fans per game during the first two seasons at Olympic Stadium.
Today, Stade des Caisses Desjardins is the home of amateur baseball during the summer months in Thetford Mines. When fans take in a Blue Sox game, they are sitting in stands that were once created to watch professional football in Montreal more than 55 years ago.
Who knew the legacy of Autostade is still alive and well in Quebec?
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Follow Marc’s stadium journeys on Twitter @ballparkhunter and his YouTube channel. Email at Marc.Viquez@stadiumjourney.com
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