I totally agree with JaJ. There is nobody who lives around the stadium who just walks down to watch baseball. If they had build on the proposed downtown site, they would have had access to hundreds of thousands of business people pouring out of work who could walk to the game after work the same they do for the Montreal Canadiens. The same thing happens in many US cities as well. Location, location, location!!!!!!!!
Here's another reason why they've had a hard time to get their fans to come out. After losing the best chance they ever had to go to the World Series in 1994 with the strike (which the players won to avoid a salary cap which is destroying baseball), then enduring the fire sales where they had to unload Larry Walker, Marquis Grisom, Tim Raines, Jeff Reardon, Ken Hill, Gary Carter to name the few I can remember, to always lose incredible prospects they develoed in their farm system to free agency (Moises Alou, Pedro Martinez, Vladimir Guerero, Orlando Cabrera and so on), and then to top it all off, have a dirt bag like Jeffrey Loria conspire with Bud Selig to choke the team to death by announcing a contraction they knew they could never do (what happened to Minnesota????), its amazing they continued to draw as well as they did!
In fact, every home opener I've been to including up to this year, has been a sellout, drawing between 43,000 up to almost 50,000 fans (used to have more seats). Unfortunately, after a while, you get tired of never knowing when MLB was going to pull the plug on the Expos.
Personally, I hope the deal does get blocked only to cause Bud Selig maximum grief, and hopefully the owners will figure out that this guy couldn't manage a McDonalds, and get rid of him.