Before David Samson developed a media career as a baseball and sports business analyst, he was most known for tearing down multiple beloved MLB teams.
Before he built and then assembled a championship Marlins roster, Samson helped orchestrate the departure of the Montreal Expos in the 1990s as team president. A newly announced Netflix documentary entitled Who Killed the Montreal Expos? retells this story from a local perspective.
Given the title, it is clear the series is tilted against the ownership group that sold the team and laid the groundwork for its move to Washington, D.C. This was all unbeknownst to Samson, apparently, who revealed this week that he eagerly sat for a nine-hour interview with the filmmakers.
It was not until this week when the series was announced, Samson said Thursday on The Dan Le Batard Show, that he realized he was likely to be the villain of the doc.
“When they said, ‘We’ll come to your house,’ I thought, hmm,” Samson laughed. “Then it was nine hours long, and I thought to myself, what’s this about again? And I didn’t know the title until yesterday, and it’s called ‘Who Killed the Montreal Expos?’ So I had to call my agent, I had to call my lawyer, I had to call my kids, and I said, ‘I may have made a mistake.'”
Samson and his stepfather Jeffrey Loria ran the Expos from 2001-03, using the money from selling the Montreal team to quickly purchase the Florida Marlins. The Marlins won a World Series in 2003, then sold off the core of that team in short order.
With a track record running both the Expos and Marlins into irrelevance, Samson is seen by some as a disliked executive that cared more for financial success than on-field success. So much so that he has built a character out of it in the Le Batard Show universe.
Somehow, David Samson still agreed to participate in the Netflix doc without realizing how he might be seen.
“I was doing the interview, thinking to myself while it’s going on, ‘I’m doing great,'” Samson added. “I’m slightly concerned with how the edit’s going to go.”
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.