Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos (12 page)

Scott Sanderson made his major league debut in 1978, and immediately noticed the staff ace’s many rituals. Rogers’ pre-start routine never wavered. He prided himself on recognizing mound conditions so he could be unfailingly consistent in planting and landing the same way on every pitch. These customs weren’t so unusual for a successful starting pitcher. Rogers was just stricter about all of it, with fixations approaching kooky superstition. One of his loopier neuroses was to sit in exactly the same place between innings of every home start, on a towel a few inches from the rivets on the dugout’s fibreglass benches. Prankster teammates would inevitably move the towel just enough to drive Rogers crazy.

Young and impressionable, Sanderson soaked up all of Rogers’ habits and tics.

“Along with superstition comes discipline, attention to detail,” Sanderson said. “A lot of it was routine and very important to him. I learned great lessons about preparation, routine, discipline. He took the game very seriously. I’m analytical by nature, so that kind of discipline and routine sat very well with me.”

Rogers never seduced the baseball intelligentsia the way the more famous aces of his era did. But at his best, he could and did beat the best of his peers. He never did take home the award for the league’s best pitcher, but he was always “Cy” to his teammates—even though some members of the media tagged him as “Sigh” for his beefs with his managers, his periodic prickliness
with writers, and his occasional tendency to get visibly upset when a fielder behind him failed to make a play.

The most damaging mark against Rogers would come when he was scapegoated for the most infamous moment in Expos history (more on that later). But those with the common sense to avoid reducing a pitcher’s entire career to one pitch look past that moment. If we’re dealing only with what pitchers did while playing with the Expos, Rogers was clearly the greatest pitcher the team ever had.

Rogers would soon gain ample support in the rotation from a quartet of young right-handers, all four drafted and developed by the Expos. And a few years later, once Carter, Cromartie, Parrish, Dawson, and Rogers had established themselves, a fresh batch of future All-Stars joined the fray. These players collectively formed one of the best groups of homegrown talent ever assembled on one team, including two Hall of Famers and another player, Tim Raines, who so obviously deserves that honour.

Yet ask any Expos player, coach, scout, or batboy from that period which player was the most talented, and there’s a strong chance he’ll rave about someone else. The player who generated the most excitement at the start of his career was taken in the same draft as Carter, one round before The Kid, in fact. He was a bundle of raw, fast-twitch talent, the player who came with the highest billing … and the one who became the biggest disappointment of the bunch.

Ellis Valentine was a 17-year-old hardware store full of tools when the Expos took him with their second-round pick in ’72. Six-foot-four and strapping, he could hit the ball a mile. His excellent hand-eye coordination portended a future .300 hitter. He also ran exceptionally well for someone so big. Though still raw with his routes to flyballs, that speed promised superior outfield range.

Then there was his arm. Oh, that sweet, terrifying arm. It was so strong that when he was seven, he played against nine-year-olds. It was so powerful that his coaches immediately made him a pitcher, despite his other glaringly obvious skills. Valentine pitched all through high school, then got drafted as a pitcher and a first baseman. To their credit, the Expos quickly realized that the best fit for Valentine was as an outfielder, where he could put his combination of speed, power, and that mesmerizing arm to good use.

The typical course of action for a right fielder making a long throw is to aim for the cutoff man, who can then peg a relay throw to third or home and try to gun down the runner. Valentine had such a cannon for an arm that he could fire the ball home all the way from the warning track. Years later, the biggest stars of Valentine’s day would still speak of his arm with reverence.

“They say that I can’t throw like Ellis Valentine,” said Pete Rose, the all-time hit king and one of the best to ever play the game. “Who can?!”

“He had the best throwing arm of anyone I played with or against,” said Dawson, who was widely considered to have one of the best arms of his generation himself.

Valentine might’ve been a top-10 overall pick, but a ballplayer needs more than an arm: like Dawson, Valentine suffered a major leg injury. He broke it during the summer between his junior and senior years at Los Angeles’s Crenshaw High School, an injury so severe that surgeon Dr. Robert Kerlan had to extend a metal rod from Valentine’s knee to his ankle. That injury limited what Valentine, a multi-sport star, could do in his senior year. He didn’t play any football, and he didn’t pitch, either: instead, he spent that baseball season at first base.

Still, natural talent won out, at least enough for the Expos to take the plunge. Problem was, Valentine was so talented that he rarely experienced on-field setbacks, and never felt he had to work
hard for anything. Compared to Dawson and his hellacious work habits, Valentine’s careless attitude looked even worse.

“I was very blessed, moved up the ladder quite quickly,” Valentine said. “Even on the sandlot, I always played with older kids and had no problems, so that pushed me up a lot sooner. When I got drafted, I was just a child. But I still had that tremendous athletic ability, so I never had to struggle. I always knew I was going to be on a field somewhere, and kind of took that for granted. I didn’t pay attention from a mental standpoint. Developmentally, that hurt.”

If immaturity and poor work habits threatened Valentine’s road to success, so too did adverse circumstances. Immediately after being drafted, Valentine got sent to the Expos’ New York–Penn League affiliate in Jamestown, New York. Valentine was shipped there for purely logistical reasons—as a short-term stopover before being sent to play in Cocoa Beach, Florida—but just those few days in upstate New York underscored how emotionally fragile he was. Valentine had grown up in an all-black neighbourhood. Now, he was alone.

“Everything in Jamestown is white,” he recalled. “The streets were white, the cars, even the grass seemed white. My second day there, I was depressed. I ventured out of the dorm where I was staying, went across the street to this bowling alley/café/pool hall. I go over to get a snack. I see this one guy shooting pool and he’s black. I’m excited! I’m 17 years old, and I’m thinking, this guy is like me. Turns out this dude was from Puerto Rico. So my depression got worse. Now I’m
really
messed up.”

A few days in Jamestown weren’t going to have much lasting effect, of course; if anything, non-English-speaking players coming from different countries have it worse when thrown into small American towns as teenagers to play pro ball for the first time. But in the years to come, Valentine would demonstrate that emotional fragility was a constant, rather than something fleeting.

There’d be lasting effects from his busted leg too. The injured leg didn’t heal properly, and set slightly shorter than the healthy one. The pain of the injury forced him to pound painkillers. But then, he couldn’t stop. That first brush with addiction started Valentine down a self-destructive path that would eventually consume his career.

“Ellis, what I saw … he didn’t want to grasp success,” said Dawson. “He knew he was talented. But he didn’t like the limelight, being the focus of attention. His problems got away from
him; they took a toll on his talent and ability. It’s too bad. His ceiling was unlimited.”

Cultivating that new crop of talent was essential if the Expos were ever going to win. But change can be tumultuous for any team trying to claw its way to relevance. It certainly was for the Expos in the early-to-mid ’70s.

One of the biggest visceral blows came when Rusty Staub was traded to the Mets right before the start of the 1972 season. Aside from being the team’s best player, Staub’s value as an ambassador for the ball club was sky-high by then. The winter before, Charles Bronfman had asked him to become head of the Young Expos Club. That group put on various promotions during the course of the season, including special days at the ballpark where kids could get in for 25 cents a head. The first year, the club signed 25,000 young fans to its rolls. In year two, 75,000. In year three, 155,000. The goal was to introduce Québécois kids to baseball, in the hopes that they might become the season-ticket holders of tomorrow.

On April 5, 1972, the Young Expos Club lost its pitchman.

“There was a players’ strike going on at the time,” Staub recalled. “I was at St. Ann’s church in West Palm Beach—it was Easter Sunday. I saw [Mets manager] Gil Hodges there, the coaching staff, their trainer. I was just going to say hello to Gil. They ended up talking to me for like 10 minutes. I thought, ‘Geez, Easter really brings out the best in people!’ ”

A surreal tragedy followed. The Mets coaching staff played golf right after church. Walking off the course, Hodges was asked what time he’d like to meet for dinner. “Seven thirty,” he said, then keeled over. He died just minutes later of a heart attack.

Meanwhile, Staub didn’t know he was about to become a Met, even though the deal was very nearly done. He flew up to Montreal and soon got a call from John McHale, who told Staub
he’d been traded to the Mets for outfielder Ken Singleton, first baseman Mike Jorgensen, and shortstop Tim Foli. The move shocked everyone involved.

“Gerry Patterson was my agent,” Staub said. “In his book [
Behind the Superstars
], the title of one of the chapters was, ‘They’ll Never Trade Rusty.’ That’s how I found out about the trade, from him.

“This was a young franchise, getting three young players, so I could see how it made sense for them. But then I found out how much Gil Hodges fought to make it happen, how much he wanted me to be a part of his ball club. That was one of the most disappointing things in my career, that I never got to play for him.”

As painful as the deal might have been for many Expos fans, from a baseball standpoint, this was a good trade. Jorgensen, just 23, took over as the Expos’ starting first baseman. It took a couple of years for his bat to get going, but once it did, he was an on-base machine. He hit .310 with a massive .444 on-base percentage in 1974 (albeit in only 366 plate appearances). Given more action the following year, he posted a strong .378 OBP. All told, Jorgensen spent five-plus seasons in Montreal, with those two seasons as the highlight.

Foli, by contrast, couldn’t hit before he joined the Expos, during his time with the Expos, or after his time with the Expos. But during his prime in Montreal, he was one of the best defensive shortstops in the league. He grabbed the starting shortstop job at age 21, then sucked in groundballs behind Expos pitchers for five-plus seasons.

The best player of the three, however—and one of the best in the majors for much of the ’70s—was Singleton. Though never much of a defender or base stealer, he could really hit. In 1973, Singleton’s second season with the Expos, he played in all 162 games, hit .302, slugged 23 home runs, and led the league with a
gaudy .425 on-base percentage. Buoyed by weak NL East competition that year, the Expos actually sat just a game out of first place as late as September 20, before finishing three games off the pace (despite ending the year with a sub-.500 record). In Singleton, the Expos had found a player three and a half years younger than Staub who in ’73 surpassed anything Staub would do for the rest of his career.

Then they went and messed it up. In 1974, Singleton had a down year, hitting just nine home runs. He was still a useful player, though, batting .276 with an impressive .385 OBP. The Expos panicked anyway, shipping Singleton and pitcher Mike Torrez to Baltimore for pitcher Dave McNally, outfielder Rich Coggins, and minor leaguer Bill Kirkpatrick. Coggins played just 13 games for Montreal and played his final major league game just a year and a half after the trade. Kirkpatrick never even made the big leagues.

McNally was supposed to be the prize of the deal. The left-hander won 20-plus games four years in a row from 1968 through 1971, then 16 more in 1974, though with a below-average ERA and a strikeout rate that had cratered compared to his peak half a decade earlier. He made 12 starts with the Expos in ’75, got hurt, and never pitched again in the majors. Aside from his success with the Orioles, McNally’s claim to fame was playing out his option year in 1975, then getting convinced by Players Association leader Marvin Miller to file for free agency at year’s end even though he had no intention of playing again. When arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in favour of free-agency requests by McNally and fellow pitcher Andy Messersmith, MLB’s reserve clause was effectively abolished, and baseball history was made.

Heady stuff, though not something that helped the Expos in any way.

Following his days in Montreal, Singleton made three All-Star Games, finished in the top 10 in MVP voting three times (twice in
the top three), hit .300 twice, posted OBPs above .400 four times, and clubbed 20 or more home runs four times. Though Staub got all the accolades, it was trading away his replacement that ranks as one of the worst deals ever made by the Expos.