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 (14 page)

Taillibert himself didn’t help matters. Finishing on schedule
and within the allotted budget, building a stadium that would be the right size and design to properly accommodate baseball—these factors took a back seat to Taillibert’s own vision. Multiple delays plagued the project: construction crews staged a long strike, and brutal Montreal winters slowed progress to a crawl a third of the year. Spiralling costs for raw materials, especially the unfathomable amount of prefabricated concrete required to build this humongous edifice, forced stops and starts as the city kept scrounging for more money. These largely uncontrollable factors could be understood and forgiven. But Rory Costello, author of several Expos-related articles for the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR’s) BioProject, has detailed far more insidious happenings.

From the start, cronyism ran rampant. The problems began with the engineering firm in charge of the project, Régis Trudeau et Associes. Rather than solicit bids from multiple firms, City Hall went straight to Trudeau with the project. Turned out Drapeau’s top advisor, Gérard Niding, steered the job to Trudeau after the company built his country house. This kind of mutual backscratching was certainly unethical, but nonetheless typical in Montreal, where legitimate construction-related businesses that received political favours still beat the many other outfits that landed fat contracts through mob ties. The bigger problem was that those in charge at Trudeau were flummoxed by the challenges of the job, including essential tasks such as moving the 40-ton concrete slabs that would form the backbone of the stadium.

Taillibert only made things worse when it came to containing costs. Believing the project to be more a living monument than a stadium, he refused to compromise on price for materials or labour, and even held sway over negotiations with contractors to ensure those hired could carry out his artistic vision. “What is money? Mere paper,” he told
Montreal Gazette
columnist
Michael Farber in a 1986 interview. In the article, Farber added: “The bottom line, Taillibert said, will not be the figure some pencil pusher comes up with when the final bill is stamped ‘paid’ years from now, but what sort of heirloom Montreal will pass on to its children.”

In August of ’74, the province of Quebec finally stepped in and threw Taillibert off the project. Lavalin Inc. took over as project manager, while the Désourdy consortium became the general contractor. Both companies had ties to Quebec’s Liberal Party, and the change in management read like a simple transfer of power from one group of cronies to another.

Despite all these setbacks and illicit connections, however, Drapeau remained confident that the Olympics—and Olympic Stadium—would be self-sustaining. At the very least, he talked a good game. “It is no more possible for the Montreal Olympics to lose money than it is for a man to get pregnant,” the mayor vowed. As Costello recounted, Drapeau predicted not only massive revenue from Olympic tourists and baseball fans, but also “extraordinary revenue from commemorative coins, stamps, and souvenirs.”

Unfortunately, Drapeau would be spectacularly wrong. While the rest of the world celebrated 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s seven perfect 10.0 scores, the pageantry of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, and other highlights, Montrealers and Quebeckers got punched in the face by skyrocketing costs, with Olympic Stadium delivering the most vicious uppercuts. The building’s initial projected cost of $124 million spiked to $310 million, then to more than $600 million—about half the Olympics’ total cost of $1.3 billion. Both ventures became gigantic money-losers for the city and its many male residents (who were now apparently with child).

In the short term, the Olympics were a disaster for the Expos. No one cared about baseball during the summer of ’76, with the
biggest sporting event in the world happening a few miles away. The ball club suffered through its worst season since the expansion year, going 55–107 while drawing a pitiful eight thousand fans a game. Some of the next-generation talent had arrived, with Gary Carter, Ellis Valentine, and Larry Parrish all claiming everyday jobs. But they were still too raw to make big contributions: none of the three were older than 22 on Opening Day.

The saving grace was that Montreal would finally have a permanent home for a major league team. When the Expos moved into Olympic Stadium to start the 1977 season, they found a sports facility unlike any that had ever been built. Though it had the same basic multi-use setup as cookie-cutter stadiums in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, it looked completely different from the outside. The exterior of the building consisted of 34 giant, cantilevered concrete beams, meant to evoke huge hands with curved fingers. An attached tower, when completed, would be the largest angled, free-standing structure of its kind in the world. In architectural circles, the stadium was considered a grand accomplishment of modern design.

For less romantic baseball fans, the Big O looked completely different: a giant spaceship, far too large for a baseball game, dropped into the middle of a neighbourhood with little else around it except other Olympic Park venues and drab walk-up apartments.

“Not only did the ball club have no input about location, they had no input into the design, the construction, or configuration of the stadium,” said Dave Van Horne. “None whatsoever.”

As the Expos took the field for the ’77 home opener, they found another major problem: the stadium wasn’t close to finished, even after years of planning and construction. Both the Expos and visitors were stuck in temporary clubhouses. Front-office staff worked out of makeshift offices so cramped that several of them
later became storage closets. The padding on the outfield walls was incredibly thin, injecting every dash to the warning track with the possibility of a season-ending injury. Ron McClain, the Expos’ head trainer for 25 seasons, repeatedly warned the team about the wall and the damage it could do to the players. Management estimated the cost of replacing it at around $250,000, a pittance given the team’s revenue stream, especially when the health of its core assets was involved. Still, nothing happened. Instead, several Expos outfielders got hurt smashing into it, including Andre Dawson, who suffered a broken bone in his knee.

More concerning for the players was the playing surface itself, a paper-thin layer of turf laid over another paper-thin layer of padding, perched on top of a thick layer of concrete. Here again, McClain warned his bosses what could happen. He was told the cost of replacing the turf would be around $1 million, a tougher financial burden to handle, but still a move that could save the team multiple times that, given the likelihood of games lost to injury. Again, no dice. The money would’ve had to come out of the city’s pockets, and no bean counter at City Hall was particularly interested in projecting health outcomes for Warren Cromartie or Ellis Valentine. The rock-hard turf became so notorious around the league that players on visiting teams would leave the stadium to go run at a nearby park, for fear of wearing down their knees.

The lack of a roof only made things worse. When Drapeau had announced his grand plans for a new stadium, Bronfman kept insisting that it come with a roof to shield players from Montreal’s often terrible weather. There was a roof, all right—it just didn’t make it to Montreal for five more years, gathering dust in a warehouse in France for reasons ranging from cost overruns to design concerns to general incompetence from the stadium’s operator, the Olympic Installations Board. It measured about 60,000 square feet of orange Kevlar, weighing 66 tons. In the meantime, players
froze their asses off. Whenever there was moisture on any part of the field in early April or late September, there was a good chance those wet spots would freeze over, forcing infielders and outfielders to navigate big patches of ice. If there were ever a baseball field custom-designed to destroy the health of its players—especially its outfielders—this was that field. Though the Big O eventually got its cover, both the stadium and its woefully conceived roof would become giant albatrosses for the Expos, and the city, for decades to come.

For now, though, it was an upgrade over the minor league–caliber Jarry Park. And along with the introduction of Olympic Stadium, the Expos got another boost in 1977: Dick Williams.

Reeling in Williams was considered a coup of the highest order. In 1967, his first season as a major league manager, he had guided the Boston Red Sox to their first American League pennant in 21 years. The ’67 Sox had talent, certainly: the great Carl Yastrzemski, Tony Conigliaro, George “Boomer” Scott, and pitcher Jim Lonborg all made headlines that season. But the Red Sox had won only 72 games in 1966, and so expectations heading into ’67 were essentially non-existent. Sixth or seventh place, maybe.

Yaz was considered the only marquee player on the roster heading into the season, and only 8,324 fans made it to Fenway Park for the home opener. Moreover, this was an incredibly young team, with Yaz the only everyday player older than 25. The combination of the team’s surprising success that year, as well as impressive breakouts for Conigliaro, Scott, Lonborg, and others cemented Williams’ reputation for being unafraid to let talented young players play, develop, and thrive. In Boston, 1967 came to be known as the “Impossible Dream” season, and Williams earned a great deal of credit for making that dream possible, with the Red Sox going all the way to the World Series before losing to Bob Gibson and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Williams lasted less than two more years in Boston following that great season, however—more due to strained relations with ownership than any massive failures by the team. In 1969, the Sox stood in third place in September when owner Tom Yawkey tossed his manager overboard after Williams benched Yaz for a baserunning error.

Williams’ next job in baseball came as third-base coach for none other than the Expos, working under Gene Mauch for a season. Those who remember that 1970 campaign gave generally
positive reviews to Williams’ time there. Still, he was ready to return to managing, which he did in 1971 with the Oakland A’s. Williams was an immediate success in Oakland. The A’s won 101 games that year, thanks to another young roster that included 25-year-old Reggie Jackson, 20-year-old Sal Bando, 25-year-old Catfish Hunter, 24-year-old Rollie Fingers, and 21-year-old lefty Vida Blue. The latter would garner Cy Young and MVP honours in 1971, while Jackson, Hunter, and Fingers were ultimately elected to the Hall of Fame.

Oakland fell short of the World Series that first year, but quickly broke through in ’72 and again in ’73, capturing back-to-back World Series titles. Williams showed excellent skill as a tactician with the A’s, much of it stemming from his refusal to defer to veterans for reasons of seniority alone. In the ’72 World Series, he started Gene Tenace, a young second-string catcher, over veteran Dave Duncan, figuring Tenace by then was the better player (Duncan was only a year older but he’d made his major league debut five years before Tenace). Tenace went completely bonkers, hitting .348 with four home runs and winning World Series MVP.

A cynic might argue that Williams benefited from killer talent in Oakland, and maybe caught a break or two in Boston as well. There’s no question that Williams’ early teams wouldn’t have won if they didn’t have guys who could play. But those who played for him saw Williams as more than just a caretaker.

“He’s always joking about how he rode our coattails,” said Vida Blue years later when Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame. “But he’s the one who taught us to play winning baseball. Dick Williams was that X-factor.”

Once again, Williams clashed with a difficult owner, this time the mercurial, meddling, and money-hungry Charlie Finley. And once again, Williams had to leave a winning team. This time, leaving would backfire due to a woeful lack of talent in his new
home. Williams took over as manager of the California Angels in 1974, guided his teams to just 147 wins against 194 losses, and was gone before the end of the 1976 season. But it was clear that Williams’ reputation as a winner was well intact, with McHale and Fanning recognizing how difficult Yawkey and Finley could be, and how lousy the Angels’ players were. Give Williams the exciting young talent he’d managed to such wonderful effect in Boston and Oakland, then surround him with supportive and sane bosses in the front office and owner’s box—and the Expos too might win a championship.

“Dick Williams was not hired for a transition,” said Jacques Doucet. “Because it was his second trip to Montreal, he knew a little bit about the situation here. And he knew that with the kids that we had, he and the team had a good chance of moving up. He was there to win.”

To speed up the timetable, the Expos began aggressively courting free agents. Players newly blessed with the ability to shop their services to other teams understandably sought both big dollars and a chance to play for winners. Bronfman was prepared to bid against teams in bigger markets with deeper revenue streams, but convincing top free agents that the Expos could soon start winning was a harder sell. Williams was tasked with doing much of that selling. The Expos’ first major target after the Williams hire was the single biggest fish in the free-agent pond, as well as one of Williams’ former players. They were going after Reggie Jackson.