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 (16 page)

Okay, so Williams was a bit of hothead, carrying a grudge. And Rogers was a bit of a know-it-all who rubbed some people the wrong way. But the Expos still needed both of them as they took baby steps in their quest for relevance. Montreal won 76 games in 1978, just a one-game improvement over 1977, leaving the franchise with 10 straight sub-.500 seasons since joining the league. With the benefit of hindsight and a little statistical common sense, we now suspect that the ’78 club was better than its record indicated: in 1978 the Expos scored 633 runs and allowed just 611, which if distributed evenly over the course of 162 games would yield an expected record of 84–78, eight games better than how the season ended in reality. There were actually 32 fewer runs scored in ’78 than in ’77, with Carter and Dawson among the players seeing sizable pullbacks in their offensive numbers. But the good news was that the pitching and defence finally came together, as the club allowed 125 fewer runs in 1978, finishing seventh in the majors with a 3.42 ERA.

The biggest difference on the mound that year was Ross Grimsley. The latest free-agent signing, the 27-year-old Grimsley was a slop-throwing left-hander who the Expos figured could at least eat a bunch of innings. The year before with Baltimore, Grimsley had tossed 218 of them but with middling results, posting a worse-than-league-average 3.96 ERA and walking more batters than he struck out. What happened next might be credited partly to Expos scouts, but mostly to sheer luck: in the 1978 season, Grimsley went 20–11, slashing his ERA to 3.05. He made his first (and only) All-Star team and finished seventh in Cy Young voting. This was the first time an Expos pitcher had ever won 20 games in a season—and the last, it turned out.

Grimsley probably benefited from joining the non-DH league. Though he did strike out more batters and walk fewer than he had in ’77, he never dominated, not with just 84 punchouts (against 67 walks) in 263 innings. What he did well, however, was keep the ball in the ballpark and induce a lot of soft contact—allowing just 17 homers in 36 starts, plus a career-low .245 opponents’ batting average on balls hit in play (league average that year was .280). He threw five different pitches, and was a master of painting the corners and changing speeds, going from slow to glacial. He was also well known for … shall we say, aiding the flight of the ball. Grimsley deployed the usual array of lubricants to get a couple inches of extra drop on his curveball. He also scuffed with the best of them, using everything at his disposal to create grooves on the ball that would cause pitches to swerve to one side or the other. Between the big numbers and the blatant cheating, he did a pretty great impression of future Hall of Famer Don Sutton, for that one season anyway.

Grimsley never came close to replicating that season thereafter, and got traded two years later. Still, he led a ’78 staff stuffed with veterans who kept the team afloat while the kids continued to
mature. Alongside Grimsley was Rudy May, the 33-year-old lefty acquired in a trade from the Orioles who posted the best strikeout-to-walk rate among any of the team’s top five starters, logging 144 innings. Thirty-eight-year-old Woodie Fryman returned to the team in an early-June trade and pitched respectably, making
17 starts and putting up a 3.61 ERA that was right around league average. Meanwhile, Rogers’ 2.47 ERA ranked second among all qualified National League starters.

Even better, some of the young guns started to arrive. In his first season as a rotation mainstay, 23-year-old lefty Dan Schatzeder flashed a 3.07 ERA and even hit well (for a pitcher). Twenty-year-old Scott Sanderson, a third-round pick just a year earlier, made his major league debut and shone, posting a 2.51 ERA over 61 innings mostly as a starter. David Palmer had come into the organization with less hype as a 21
^st
-round pick in 1976, but by the time he cracked the big leagues as a 20-year-old two years later, he too was projected to be a big part of the team’s future success.

When teams improve in certain statistical categories, it’s instructive to figure out how and why it happened. In the case of the Expos’ massive 125-run improvement in run prevention, you could pinpoint several factors. First, they ran out a more talented pitching staff. Grimsley’s 20-win season might’ve been built with some degree of luck, but he was still a big upgrade over the likes of 1977 punching bags such as Jackie Brown. The addition of Grimsley, May, and Fryman, along with the emergence of some young homegrown pitchers, also nudged pitchers into roles for which they were better suited: Bahnsen shaved a run off his ERA after moving from a starter’s role to the bullpen, for one. Furthermore, the team’s defence was phenomenal behind them. The Expos turned 74 percent of balls hit in play into outs in 1978, the best mark in the National League. Those two variables pointed to real skill, encouraging signs as the Expos geared up for the 1979 season. But the Expos may have finally had some luck on their side, as well. For one thing, Expos pitchers simply stranded a greater percentage of runners they put on base, an MLB-best 75 percent in ’78. While a few pitchers do show some ability to strand runners, a team-wide jump that big smacked of chance working
in Montreal’s favour. Furthermore, the Expos benefited from a league-wide drop in offence in ’78; hitters batted .258/.323/.379 that year, compared to .264/.329/.401 in 1977.

Despite all this, however, the Expos were still losing.

The first big move in preparation for 1979 was to shore up the bullpen. Late-inning assassins like Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter had begun springing up all over the league, ushering in a new era of relief aces. With the Expos well beyond their humble expansion beginnings and hoping to contend, finding a quality stopper made sense. With that goal in mind, they signed veteran free agent Elias Sosa. The 28-year-old right-hander had already pitched for five teams before landing in Montreal. But in ’78, Sosa had posted a 2.64 ERA in 109 innings for Oakland, profiling as the sort of pitcher who could protect late-inning leads and throw multiple innings when needed.

In addition to strong relief pitching, a deep bench is a hallmark of competitive teams, which might explain why, for a full decade, the Expos had carried so many regrettable reserves. For 1979, though, Montreal acquired two players who’d been Expos earlier in their careers, nabbing Jerry White and Rodney Scott from the Cubs for fringe outfielder Sam Mejias. In his second stint with Montreal, White became a highly productive member of “the Bus Squad,” the name given to the team’s suddenly far more effective bench.

Initially ticketed for a part-time role, Rodney Scott instead beat Dave Cash out of the starting second-base spot. Cash had put up the worst numbers of his career in ’78, with many observers blaming a lifestyle change that included Cash becoming a vegetarian, thus sapping him of his power. More likely it was simply a case of a high-contact, low-power hitter becoming unplayable once his bat speed slowed and he stopped hitting for high averages. Scott was no masher himself, hitting all three of his career home runs
in that 1979 season. But the man they called Cool Breeze drew a ton of walks and possessed breathtaking speed, giving the Expos the equivalent of a potential double whenever he came up. This constituted a modest upgrade over Cash’s limp bat.

“Dave Cash was a veteran free agent making a lot of money on the bench all of ’79, and Williams didn’t care at all about that,” said Melnick. “He wanted the better player in the lineup, and Scott was it.”

The biggest acquisition of the winter, however, proved not to be a reliever or a hitter, but a starter: Bill Lee, the tall, junkballing, rabble-rousing, wildly eccentric lefty. A few years earlier, acquiring Lee would’ve been a huge coup. From 1973 through 1975, he averaged more than 275 innings per season, putting up impressive
numbers in Fenway Park, a stadium that could be tough on left-handers. By the time the Expos traded for him in December 1978, though, Lee’s fastball was gone, wiped away by a shoulder injury suffered during a brawl at Yankee Stadium in 1976. Lee had come back as an extreme finesse pitcher, relying on guile and command to (sometimes) get hitters out. Though he’d posted a solid 3.46 ERA in 1978 with the Red Sox, he’d done so while walking more batters than he struck out, with just 44 Ks in 177 innings. If the Expos were going to hang their collective hats on this trade, they could latch on to two positives.

One, Lee’s repertoire and stats column looked a lot like Grimsley’s right before Ross the Boss had signed with Montreal, and that had worked out pretty damn well. And two, to get Lee, the Expos had to give up only a forgettable utility infielder named Stan Papi. The Red Sox believed that Lee’s best days were long gone. He was also a pain in the ass by his final season in Boston, often calling Red Sox manager Don Zimmer “the gerbil” and publicly questioning his managing. “Zimmer wouldn’t know a good pitcher if he came up and bit him in the ass,” Lee told the local writers. After the Sox sold teammate Bernie Carbo to Cleveland for $15,000, Lee announced he was retiring from baseball and left the team, only to return a day later. He then pitched terribly toward the end of the year, erasing the memory of his strong first half. Meanwhile, Lee was closing in on 10 years in the big leagues, meaning he would soon have the right to veto a trade. The Sox wanted him gone, while Williams, who had managed Lee briefly in Boston and kept tabs on his career thereafter, wanted him as an Expo. The deal got done.

Lee was horrified.

“I cried, cried for about two days,” he said. “Who wanted to go to the Expos? The team had never played above .500. Perennial losers.”

Thirty-four years after it happened, Lee still remembered the exact date of the trade.

“It was December 7, 1978, Pearl Harbor Day.”

Not to be dramatic.

“Not to be dramatic.”

In fact, there was drama from the beginning. Lee spent the next few months living in remote Bellingham, Washington, doing lots of distance running, growing out his hair and beard, and living a mountain man’s existence. When he showed up for the first day of spring training, stadium security detained him, thinking Lee was some kind of derelict trying to break in.

That was just one of several distractions generated by Lee, “The Spaceman.” One Boston writer visited Expos camp to do a story on the ex-Red Sock, and Lee told the writer he’d been consuming marijuana in various forms for the previous 11 years. “I sprinkle it on my organic buckwheat pancakes in the morning,” he explained. “It makes me impervious to bus fumes when I run.” You could debate the science, sure. You might also argue (or not) with Lee’s related points about the war on weed being misguided, with so many millions of people ingesting caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine without fear of legal reprisal.

Either way, adding a pot-smoking, House of David beard-wearing, say-whatever-the-hell-he-liked, anti-establishment type to the pitching staff was going to draw attention. But in Montreal—where free-spirited players came to be greeted by fans and most of the media with laissez-faire attitudes or even warm embraces—Lee fit right in. He might as well have been one of them, given how often he held court at Grumpy’s. Hit the old downtown bar after a game and there was an excellent chance you’d find Lee, downing pints and spinning tales alongside buddies like famed editorial cartoonist Terry Mosher and journalist and raconteur Nick Auf der Maur. All of it preceded and followed by a few puffs in the Spaceman van.

Lee’s
bon vivant
tendencies didn’t always go over well with Williams, though, nor did the white lies Lee told to get out of jams. One day, Lee walked into the clubhouse, his legs covered in big gashes. Two versions of this story made the rounds afterwards, the first being that Lee had run into a fence while jogging at three a.m. The second also involved jogging at three a.m., only this time with a cat jumping out from behind the bushes and scratching him badly. In the end, the three a.m. part was true. The rest was not. In fact, Lee had been with a lady friend at her apartment when the woman’s husband unexpectedly came home. Lee bolted out of the place, jumping off the second-story balcony onto a trellis, which he tried to use to climb down. The trellis broke, landing Lee on an iron fence, which messed up both his legs and his groin.