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 (18 page)

There were regrets and what-ifs, of course. There was the late-August game in Atlanta in which the Expos built a big lead heading into the bottom of the fifth, in pouring rain. Schatzeder, ever the perfectionist, kept complaining to the umpires about the slippery pitching rubber, and kept cleaning his spikes between pitches.
That caused the umps to call the game right before the fifth inning could end and the game could become official, wiping out a near-certain win for the Expos that they never got back. Though it didn’t show in their record until the very end, the doubleheaders took a toll as well, affecting everything from Carter’s health to more routine elements that should’ve been easy but weren’t—like travel, sleep, even meal times. They finished with 95 wins, enough to take either of the West divisions that season by a comfortable margin. It just wasn’t enough to beat out the powerful Pirates.

“I think Williams did an amazing job, with the pitching staff especially,” said Melnick. “The only thing wrong with the ’79 team was the Pirates. They couldn’t beat the Pirates.”

No one could beat the Pirates. At 39, Willie Stargell was still terrorizing the Expos, launching balls once destined for Jarry Park’s swimming pool into the Big O’s upper deck instead. The Cobra, Dave Parker, was a five-tool player at the height of his powers. Bill Madlock and Bill Robinson, Phil Garner and John Milner: the whole damn team gave the Expos fits, taking eight of the final 10 games against Montreal that year. The pitching staff might not have been specifically designed to torment the Expos, but it seemed that way, with tough righty starters Bert Blyleven, Bruce Kison, and Don Robinson matching up against Carter, Dawson, Valentine, and Parrish, and submarining right-handed closer Kent Tekulve finishing up. At the end of a decade full of dynasties, the Pirates were worthy champions.

Though the Expos’ season ended in disappointment, there was also great hope for the future. Their core players were all young, with yet another wave of talent coming. They hadn’t quite made it over the top in the ’70s. But with their farm system churning out new stars every year and the big club making huge strides, that hardly seemed to matter. At the dawn of the 1980s, incredibly, the Expos were the envy of the baseball world.

I
t was a note of optimism, a touch of bravado after a 95-win season that ended just two games short of a division title. With a scintillating but disappointing breakout 1979 season behind him, John McHale was asked by a reporter what to expect from the Expos in the future. Get ready, McHale replied, for “The Team of the ’80s.”

Looking over the Expos’ roster heading into the 1980 season, it was tough to argue otherwise. Andre Dawson was entering his age-25 season that year. Gary Carter, Larry Parrish, Warren Cromartie, and Rodney Scott would all play the bulk of the 1980 campaign as 26-year-olds. On the pitching side, the Expos boasted a quartet of exceptionally young right-handers with big upside: 23-year-olds Scott Sanderson and Charlie Lea, 22-year-old David Palmer, and 21-year-old Bill Gullickson.

It would be two more years before baseball writer and statistician Bill James would emerge from obscurity with the first mass-produced
Bill James Baseball Abstract
, but that book
contained a seminal James essay which argued that baseball players tend to peak around age 27. Even before that study came out, though, teams were keenly aware of the broader point: If you’ve got a handful of talented players in their early-to-mid 20s, you’ve got a chance to get better. If you had as many as the Expos had—plus up-and-coming younger players like Tony Bernazard, Tim Wallach, and Tim Raines just getting their feet wet—you had the makings of a dynasty.

“By the time the ’79 season was over, maturity had set in,” Carter told me in 2003. “We believed we had a great chance to win.”

Still, young players always come with questions, and one in particular might have come with more questions than all the rest put together. With some solid numbers already on his resumé Ellis Valentine was considered the most talented player on the entire roster, but he hadn’t yet become the superstar everyone expected. At 25, Valentine was entering his fifth full season in the majors, and though it wasn’t difficult to imagine the Expos finally making that leap from pretenders to contenders to champions, it was a lot easier if you figured this would finally be Ellis Valentine’s breakout season.

Problem was, any big performance gains from Valentine were going to come from talent, and talent alone. Like many athletes who make it all the way to the pros, Valentine was the best player at every level growing up, from sandlots as a kid to early organized ball, high school to the minors, all the way to the Show. Unlike many other elite athletes, Valentine coasted on those talents. Though sophisticated weight-training programs hadn’t yet permeated the game, players were still jumping on Nautilus machines over the winter to improve their fitness; Valentine did not. To increase stamina and keep their legs in shape, many players stuck to running routines throughout the year; Valentine did not. Extra work in the cage, extra practice improving routes to flyballs, extra
attention paid to nutrition and sleep patterns … Valentine did none of these things.

The side effects started adding up. Ron McClain took over as the Expos’ head trainer in 1980, and he was hardly impressed by Valentine.

“He didn’t try to work or stay in shape,” McClain said. “By the time he got to me, he had gained 20 pounds. Then with me, in less than two years, he gained another 15.”

Valentine’s lack of work ethic and resulting weight gain were troubling enough. But there was a bigger problem. He was pissing away his career, and his life, on drugs and booze.

It started with his high-school leg injury, the one that resulted in one leg setting shorter than the other, and years of excruciating pain thereafter. That injury led to an addiction to painkillers. Olympic Stadium’s rock-hard turf took a toll on his knees and ankles, ratcheting up the pain. When painkillers brought him down, Valentine went looking for mood-elevating drugs to stay on an even keel. Many players in those days popped amphetamines; you could find bowls full of greenies in many trainers’ rooms, and no one made a fuss about it. Still, McClain never saw anyone throw down greenies more vigorously than did the ever-medicated Valentine.

Or as Bill Lee, no stranger to heavy alcohol and drug use himself, put it: “You take the greenies to get up for games. Then you have to kill the greenies with alcohol. Then you became alcohol-dependent. Then it became a vicious cycle.”

Compounding all of these factors were the usual traps set for young, professional athletes. Drafted before his 18
^th
birthday and in the majors just after his 21
^st
, Valentine got everything a precocious and fancy-free ballplayer could want: tons of money, tons of adulation, and an army of friends and hangers-on who cared a lot more about having a great time (usually on Valentine’s dime) than about his emotional, physical, and professional health.

Again, cash and cronies are commonplace for talented major leaguers. The ones with enough self-discipline know how to have fun while knowing when to say when. The next level up are the ballplayers who party excessively, have to sit out occasional games with mysterious cases of the “flu,” and rely on greenies to help them overcome hangovers. Then there was Valentine, the womanizer who’d spill out of his apartment at the crack of noon with three companions on his arm, red-eyed and woozy. Valentine, who—and, granted, this was the height of baseball’s cocaine era—did enough lines to get an elephant jacked up.

At first, Bronfman, McHale, and Williams tried to tell themselves that there was only recreational weed being used, away from the ballpark. Then one night, Expos coach Ozzie Virgil took a shortcut from the dugout to the bullpen, walking behind the stands, then back onto the field through the side door. En route, he spotted a small space underneath the box seats, with just enough room for a couple of guys to stand. Spread over the concrete floor was a towel, littered with stubbed out joints. Virgil told the manager. Though Williams would pick fights when angry and pick on certain players he didn’t like, he usually gave his players tons of latitude. But seeing cleat marks on that towel, and realizing that players were sparking up in the stadium, in uniform? That freaked him out. Just not freaked out enough to do anything about it.

“I passed the buck,” wrote Williams in
No More Mr. Nice Guy
. “After a sleepless night deciding that my job was to manage baseball games, I visited John McHale and told him about our discovery. Basically dumped it all in his lap.… Managers can’t suspend players or call the cops without team presidents. Managers really don’t have the authority to do anything but manage. So I gave the problem to McHale.” A few chats between McHale and players suspected of smoking in the stadium went nowhere.

All of that was mild compared to Valentine’s off-field pastimes. Rich Griffin, who handled public relations for more than two decades with the Expos before taking over as a columnist for the
Toronto Star
in 1995, can tell you stories. Like when the team flew to St. Louis on a road trip. Everyone gets off the bus. Waiting on the front steps of the hotel is an attractive blonde. Everyone recognizes her right away. She’s a bartender at one of the clubs on Crescent Street, the go- to locale for anyone in Montreal who wants to party—ballplayers included. Now she’s here, 1,100 miles away. She’s waiting for Valentine. Given the non-stop coke-dealing happening on Crescent at the time, and how Valentine looked later that day, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on: she’s brought the stuff, and she’s here to hook him up.

Or the West Coast trip immediately after the 1979 All-Star break. As talented as Valentine was, he made only a single All-Star team, and it was two years earlier. So for three days in July ’79, while most players took it easy to marshal their strength for the second half, Valentine went on an all-time bender back home in Montreal. The break ended. And then …

“We’re in L.A., getting ready to play the Dodgers,” said Griffin. “It’s mid-afternoon. A car wheels into the Dodger Stadium players’ lot. The door opens, and they push Ellis out. Then the car pulls out and speeds away. He’s out cold. So the first game after the All-Star break, they have to carry him from the parking lot to the training room. And he spends the whole game sleeping in the training room, on the floor. To me, that was Ellis.”

Being likable and popular with teammates—that was Ellis too. Andre Dawson was as strait-laced a player as anyone on those Expos clubs, and he adored Valentine. “We had different character traits, but we fed off each other. All of us supported each other, looked after each other. He was a good friend.”

Bill Lee said Valentine was “like a brother” to him, and vice versa.

As team trainer, McClain could render his professional opinion about Valentine’s actions. But he wouldn’t condemn his motives. “He was a great guy who just couldn’t control himself.”

Those outside the clubhouse raved about Valentine’s charisma. As Dave Van Horne told Alain Usereau in
The Expos in Their Prime
, “He loved playing the game and he showed his happiness on the field with that great big smile and when he would come across home plate after a home run or after the team had won a game out on the field or after a terrific catch or a great throw, he would show that smile to the fans and that won them over.”

That’s what made all of his demons so frustrating. When sober(ish), Valentine would show flashes of absolute brilliance, hitting tape-measure home runs and showing off the best throwing arm the game had seen since Roberto Clemente. After awhile, Valentine threw out so many baserunners that a code emerged. “Someone would hit the ball to right field, and he’d just smile,” said McClain. “They knew not to run on him.”

Still, no one could deny that Valentine was hurting the team by failing to reach his full potential. Michael Farber recalls the time a pitcher threw to second to try to pick Valentine off, and he didn’t even move: no dive back to the bag, just a glazed look in his eyes as the shortstop applied the easy tag. He’d also zone out on flyballs, missing catchable plays by five feet, then get booed by the locals. Thin-skinned, Valentine would occasionally ask out of the lineup to avoid the fans’ ire. The 1979 season was a major disappointment in particular, with Valentine setting new career lows in batting average (.276) and on-base percentage (.303) while grounding into an ugly 23 double plays. With his speed waning and his weight rising, he was thrown out stealing nearly as often as he was safe. And his timing couldn’t have been worse, given how close the Expos came to nabbing their first playoff berth. You
couldn’t necessarily draw a straight line between Valentine’s addictions and Montreal losing the NL East title by two games. But you saw the Expos lose that game in L.A. with Valentine passed out on the floor. You saw Valentine looking listless down the stretch, hitting exactly zero homers in the final 34 games of the season, while teammates like Carter kept producing even with painful injuries. All of it made you wonder: What if?

After that season, the Expos went to the winter meetings and talked seriously about trading Valentine. It wasn’t the first time they’d had that discussion, with Valentine’s name first circulating in trade talks way back in 1977. McHale had grown increasingly worried that his right fielder was becoming a problem, and that Valentine’s vices could negate his immense talent. Finally, the decision was made. They’d keep Valentine, and hope that becoming another year older would make him another year wiser.

Then they went and got Ron LeFlore.

Few players, then or ever, came with a more checkered past than did LeFlore. Born in Detroit, he grew up in a neighbourhood riddled by crime and poverty. He dropped out of school at an early age and steadily upped the ante on his vices, graduating from breaking into a local Stroh’s factory to steal beer to shooting heroin as often as he could afford it. He earned his first arrest at age 15, and later got a 5-to-15-year sentence for armed robbery. Having never played organized baseball, LeFlore finally joined his first league while doing time at Jackson State Prison. What he lacked in experience he made up in jaw-dropping natural talent. Solidly built with big, strong legs, LeFlore was blindingly fast, stealing bases at will. Through a series of connections, one of his fellow inmates sent word to Tigers manager Billy Martin to come check out LeFlore.