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 (19 page)

If this sounds like an implausible idea, or an alternate take on Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn’s rise in the movie
Major League,
keep in mind this was 1973, and scouting and organizational practices weren’t nearly as well coordinated as they’d become 40 years later. Also, this was Billy Martin, a gunslinger of a manager who was known both for his fiery personality and his unorthodox tactics. LeFlore got permission to leave prison for a one-day tryout at Tiger Stadium. Detroit signed him in July of that year, and LeFlore made his major league debut the following summer at age 26. After six seasons with the Tigers, he signed a free-agent contract with the Expos. That’s when the fun started.

Having curbed his drug use while playing in Detroit, he jumped right off the wagon in Montreal. LeFlore was quickly seduced by the city’s party atmosphere, and found multiple willing accomplices on the Expos’ roster. Rodney Scott, Rowland Office, Lee, and Valentine formed a clique with LeFlore that partied hard, resulting in many bleary-eyed mornings, constant late arrivals to the ballpark, and, with Valentine and LeFlore especially, many on-field mess-ups due to a perpetual cycle of cocaine and over-the-top drinking. Farber recalled one night when the Expos lost as LeFlore, clearly loaded, failed to make the play on what should’ve been an easily catchable flyball. When pressed on the error, LeFlore said he lost the ball in the lights. The next day, Dick Williams walked out to the spot where he believed LeFlore had been standing, then looked up into the lights. “Son of a bitch!” he cursed. Williams moved 10 feet. “Motherfucker!” LeFlore was, at the very least, stretching the truth.

Farber’s wildest memory of LeFlore came from the final game of the 1980 season. Late in the game, Williams told LeFlore to be ready to pinch-run if Bobby Ramos reached base. Ramos led off the bottom of the eighth inning with a single, and with the Expos trailing the Phillies by a run, it was time for LeFlore to enter the game. Only he was nowhere to be found. Williams looked around, then spotted his speedy outfielder … walking out from the Phillies
dugout. What the hell was he doing there? At the time, no one knew for sure. Trotting out from the wrong dugout wasn’t even the craziest part. Once he’d figured out that he should be on first base and not chatting with the opposing team during a game, LeFlore actually regained his focus well enough to steal second base—and third base too—before scoring the tying run on a sacrifice fly.

LeFlore finally revealed the details of that incident in a 2013 interview with the
Toronto Sun
. “I was in the Phillies’ locker room, talking with Pete Rose, and he said, ‘Hey, you only need two more stolen bases to win the title.’ So I ran out of their locker room, out of their dugout, across the backstop to our dugout.… I stole second base and Ozzie Virgil threw the ball into centre field. But I didn’t keep running. I stayed at second base. Then I stole third. I ended up scoring and I won the stolen base title. Then I went back into the Phillies’ clubhouse and drank some more champagne.”

That was the amazing thing about LeFlore’s one and only season as an Expo. Despite putting enough substances into his body to take out a small village, despite showing up unfathomably late all the time (four times just before the anthems), despite racking up enough transgressions to prompt many managers into benching him, suspending him, and tossing him into the nearest river, LeFlore played pretty well that year. Sure, he hit just .257—including one stretch in which he went 2 for 52—after batting an even .300 with the Tigers in ’79. He managed just four home runs and slugged just .363. Despite his blazing speed, he played terrible defence after being moved from center field to left. But LeFlore was an absolute demon on the basepaths, stealing an incredible 97 bases while getting caught just 19 times. Prior to 1980, only two players in the 20
^th
century had stolen more bases in a single season: Lou Brock and Maury Wills.

In a
Sports Illustrated
article on the speedy Expos that summer, LeFlore said he considered himself “more controlled now than
before, when I used to just go with reckless abandon.” Writer Douglas Looney described LeFlore’s nefarious routine: “He studies pitchers and talks at length with them, liking nothing better than to get them gossiping about the foibles of other pitchers in the league.”

Unfortunately, that base-stealing explosion wasn’t enough to convince the Expos to keep LeFlore around. In
No More Mr. Nice Guy
, Williams ranted about LeFlore’s “rabble-rousing in the clubhouse, his constant bitching about the food or the laundry or the managing. His late-night forays into strange parts of town, which wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t taken the team’s younger players with him.”

Williams might’ve complained after the fact, but he didn’t do anything about it that year, admitting, “I played him in every game he was eligible for.”

The Expos hired McClain to be their new trainer with hopes that he could clean up the clubhouse culture of out-of-control drug use. He’d worked with Indiana University coaches Bobby Knight and Lee Corso, implementing stiff drug-testing policies for the school’s basketball and football programs. But Major League Baseball’s players union, then, as now, the strongest of all four major North American team sports’ unions, lobbied to ensure that no such tests be allowed. That tied the hands of McClain, team physician Dr. Robert Broderick, and Dr. Larry Coughlin, the team orthopedist—all of whom knew better than most what was going on. The medical staff needed help from Williams to provide some disincentive for players to go on binges, be it through benchings, fines, or suspensions. No such help ever came.

“All you had to do was show up at the ballpark and you were in the lineup,” McClain said. Under Williams’ watch, there was “no discipline, no punishment for being late. The inmates were running the asylum.”

Like LeFlore, Valentine showed remarkable on-field resilience even as he turned his insides into an elaborate chemistry experiment. Though he’d made some mistakes defensively and on the basepaths, he still hit well, sitting at .297 near the end of May and riding a 19-game stretch in which he’d hit .373.

Then, disaster. In the sixth inning of the game against St. Louis on May 30, 1980, Valentine came to bat against Cardinals righty relief pitcher Roy Thomas, with the Expos leading 7–2. Thomas reared back and fired a fastball. The pitch was up and in, and struck Valentine flush in the side of the face. It knocked him out, cracked his cheekbone in six places, and gave him a concussion, sending him to the disabled list for nearly six weeks during which he struggled with blurry vision. The incident had a profound effect on Valentine’s psyche. He became afraid to face hard-throwing right-handed pitchers. He was mad at Thomas—and mad at baseball—for what happened.

“MLB doesn’t compensate you a damn for being a budding star, one of the top guys in the league for several years, then all of a sudden it’s all stripped away by an injury,” Valentine said. “That’s fucked up. That’s a bunch of crap. Pitchers do throw at you intentionally. I was very effective against the Cardinals and I do believe it was intentional.”

Asked if he was under the influence when Thomas’ pitch slammed into his face and if that affected his reaction time, Valentine wouldn’t go into details. But more than three decades after that fastball to the head, he expressed regret for letting his addictions spiral out of control, and also frustration with the circumstances that led him to that point.

“I had no freaking clue, man,” he said. “I had money in my pocket. I had fame. I had people treating me very well. I thought life was going to be like this forever. I was really a child. This is what baseball doesn’t do. They don’t grow these kids up as
people. They just take advantage of them for the purpose of the game, putting people in the stands. What we have to do is learn some things. One problem for me was that there were very few mentors from a black perspective. A lot of guys don’t want to talk about this but they might concur. A lot of us did struggle because we didn’t have guys to talk to after the game like some of the white guys did.”

What about coaches?

“This was the era after Jackie Robinson. You had black players, but no black coaches. I couldn’t sit after the game and talk to a Larry Doby in the big leagues. One of the best years I ever had was in Memphis at Triple-A. Doby was the hitting coach. I had somebody to talk to, to mentor me. It was the most sane freaking year of my baseball career, even though I was only 19 years old. I could talk to him at games, go to breakfast, talk to him on the plane, on the bus. That meant a lot. Then I get up to the big leagues and I don’t have that. All the questions and problems you had, drugs, alcohol, addictions, those were the coping mechanisms. It wasn’t great, but it’s all we had.”

As frightening as that knockout pitch was, what’s strange is how Valentine played afterwards. Despite his fears of facing right-handed pitching, Valentine absolutely raked upon his return from the disabled list. From the day he came off the DL until the end of the season, he hit .331 and slugged .571, producing a passel of big hits. Though he only played in 86 games that year due to the broken cheekbone and other injuries, Valentine still put up better numbers in 1980 on a per-game basis than in any other year that even came close to a full season.

The other good news was that the rest of the Expos were heating up. With Valentine on the DL, they went 21–16. LeFlore, Parrish, and other key performers also populated the disabled list as the summer wore on, yet the team kept winning. On June 8,
the Expos swept a doubleheader at the Big O against the Cards. Those two wins, in front of 46,871 fired-up fans, launched the ’Spos into first place for the first time that season. On 31 of the next 32 days, Montreal was in first place. Areas that could’ve been weaknesses turned into strengths—like pitching. Two years after his 20-win season, Ross Grimsley was terrible, throwing just 41 1/3 innings and delivering a hideous 6.31 ERA. Lee didn’t make his first start until May 31 because of injuries, and pitched miserably when healthy, posting a 4.96 ERA. Plagued by injuries himself, David Palmer tossed just one inning between mid-July and mid-September, spending the rest of that time on the shelf.

But luckily for Montreal, the pitching cavalry had finally arrived. Bill Gullickson turned in one of the best seasons ever for an Expos rookie pitcher, posting a 3.00 ERA while flashing a superior strikeout rate. Though Palmer managed only 19 starts, he was great when he did pitch, posting a 2.98 ERA. Charlie Lea chipped in with 19 solid starts of his own. Those three young guns teamed with staff leaders Steve Rogers and Scott Sanderson to give the Expos’ rotation the third-lowest ERA in the National League. Complementing that young rotation was a grizzled bullpen, led by 30-year-old Elias Sosa, 35-year-old Stan Bahnsen, and bionic 40-year-old lefty Woodie Fryman, who ranked among the top five relievers in the league.

The offence, meanwhile, ranked around the middle of the pack, with Parrish in particular having a big letdown season following his huge numbers in ’79. Fortunately, the team had two superstars in Dawson and Carter. In a breakout season, Dawson hit .308 with 17 homers and 34 steals, winning both the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards and announcing himself as one of the best all-around players in the majors. Carter started 146 games behind the plate, appearing in 154 in all. He blasted 29 homers, knocked in 101 runs, and finished second in MVP voting. Most impressively,
he started every game from September 1 through October 4 with the Expos in the midst of an airtight pennant race, hitting an off-the-charts .336/.414/.636 in those 31 games. All told, the Expos spent 67 days in first place in the NL East that season.

“I don’t know why [the Expos] win,” Phillies manager Dallas Green said in
Sports Illustrated
, “but they are pesky little devils.”

On September 16, with less than three weeks to go in the season, the Expos led those Phillies by 2½ games. But Montreal then lost four of its next five to briefly fall out of first. Two head-to-head series figured to decide the race. First, the Expos took two out of three at Veterans Stadium, restoring their half-game lead—but only temporarily. The teams were tied heading into the final series of the season: Expos-Phillies, three games at the Big O, two out of three wins it.

The atmosphere was insane as more than 57,000 fans packed the park for the first game. Mike Schmidt, the MVP that year and one of the biggest Expos nemeses of all time, smacked a homer off Sanderson that provided the margin of victory in a 2–1 opener.

The Expos looked primed to even the series the next night in front of nearly 51,000 partisans, only to blow a one-run lead in the ninth. In the 11
^th
, Schmidt came up against Bahnsen with a runner on first. The Phillies’ all-world third baseman got ahead in the count 2–0, then got an absolute meatball of a pitch: fastball, thigh-high, dead straight, middle of the plate. In a career full of Expos-killing moments, this was the biggest, a two-run blast into the left-field bleachers that gave the Phillies a 6–4 lead, crushing Montreal’s dreams for that first-ever NL East crown. For the second straight year, the Expos and their fans had their hearts broken in the cruellest of ways.

“That made it two years in a row going down to the last Saturday of the season, only to lose out to teams that went on to win the World Series,” said Van Horne.

Once the sting from those losses wore off, however, optimism reigned. If coming that close once with that terrific core of young talent warranted good feelings for the future, having it happen twice got everyone predicting that the Expos would start winning pennants soon.

“These were pretty giddy days,” Van Horne added. “You had two million–plus fans coming out, at a time when those were big numbers for a major league club. The support was terrific. By then, the radio network had 50-some stations. It was a great time to be an Expos fan. These were the halcyon days of the Expos.”

If the third time was going to be the charm, the Expos would have to make it happen with the same core group of players. In typical John McHale style, Montreal didn’t make any major moves in the offseason. Once again, the Expos badly needed left-handed power, with the lineup dominated by righty swingers Carter, Dawson, Parrish, and Valentine. Once again, they didn’t have a viable starting second baseman. Once again, little was done to address these or other holes.