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 (20 page)

Actually, that’s not entirely true. In an attempt to balance the lineup, the Expos signed lefty-swinging free-agent first baseman Willie Montanez. Unfortunately for them, Montanez was washed up by then, hitting just .177 in 62 at-bats in Montreal.

They also made a seemingly minor move that ended up biting them in the ass in a major way. At the time of the move, Rodney Scott had a big supporter in Dick Williams. “It will take tremendous play to beat Rodney out; I’m a big Rodney Scott man,” the Expos skipper told Michael Farber in December 1980. Sure, Scott was the worst-hitting everyday second baseman in the league, threatening the Mendoza Line while hitting for absolutely zero power. “But you have to appreciate the speed,” Williams said.

With the manager oddly committed to Scott, the Expos had no room for promising second-base prospect Tony Bernazard. So
Montreal shipped Bernazard to the White Sox for left-handed reliever Rich Wortham. In Wortham, the Expos were getting a pitcher coming off a 5.97 ERA the year before, but McHale wanted him anyway, for dubious reasons. “We were going to make him a number one or two draft choice when he came out of college,” McHale said, ignoring the reality that Wortham had been drafted a long four and a half years earlier and had had a terrible time finding the strike zone since. Wortham never threw a single pitch for the Expos. Meanwhile, the 24-year-old Bernazard immediately became one of the best second basemen in the game. McHale had taken the team’s biggest weakness and somehow made it worse.

The good news was that more reinforcements were arriving from the farm. In 1980, 20-year-old Tim Raines got promoted to the Triple-A Denver Bears. Any player that young who can even hold his own at the top minor league level typically projects as a good player in the big leagues—and Raines more than held his own. He led the league by hitting .354, led the American Association in triples, and set a new league record with 77 stolen bases (all in just 108 games). Raines got an assist playing in Denver’s hitter-friendly conditions, but still the baseball world fell in love. Who wouldn’t love a switch-hitter with a terrific batting eye, doubles and triples power, and ludicrous speed? At baseball’s winter meetings following the 1980 season, 18 different teams asked McHale if Raines could be had in a trade. Eighteen times McHale said no—even when the Cubs offered Bruce Sutter, a dominant closer who would end up in the Hall of Fame.

That Denver team fielded other stars too, including Randy Bass (.333, 37 homers, 143 RBI) and Tim Wallach (.281-36-124). Though the mile-high altitude helped the team’s offence, the Bears also got impressive contributions from several pitchers; 21-year-old Bill Gullickson was the best prospect of the bunch, putting up strong numbers in Denver before getting the call to
the Show at the end of May. Led by those standouts, the Bears went 92–44, winning their division by 21½ games, and compiling the best record by any American Association team in the previous 60 years. In 2001, Minor League Baseball’s website ranked the top 100 minor league teams of the 20
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Century: the 1980 Denver Bears came in 37
^th
.

Bass never lived up to his minor league hype (though he did become a star in Japan), and Wallach wouldn’t make a significant impact in the majors until 1982. But Raines and Gullickson would play integral roles in the ’81 Expos’ success.

They got a taste of that success right out of the gate, winning 13 of their first 17 games. In their first rematch with the Phillies, the Expos swept their loaded division rivals, claiming sole possession of first place. The final win of that hot start was a thriller at home against the Dodgers. The Expos jumped out to a 5–0 lead against L.A., then watched that lead shrivel as the Dodgers scored three in the eighth to tie the score at 8–8, followed by the two teams failing to score until the bottom of the 13
^th
. The Expos were so low on position players by that point that Bill Lee batted to start the inning. After Lee grounded out to first, Raines stepped to the plate.

To that point in his very young career, Raines had been absolutely incredible. He’d replaced Ron LeFlore as leadoff man and outdone his speedy predecessor. He was a little unpolished as the new everyday left fielder, having played second base in the minors (a position that didn’t suit him well, else the Expos might’ve left him there). But he batted .348 to start the 1981 season, walking 13 times and striking out just five times. His most impressive feats, however, came with his feet. In his first 17 games in ’81, Raines stole 19 bases.

Of all the kooky traditions the Expos had, none topped the scoreboard chickens. Every time an opposing pitcher threw over
to first base, a supremely low-tech image of a chicken would flash on the screen, “Bawk-Bawk-BAWWWWWK” echoing through the stadium. I once saw Raines goad an opposing pitcher into 13 chickens during one turn on first. The first interview I ever did with Raines, I asked him, “Did you ever notice the scoreboard chickens?”

“Sure!” he replied. “We’d all compete to see who could get the most. I always won.”

Raines wasn’t just blazingly fast. He was also a student of base stealing. Being new to the league, he didn’t yet have the mental database of pitchers that he’d rely on later in his career. Instead, he’d watch each pitcher intently from the dugout, studying all of their quirks: how they positioned their legs, little tics such as taking a deep breath before throwing to the plate (as opposed to a different habit when they threw to first). First-base coach Steve Boros lent a big hand, tracking and studying pitchers’ moves to first as well their time to home, then huddling with Raines to exploit the most vulnerable. Those study habits showed: counting his brief call-ups in 1979 and 1980, Raines swiped 27 bags in the first 27 attempts of his career, a regular-season record that still stands. When the streak ended, it was a shock to all who witnessed it.

“There was rejoicing in the National League last Saturday. Baseball’s Raines of Terror had ended,” Jim Kaplan wrote in
Sports Illustrated
. “After stealing 27 consecutive bases over three seasons, just 11 short of the major league record, Montreal’s Tim Raines was thrown out by Los Angeles catcher Mike Scioscia trying to steal third at Olympic Stadium. From New York to San Diego pitchers and catchers embraced, second basemen and shortstops cried for joy and managers began to breathe again, albeit nervously.”

The one thing Raines hadn’t done in his career leading up to that at-bat against the Dodgers in the bottom of the 13
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, however,
was hit a home run. That streak ended too, as Raines blasted a homer over the wall in right-centre, giving the Expos a 9–8 win and sending 28,179 fans home happy.

Then the losing started. Dropping three of four at home against the Giants in early May knocked the Expos out of first place. The one highlight of that series was a big one, though: a no-hitter by Charlie Lea, part of a terrific May in which the second-year pitcher went 4–0 with a 0.25 ERA and garnered National League Pitcher of the Month honours.

A subsequent trip to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego—the West Coast trip that had clobbered the Expos so many times over the years—proved no kinder in ’81, with Montreal dropping six of nine games.

One of the biggest problems was a thin bullpen. Right-hander Steve Ratzer allowed that three-spot in the eighth against the Dodgers on May 1, with Raines’ walk-off homer bailing him out. On May 14, Ratzer did a great job against the Dodgers, putting out an eighth-inning fire that set up a five-run, ninth-inning rally, but Woodie Fryman ruined it by allowing four runs in the bottom of the ninth for the blown save and the loss. The next day, the Expos again rallied in the ninth, tying the score 2–2. This time, Ratzer got the ninth-inning call … and served up a game-winning homer by Pedro Guerrero. Three days after that, a game against the Giants went to the 12
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inning, with Lee loading the bases with one out. Ratzer came in and allowed a game-winning single. That would be the last pitch Ratzer would ever throw in the majors.

Coming off a good season in Denver, Ratzer had won a late-inning role with the Expos just a few games into his rookie season. It was a move by Dick Williams, born out of necessity, that backfired far too many times. Left-handers Fryman and Lee fared well on most nights, but the Expos sorely lacked reliable right-handers out of the pen, hence the compulsion to throw an untested rookie
into big spots. For the month of May, Montreal’s bullpen posted a 4.58 ERA, second-worst in baseball.

The Expos needed help, and it wasn’t coming from inside the organization—they needed to make a deal. At the end of May, they made a big trade with the New York Mets. Joining the Expos was right-handed relief pitcher Jeff Reardon, who’d racked up 110 innings with the Mets in 1980. McHale and Fanning had coveted Reardon for years, having drafted him out of high school way back in 1973 only to watch him head to college before eventually signing with the Mets. Now, he was about to become the Expos’ top righty reliever (and a few years later, for a short time, the all-time leader in saves).

Reardon, however, was hardly the biggest name in the deal: Ellis Valentine was going to the Mets. McHale made the trade, and yet even he was crushed. McHale was there for the 1972 draft that ushered Valentine into the organization. He was there for all of Valentine’s nine years with the franchise. When Roy Thomas’ fastball smashed Valentine’s face, McHale was one of the first people to rush to the right fielder’s side at the hospital. But over the years, McHale came to realize that Valentine wasn’t going to grow into the superstar everyone hoped he’d become. Given the toll that Valentine’s various vices and injuries had taken on his body, he probably wasn’t even going to last much longer in the majors. It was time to say goodbye.

“It was difficult,” said McHale, talking to author Brodie Snyder in a 1981 interview. “We’ve had Ellis with us since he was 17 years old. I’ve often said he’s like my seventh child. I love him and hope he does well.”

Despite his best wishes, McHale’s hunches were right; Valentine played just 256 more games after the trade, the equivalent of about a season and a half. After his career, Valentine went for drug and alcohol counselling, and has now been sober for 27
years. Today, he works as a counsellor for Harmony Community Development Corporation, a non-profit based in Dallas, helping rehabilitate people suffering from drug and alcohol addiction. His career didn’t go as planned. But he did get his life back.

After that 13–4 start, the Expos won just 17 of their next 38 games. That left them with a 30–25 record, in third place and four games behind the front-running Phillies. That record was significant: a meagre 55 games marked the end of the season’s first half in 1981. Major League Baseball’s players were going on strike.

The reason for the strike was simple: MLB’s owners had spent multiple lifetimes operating with players under their thumbs. When the reserve clause got repealed, players were granted the right to shop their services on the open market once they reached the point of free-agent eligibility. But if the owners couldn’t stop free agency from happening, they hoped to at least curtail it. The plan they proposed demanded that teams receive major compensation for losing free agents to other teams. Under the proposal, a team that lost a free agent could pick a player from the signing club’s roster, as long as that player wasn’t one of 12 protected by the signing club. The players’ union maintained that introducing compensation of that magnitude would make teams far more reluctant to sign free agents, thus restricting players’ ability to seek full market value for their services. So though the work stoppage was a strike in the strictest sense of the word, there was no doubt that owner greed helped cause the walkout. While the players could have simply waited until after the season and negotiated then, they rightly figured that they had more leverage in June than they would in November. (This, of course, wouldn’t be the last time an in-season strike would play a major role in Expos history.)

The impasse finally ended when the two sides reached a compromise where only teams losing a player deemed to be a premium
free agent would be eligible for compensation, and the players made available in the offseason compensation draft would be less valuable than what the owners had proposed. In the end, the two months ripped out of the heart of the schedule proved to be much ado about very little. Only a few players ended up getting taken in the free-agent compensation draft, most of them of limited value. The compensation draft itself lasted just four years before being replaced by a new system in which teams could conditionally gain amateur draft picks as compensation instead.

Back to the 1981 season: on August 6, the owners agreed to split the season into two halves. This meant whichever teams were leading the four divisions before the strike had already claimed a playoff berth. The other four spots would be filled by the teams with the best records in the second half, once play resumed on August 10. There were several problems with this idea, starting with what would happen if a team won both the first- and second-half races in its division; the owners agreed that said team would face the second-half runner-up in a playoff series. There were also problems with teams having played an unequal number of games before the stoppage. First-half winners had little incentive to fight for every win in the second half, and it showed in their second-half records (just three games over .500, combined). The biggest potential source of unfairness loomed, however, if a team played well in both the first half
and
second half, but narrowly missed snagging the best record both times. Under that scenario, it was conceivable that the team with the best record in its division over the entire season could still miss the playoffs.

Fortunately for the Expos, the split-season rules gave them a reprieve. The team’s erratic play in the first half was now forgotten. Put together a hot streak over the equivalent of one-third of a typical season, and they’d make the playoffs for the first time in franchise history.

When play resumed, Williams made rookie Tim “Eli” Wallach his new starting first baseman, replacing the struggling Montanez, who’d replaced Valentine in the lineup after the trade (with Cromartie moving from first base to right field). A few days later, the Expos traded Montanez to the Pirates for John Milner, another over-30 lefty first baseman, then gave Milner the first-base job, turning Wallach into a super-utility man. Milner showed a bit of pop and walked a bunch, but also hit .237 with no speed and poor defence. The season-long struggle to find a good everyday first baseman foreshadowed a major trade at season’s end, and the team’s continued inconsistent play amid all of Williams’ lever-pulling irked McHale.