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 (37 page)

Even with that skill set, DeShields wasn’t untouchable in Montreal. With every passing day, Claude Brochu kept tightening the purse strings. Larry Walker even famously griped that the Expos players were now being asked to buy their own vitamins. With penny-pinching that extreme, any player with some service time under his belt and making more than the league minimum could be trade bait. DeShields was one of them, making $1.5 million in 1993 and now up for arbitration. Meanwhile, Mike Lansing was about to enter his second major league season, would make just $200,000 in 1994, and the Expos felt he was ready for a full-time job at second base. At the same time, Montreal also had a pitching vacancy to fill, with Dennis Martinez filing for free agency. If the Expos could find a team hungry for a new second baseman that also had a good, young pitcher to offer, a deal seemed possible.

The Dodgers were that team. Twenty-one-year-old Pedro Martinez had a great rookie campaign for L.A. in ’93, firing 107 innings (99 2/3 of those in relief), striking out 119 batters, and allowing just 76 hits and five home runs. He could be wild, walking 57 batters and losing control of his fastball at times. But that heater topped out in the high-90s and was accompanied by both a tantalizing curveball and a murderous changeup. Martinez’s success wasn’t anything new either—not after he’d stormed through the minor leagues, striking out more than a batter an inning despite ranking among the youngest players at each stop (and pitching in some extremely hitter-friendly ballparks).

In spring training of 1992, Claire made his policy on Martinez crystal clear to anyone who asked. “I won’t trade Pedro Martinez,” he said. “I don’t care who they offer.”

Tommy Lasorda wasn’t quite sold, however. Pedro had pitched well in his first full season—that was true. But he also weighed just 164 pounds, and at 5-foot-11 (his listed height, but scouts claimed he was 5-foot-10 or shorter) lacked the kind of frame that would suggest he’d fill out in the future. The Dodgers manager didn’t think Martinez had the size and strength to go deep into games the way a reliable starting pitcher should. Lasorda watched Martinez pitch well in relief in ’93, then sent him out for a pair of starts in September. In his first start, Pedro surrendered five runs on 2 1/3 innings; in his second, he gave up three more in five innings. Never mind that he’d thrown three innings or more in a game just twice all year, giving him no opportunity to stretch out his arm and re-acclimate to starting. Never mind that the first of those starts came in the mile-high air of Denver’s Coors Field, a death trap for visiting pitchers. Those two starts confirmed the bias Lasorda already had in his head: Martinez was a fine reliever, but he didn’t have what it took to be an effective starter in the majors.

Others in the Dodgers organization disagreed with Lasorda’s assessment. One of those dissenters was Kevin Kennedy, Pedro’s manager at Triple-A Albuquerque.

Kennedy hadn’t managed Martinez for all that long. In 1991, a 19-year-old Pedro zoomed through three levels of minor league ball, starting in the Class-A California League and ending under Kennedy’s watch in Albuquerque. The skinny right-hander made just six starts in that last stop, but that was enough to convince Kennedy that the Dodgers had a future star on their hands. As all minor league managers do, Kennedy wrote up reports on all the players he managed that season. He raved about Martinez’s knockout stuff, and the way each of those pitches befuddled
hitters with sharp, darting action. Kennedy also liked Pedro’s ability to pound the inside and outside corners, to make batters swing and miss, and even his attitude on the mound: a combination of poise and aggression.

As the ’91 Triple-A season ended, Kennedy was restless. He wanted to land a job in the majors—as a manager, preferably, but if he had to pay his dues for a few years as a coach first, so be it. He sent resumés to eight different teams, and after a few days, he started to get some responses. One was from Duquette. Come to Montreal, the Expos GM told Kennedy, I have a couple of things I want to run by you.

“That was the year the Expos had a lot of turnover, when Dave Dombrowski went to Florida and took John Boles and other people with him,” Kennedy recalled. “Duquette flew me in, put me up at the [upscale] Queen Elizabeth [Hotel], took me to a Habs game, all of that. I really felt like I was being recruited, which was pretty cool. Dan said, ‘I know you want to coach in the big leagues, but I have the minor league director job available right now. I promise I’ll get you in the big leagues within two years.’ ”

Kennedy accepted the offer, and as Duquette entered his first off-season in his new GM job, he sought out Kennedy’s counsel on players worth watching for future deals. Kennedy started telling Duquette about some of the players he’d managed. Then, a lightning bolt struck.

“I realized I’d never sent the Dodgers my reports,” Kennedy told me. “I never had to, because I left the organization.”

Instead, he handed the whole stack to Duquette. For the Expos, these surreptitious reports became a gold mine.

One of Duquette’s biggest goals upon taking the Expos general manager job was to rebuild the bullpen, landing as many young, power arms as possible. One of the best pitchers on the ’91 Albuquerque Dukes fit that mould. John Wetteland was a
hard-throwing right-hander who struck out nearly a batter an inning that season. Of course, you can find hundreds of hard-throwing relievers in any given season—dozens of those with the numbers to match. As luck would have it, Kennedy didn’t just manage Wetteland that season: he’d managed him for two years in rookie ball at Great Falls, and had named him the starter for the Texas League All-Star Game. He’d also managed him at winter ball in Puerto Rico, then again in the Dominican Republic. From 1985 through 1991, Kennedy either managed Wetteland or managed against him, getting to know his strengths and weaknesses intimately. His protegé was a starter for most of those years, but Kennedy could see that he didn’t have the command or the temperament to start—that he couldn’t survive the third time through opponents’ lineups.

“He was so intense,” Kennedy said. “There were times when you had to go out there and just tell him to breathe.”

In 1991, the Dodgers sought to harness that intensity by making the right-hander a co-closer in Albuquerque. Suddenly Wetteland was finding the plate with more regularity. Freed from needing to pace himself over seven or eight innings, he started firing high-90s fastballs as a ninth-inning guy. On November 27, 1991, the Dodgers traded him to the Reds, part of a four-player deal that brought back Eric Davis, a star in the mid-to-late ’80s who had bounce-back potential if he could overcome a string of injuries. In the end, Cincinnati didn’t have much use for Wetteland—not when they already had the Nasty Boys trio of Rob Dibble, Randy Myers, and Norm Charlton. That gave the Expos a chance to buy low on a player they now coveted thanks to Kennedy. Only two weeks after acquiring him from the Dodgers, the Reds shipped Wetteland to Montreal (along with fringe right-hander Bill Risley), for Dave Martinez, Willie Greene, and Scott Ruskin.

Greene and Ruskin were the players acquired, along with Moises Alou, for Zane Smith 16 months earlier. This after the Expos nabbed Smith from the Braves for three players, including Kevin Dean (the first-round pick who never panned out, and instead went to prison). In a way, the Expos traded a guy who spent several years behind bars for Moises Alou … and John Wetteland.

The Expos had also gained intel on other players they would later acquire. One was Henry Rodriguez, an outfielder on the ’91 Dukes who didn’t put up exceptional numbers, but had done enough the year before in Double-A (28 homers) and shown a projectable enough power swing to make Kennedy—and Duquette’s eventual successor Kevin Malone—believe he could one day produce in the big leagues. The Expos eventually acquired Rodriguez in a May 1995 trade, and promptly got rewarded in 1996 with one of the best power displays in team history.

Another of Kennedy’s favourites was Darrin Fletcher. The lefty-swinging catcher played for Albuquerque in 1989 and 1990, but was dealt to Philly before the ’91 season. There he ended up being blocked by Philadelphia’s other left-handed-hitting catcher, Darren Daulton, which made him expendable. Two days before the Wetteland deal, the Expos flipped pedestrian relief pitcher Barry Jones for Fletcher, in the process acquiring a badly needed starting catcher.

Then there was Pedro.

No one needed smuggled scouting reports to see that Pedro had big-time potential when teams were banging down Fred Claire’s door in the spring of ’92. But in October of that year, Dodgers team doctor Dr. Frank Jobe performed surgery on Martinez’s shoulder. Granted, it was his non-throwing shoulder, but just as Lasorda wondered if Pedro could handle a starter’s workload, Jobe expressed even deeper concerns, wondering if the little righty’s slight build would lead to a breakdown.

The glowing reports filed by Kennedy (who by 1993 had fulfilled his goal of becoming a major league manager, landing the job with the Rangers) convinced Duquette to take the plunge anyway. Especially since the Expos GM already had a bias of his own.

“I had the benefit of seeing Pedro when he pitched in rookie ball, in the Gulf Coast League,” Duquette said. “He hit a couple of our batters. Surprise! Surprise! I said, ‘Who
is
this kid?!’ With that kind of abandon in his delivery, and competitiveness, and breaking ball … I loved him.”

On November 19, 1993, the trade was made. Going to the Dodgers was DeShields, the talented second baseman Claire had been craving. Coming to the Expos was Pedro, the pitcher Duquette hoped could fill the void left by Dennis Martinez’s departure.

“Pedro did an outstanding job for us in the role that he played,” Lasorda said after the deal was made. “But in order to get a player the calibre and the quality of a DeShields, you have to give up something.… We had to have this guy because we felt we needed speed in the lineup. As an everyday player, we feel he will be more valuable to us than the relief pitcher.”

The Montreal media didn’t just agree with Lasorda’s view that DeShields was the more valuable commodity: columnists launched grenades at Duquette and Brochu, accusing the Expos GM, and the team’s principal owner, of being motivated by factors other than Martinez’s ability.

“There’s no puzzle why the Expos made the deal,” wrote Pat Hickey of the
Montreal Gazette
. “Too many decisions are made to balance the books.” Hickey’s colleague Michael Farber was even harsher in his criticism. “[The] deal is rotten to the core. [The] Expos’ one big deal will sicken fans.” Pierre Ladouceur of
La Presse
claimed that “trading Delino DeShields to the Los Angeles Dodgers shows, once again, that the Expos executives are only thinking about reducing their payroll.” Ladouceur’s colleague
Philippe Cantin didn’t mince words, either: “So begins the fire sale; where will it end?”

It was certainly true that trading DeShields for Pedro would save the Expos some money. But Duquette was optimistic: his predecessors had drafted and developed stars like Larry Walker and Marquis Grissom. They’d acquired important contributors like Jeff Fassero and Mike Lansing on the cheap, and snagged talented international amateurs like Wil Cordero and Mel Rojas. Promising up-and-comers included Cliff Floyd, Rondell White, and Kirk Rueter. Duquette himself pulled off successful trade after successful trade, landing Ken Hill and Butch Henry for the starting rotation, Sean Berry to play third, and Fletcher to catch. Nearly the entire Expos bullpen in 1994 came from Duquette deals, with Wetteland joining Jeff Shaw, Tim Scott, and Gil Heredia as nifty steals.

Pedro, however, was the capper. His doubters thought he was too small, and too fragile. But Duquette saw him as the final ingredient for a great team. As soon as he’d completed the deal, he called Brochu. The GM’s prognostication for the 1994 season was short and sweet.

“We’re going to win.”

Duquette wouldn’t stick around to see his prediction fulfilled. In January 1994, the Massachusetts native got an offer from the Red Sox to become their new general manager. As promising as the Expos were, Duquette couldn’t turn down a chance to come home, and—if everything went right—break one of the most notorious championship droughts in sports.

In his stead, the Expos promoted scouting director Kevin Malone. There’s no such thing as a perfect ball club, but Malone inherited a team that was pretty close. The 1994 Expos had a lineup full of on-base hounds, finishing third in the league in OBP
that year. They had speed, with five players swiping enough bases to pro-rate out to 20 or more over a full season. They had one of the deepest and most balanced starting rotations in the league, with three lefties and two righties, finesse pitchers and power pitchers. Potential doubles and triples frequently died before ever hitting the turf, thanks to an outfield stuffed with human vacuum cleaners.

Then there was the bullpen. Though managers had always appreciated having both righties and lefties available in relief, Tony La Russa ramped up that interest in the ’80s and ’90s, aggressively playing matchups in the late innings, finding success with those tactics, and thus fostering a new wave of relief specialists. By 1994, every manager pined for a lefty reliever who could match up against sluggers like Barry Bonds and Fred McGriff in high-leverage situations.

Every manager, that is, but Felipe Alou. Just as he valued talent over experience when constructing a lineup, the Expos skipper sided with talent over handedness in building a bullpen. The Expos’ top five relievers that year were all right-handers. He didn’t need any lefties, if his righties were going to get everyone out.

“Wetteland was really as good against lefties as he was against righties with that big, hard curveball and that fastball he could blow by anybody,” Alou said. “Shaw had that great slider and great sinkerball and pinpoint control. Mel Rojas was a starter who was mediocre, but the machine that was the Expos’ player-development system made him into a great reliever, then a closer, with one of the best splitters in baseball. It’s all a credit to the Expos’ way of developing players. Not only our own players, but anybody who came to us.”