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 (38 page)

With one of their youngest rosters ever (averaging just 26.2 years old), talent, depth, no obvious weaknesses, and a manager who could push the right buttons—the Duquette prophecy looked like it might get fulfilled.

The Expos’ first big highlight came in the ninth game of the season. Pedro Martinez pitched brilliantly in his first start as an Expo, tossing six innings of one-run ball, giving up just three hits, and striking out eight. But he still got the loss, because his teammates couldn’t score even a single run against Steve Trachsel and the Cubs. However, in his next start—his first in front of the home fans at the Big O—he became a legend.

As talented as he was in these early days, Martinez was still raw. He could throw his curve and changeup when ahead in the count 0–2 or 1–2, and get hitters to chase for strike three. But he hadn’t yet figured out how to throw the ball over the plate consistently for strikes. What would make him so terrifying later in his career was his ability to snap off any one of his devastating pitches in any count—knowing the hitter had no chance one way or another—but that wasn’t yet the case at age 22. His fastball was the pitch that really gave him problems; it also caused nightmares for his opponents. If there was one pitcher in the league that year liable to buzz your head with a 97-mile-per-hour fastball, it was Pedro.

Opinions vary on how and why that happened. The sympathetic view was that he really didn’t have any idea where the ball was going, that early in his career.

“Felipe used to say, ‘We’re trying to teach him how to pitch inside, and he doesn’t know how yet,’ ” said long-time Giants broadcaster and former ESPN play-by-play man Jon Miller. “He had that movement on his pitches that would get in on a right-handed hitter. He’d aim inside, and the pitch would go
way
inside.”

“I remember they brought out a dummy,” Martinez told me in a 2013 interview. “[Pitching coach] Joe Kerrigan wanted me to throw inside with the dummy standing there. I threw a few well, then I missed one and dented the dummy’s head. Everybody laughed, but Kerrigan did not find it funny. He wouldn’t support me, and didn’t want to continue to work with me on pitching
inside. Felipe was really supportive of me. After the dummy thing, he conducted all my bullpen [sessions]. Felipe and Bobby Cuellar [Kerrigan’s replacement as pitching coach in 1997] helped a lot as far as correcting all those things.”

The less charitable opinion about Pedro’s wild streak was that he was throwing at people on purpose, using his wildness as a cover for plunking batters—or just scaring the hell out of them.

“By the time we got to 1997, his stuff was absolutely electric, the best stuff I’ve ever caught,” said Darrin Fletcher, Martinez’s catcher for four seasons in Montreal. “Leading up to then, absolutely—Pedro was a headhunter trying to hit everybody. He stopped when he realized, ‘You know what? I don’t even need to pitch inside. I’m just going to blow everybody up.’ What an unbelievable arm he had.”

The line between Pedro’s intimidation and his losing control was so fine, he could even elicit mixed reactions from the same person in the same conversation. When I sat down with Dave Van Horne for a 2013 interview in Florida, the long-time Expos broadcaster first defended Martinez.

“I remember how Pedro made such good progress almost on a daily basis, even though he only pitched once every five days, being in the starting rotation,” said Dave Van Horne. “I mean, he was working at it every day. They were working a lot on command of all of his pitches, but primarily the fastball, which had a tendency to get away from him. It would fly, it would sail, it would dip, it would dart, it would do a lot of things. He just couldn’t control it very well.”

Then, a few minutes later …

“I don’t think Pedro ever wanted to put himself or his teammates in a situation where his feelings toward a hitter could put the outcome of the game in jeopardy no matter how he felt,” said Van Horne. “But if he felt that a hitter had abused him, the hitter
somewhere along the line was going to pay a price. I think if you looked at each start in which Pedro hit a batter, you could almost figure out whether it was purposeful or not.”

Either way, it made hitters paranoid, to the point that some of them thought they might get hit every time up. That fear made a few hitters do some crazy things. But nothing crazier than what the Reds’ Reggie Sanders did in that first Martinez start at Olympic Stadium.

Sanders was a dangerous hitter at that time, coming off a 20-homer season and a year away from a 1995 campaign that would cement him as one of the best sluggers in the game. He’d banged out three hits and knocked in five runs through the first two games of the series; and though Martinez didn’t have a beef with him, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Sanders get comfortable in the batter’s box and wail on pitches for a third game in a row. On Sanders’ first time up, Martinez backed him off the plate with a fastball, causing Sanders to start jawing at him. A few moments later, Pedro struck him out swinging on a fastball. None of Sanders’ teammates could get anything going either: from the first pitch, Martinez was mixing pitches beautifully, inducing lots of weak groundballs with soft stuff on the outside edge, then painting the inside corner with hard stuff. From the second inning through to Sanders’ second at-bat in the fifth, no Cincinnati player could even work a three-ball count against Pedro, let alone get on base.

Sanders’ second at-bat looked like a lot like his first. Refusing to let Sanders dig in, Martinez threw a fastball inside. The pitch wasn’t dangerous, but did leave Sanders with another peeved expression his face—no posturing and whining this time, at least. Then Martinez fanned Sanders again on the fastball, eventually striking out the side in the fifth. The slaughter continued in the sixth and seventh, with the Reds rarely even making decent contact, and Pedro in complete command. Kevin Mitchell finally
managed a deep flyball to start the eighth, but Moises Alou squeezed it for the first out of the inning.

That brought Sanders to the plate for the third time. Overmatched, he quickly fell behind 0–2. In just his fifth major league start, Martinez could now smell a perfect game. He had five outs to go—four if he could put Sanders away with one more strike. Martinez got the sign for a fastball, the same pitch he’d used to punch out Sanders twice already. He reared back and fired … and watched in horror as the ball sailed on him, nailing Sanders in the ribs. Pedro turned away from the plate toward the Expos dugout and threw up his hands in disgust: he couldn’t believe he’d lost his perfect game. A split-second later, he found something else beyond comprehension: that Sanders would be so completely clueless that he’d charge the damn mound—as if Martinez meant to throw at him on an 0–2 count, five outs away from a perfecto. Sanders got to Pedro, tackled him, and both benches emptied.

“I just remember the frustration back then,” Martinez said. “Being accused so much, being warned after two or three pitches, getting fined. I remember people looking at me to see what they could find, if they can find some weakness. The fact that I was small made me really attractive to guys wanting to beat me up. They thought they might get the weak side of me by charging me. Unfortunately for them, it did not work.”

Even Reds catcher Brian Dorsett defended Pedro. “That’s the way you’ve got to pitch,” he said after the game. “You’ve got to bust them in and keep them honest.”

Pedro got through the rest of the eighth without giving up a hit, only for Dorsett to break up the no-hitter leading off the ninth, chasing the Expos’ starter from the game. As soon as Felipe Alou popped out of the dugout, the crowd began cheering like mad. In Martinez’s first start ever at the Big O, the little guy had proven
he could dominate any lineup (the Reds were the highest-scoring team in the National League that year), and that he’d do whatever was necessary to own the inside corner. As he jogged off the field, the cheers intensified. He tipped his cap, revealing his glorious Jheri-mullet. From that moment on, Pedro’s starts became appointment viewing.

Martinez didn’t get the win that day, since the bullpen couldn’t hold the lead he’d left behind. But a pinch-hit single by valuable reserve outfielder Lou Frazier saved the day in the bottom of the ninth, and the Expos walked away with a 3–2 victory.

The next four games didn’t go as well, as the Expos dropped four straight in Colorado and San Francisco. All told, Montreal had lost nine of its first 13 games of the season. Making matters worse was the hot start turned in by the Expos’ brand-new division rivals, the Atlanta Braves. Realignment shifted the Braves to the NL East after the 1993 season, which was bad news for the Expos and the other clubs in the division. Atlanta was coming off three straight NL West titles, with World Series appearances in ’91 and ’92. Though the Braves weren’t lacking for impressive hitters, their biggest strength lay in their pitching staff. Tom Glavine, Steve Avery, John Smoltz, and Kent Mercker gave Atlanta better-than-average options all the way through the number-five spot.

But Atlanta’s staff ace was the Brave every team feared. Greg Maddux was coming off two straight Cy Young–winning seasons. In 1993, he led the National League in starts, complete games, innings pitched, and ERA. Though no one knew it yet, he hadn’t even reached his peak, and was just entering a two-year stretch that to this day ranks as one of the best in baseball history, en route to one of the greatest pitching careers of all time. Through the first three starts of his ’94 campaign, Maddux tossed two complete games, totalled 26 innings, struck out 20 batters, walked just one, and produced a 0.35 ERA. With a big assist from Maddux,
the Braves jumped out to a scorching 13–1 record to start the year, building an 8½-game lead on the Expos.

A Braves-Expos rivalry formed quickly in their first year as intra-division combatants. The two teams shared the same spring training complex, and the Braves had developed into a powerhouse thanks mostly to killer scouting and player development—the very blueprint the Expos were trying to follow. For Georgia-born Expos outfielder Rondell White (a first-round pick who was mostly a reserve in ’94 but would develop into one of the team’s brightest young stars the following year), beating the Braves meant everything.

“I remember me and my brother and my cousin, cheering on the couch for those Braves teams in the ’80s. ‘Chambliss! Chambliss!!!’ or whatever player was doing something big at the time,” recalled White. “Then I got to meet some of these guys growing up, my idols; the first player I ever met was [Braves second baseman] Glenn Hubbard, it was so exciting. So now I’m in the big leagues, getting ready to play Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz, America’s team, TBS, all that. Playing against them, trying to beat them, there was a lot of extra incentive.”

There’d be plenty of incentive for everyone when the Expos and Braves met up for the first time in ’94. After that slow start, Montreal blazed through the league, winning 12 of 14; and at the same time, the Braves went ice cold. By the time the Expos got to Atlanta, they had surged to within a half-game of first place: win two out of three and they’d take over the NL East lead.

The series opener featured a classic matchup, with the young stallion Martinez taking on the dean of National League pitchers, Maddux. The Braves won the battle handily, with Pedro lasting just five innings while Maddux went the distance, shutting out the Expos with a four-hitter. In game two, wildly underrated Expos lefty Jeff Fassero pitched a gem, going 8 2/3 innings,
allowing just two runs, and striking out 11. But it wasn’t good enough, as Tom Glavine bested him with a four-hitter, en route to a 2–1 Braves win.

Hoping to avoid a sweep, the Expos sent Ken Hill to the mound in the third game. I can vividly remember the day the Expos acquired Hill. After the 1991 season, we’d heard rumours that Dan Duquette was shopping Andres Galarraga, that the Cardinals were the Big Cat’s most aggressive suitor, and that the Expos were after a starting pitcher. We were convinced Duquette was chasing Rheal Cormier. A left-hander who lacked overwhelming stuff, Cormier started working as a lumberjack before getting drafted in 1988 to play pro ball. Still, two factors made us think he’d end up an Expo. First, Galarraga’s stock had plummeted following a miserable ’91 season. Second, Cormier was a Francophone, a New Brunswick native of Acadian descent—about as close as you could get to a Québécois player without actual Quebec ties.

The Expos hadn’t actually mined their home province all that much for talent before, with Claude Raymond and Denis Boucher standing out as rare exceptions 22 years apart. This was a sore spot for some, including Jacques Doucet, who believed the team could benefit greatly from drafting and developing local boys to one day play at the Big O. Given the boom in fan interest when Boucher eventually made his home debut, and the stellar careers later enjoyed by Quebec natives like Eric Gagne and Russell Martin, Doucet probably had a point. But as things turned out, the Expos wouldn’t go for the French-speaking Cormier this time either; they went for Hill instead. When the news broke and I ran into fellow Maple Ridge Boys member Elan at school, we could only manage one reaction: “Ken Hill? Ken Hill?!?!?”

A lousy marketing move, maybe, and not a deal people expected … but definitely the right personnel decision. Never a big strikeout artist, Hill nonetheless matured into one of the
Expos’ best pitchers, chewing up innings, keeping the ball in the ballpark, and keeping his team in games on a regular basis.

“He was huge in Montreal,” said Van Horne. “He helped settle down all the younger, more inexperienced pitchers, including Pedro. He was just a take-charge guy, a terrific teammate, and a quality major league pitcher.”

A slump-buster too. Facing the possibility of a sweep in Atlanta, Hill blew away the Braves in the series finale, tossing seven shutout innings on just three hits. He then gave way to Wetteland, who notched one of many unhittable performances that year: six batters up, six down, five of them on strikeouts.

When the calendar flipped over to June, the Expos turned into world beaters. They pulled off three series sweeps that month, dominating the Cubs, Mets, and Pirates. Usually comfortable at Olympic Stadium (even during so-so seasons), the Expos started creaming opponents regardless of venue: they would eventually end the season with the best road record in franchise history, and one of the best road marks by any team in years.