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 (4 page)

On temperament alone, you could call Mauch the National League’s version of Hall of Fame Orioles manager Earl Weaver. Generously listed at five foot seven, Weaver would often argue calls with umpires, firing spittle and vitriol and kicking dirt on any who dared oppose him. He’d cast scorn on umps, players, and even himself when things didn’t go right. That was Mauch, too. A five-foot-ten bundle of nerves, he too argued calls with vigour and anger. But Mauch’s critics claimed he was wound so tight that he’d sometimes psyche out his own team. Many of those criticisms seemed justified when Mauch presided over one of the worst collapses in baseball history.

In his book
October 1964
, David Halberstam described the wild pennant race that took shape in the National League that year. The Phillies racked up a 90–60 record heading into the home stretch, leading the league by 6½ games with 12 to play and a seven-game homestand coming up. Fans of baseball history know what happened next.

In the first game of that homestand, the Phillies faced the Reds. Tied 0–0 in the sixth inning, Reds third baseman Chico Ruiz made it to third base with two outs. Right-hander Art Mahaffey was pitching for the Phils. Stealing home under any circumstances takes uncommon anticipation, and guts. In a big spot, Ruiz read the play perfectly, dashed for home, and scored, giving the Reds a 1–0 lead that would hold up for the rest of the game, slicing Philly’s league lead to 5½. “The play broke our humps,” Phillies slugger Dick Allen said years later.

It’s never easy to pinpoint exactly what causes a losing streak, let alone one of the biggest collapses in baseball history. But as the
losses piled up following that first hump-breaker game, Mauch grew increasingly shell-shocked, lashing out at anyone he could in an attempt to bail his team out. Whether Mauch’s agitated demeanour was a cause or merely a symptom, the Phillies ended up losing the pennant by a single game to St. Louis.

When Mauch took the Expos job five years later, little had changed.

“I broke in with the Cubbies under Leo Durocher,” recalled Bill Stoneman, the little righty who became a member of the Expos’ inaugural starting rotation (and almost immediately crafted one of the team’s most memorable moments—more on that later). “Durocher was a tough, tough guy, and Gene Mauch was a tough guy, but I never had a problem with Gene. I understood his thinking, especially after playing a couple years for Durocher. He was a pretty demanding guy, so you learned a lot playing for him. There weren’t any punches pulled when something didn’t quite go the way that it should have, especially with mental errors. Physical errors are physical errors, but if you made a mental error, Gene got on you real quick.”

Mauch was also considered a shrewd strategist. At a time when pitching ruled the game and bunting, stealing, and scratching out single runs was a universal approach, Mauch was the small-ball master. During the eight seasons in which he managed either all or most of the year in Philadelphia, Mauch’s teams finished first in the National League in sacrifice bunts three times, second once, and never lower than fourth. You could argue that treating outs as precious rather than willingly giving them up is always sound strategy—even during the low-scoring ’60s. But ask those who played for Mauch and they’ll praise their skipper’s extreme attention to detail.

“At Jarry Park you’d come into the clubhouse and have to walk right by his office,” said Dan McGinn, a lefty swingman and original
Expo who played for three years under Mauch in Montreal. “There was this big board up there, and I mean it had everything. If it’s the sixth inning and Pitcher X is pitching, pinch-hit with this guy. All the smallest details, he had it figured it out to a tee. Way ahead of the game.”

Just learning to crawl in those first few years, those early, talent-starved Expos teams would push Mauch to the limits of his sanity. But the team wasn’t all bad. McHale and Fanning were on to something when they roughly translated the prevailing theory of the expansion draft to “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Cobble together enough attractive, unprotected players from various teams and maybe you could somehow turn them into something better. It would require perfect circumstances, where a team possessing that kind of front-line player either didn’t appreciate that player’s talent, or was so spectacularly stupid that it would let ill-founded biases get in the way of sound player evaluation. The Houston Astros, it turned out, were happy to oblige. In a tremendous coup, the Expos would leverage three of its newly acquired rejects into its first star, one of the best and most popular players the franchise would ever know: the man who’d become known as Le Grand Orange.

The entire Astros brain trust disliked Rusty Staub, mostly for ridiculous reasons. It started when they gave him $90,000 as an 18-year-old bonus baby, stamping him as the boy destined to become the man who would lead Houston’s expansion franchise to glory. Staub got the usual jealous glares and condescending jabs from teammates for being that young and that wealthy (at least for the time). But big bonuses also make managers and general managers expect big things out of players, even when they might be several years shy of their prime. Thrust into the everyday lineup at 19 for the 1963 season, Staub hit just .224 with minimal power. Reduced to part-time work the next year he was even worse,
hitting .216 while also struggling defensively as the Astros shuttled him between first base and the outfield.

He took a big step forward in his third season, batting .256 with 14 home runs. And the next year, he set new career bests in multiple categories, making his first All-Star team, settling in as an everyday right fielder, and finishing fifth in the league with a .333 batting average.

During Staub’s ’67 campaign,
Sports Illustrated
ran a feature story in August on the big redhead; at the time, he was hitting in the .350s and in hot pursuit of the batting crown. The article contained the usual superlatives: Former Reds manager Fred Hutchinson claimed to have pegged Staub years earlier as a future star. Ted Williams called Staub one of the best hitters he’d ever seen. But one quote now pops off the page: “I see the Astros hired Harry Walker as a batting coach,” said Mauch, then managing the Phillies. “Well, I’ll tell you this: the best batting coach Houston ever had is Rusty Staub. That boy made himself into a hitter, and he did one hell of a job.”

Staub could be stubborn, though. He was a tinkerer, and went from an upright stance—in which he held the bat high above his head and near the knob, swinging from his heels—to a crouch, in which he choked up and tried to spray the ball to all fields. Harry Walker was even more stubborn, objecting to Staub’s self-diagnosis, even as the hits kept coming for the pupil he hadn’t really helped. Staub didn’t get along with manager Grady Hatton either. But beyond a mere clash of personalities, Hatton and Astros GM Spec Richardson simply didn’t appreciate Staub’s skills. Though he didn’t hit for a high average until 1967, Staub always owned a good batting eye and a high-contact approach; he walked 52 times against 57 strikeouts in ’65, drew 58 bases on balls against 61 whiffs in ’66, and walked 60 times versus just 47 punchouts in ’67 (albeit with 21 of those walks being intentional).
Houston management hoped for more power from their bonus baby as well, but didn’t get it: though Staub posted a .398 on-base percentage (fourth-best in the league) and slugged .473 in 1967, he managed just 10 home runs. This too was a miscalculation, in which management knew the Astrodome was a tough place in which to hit home runs, but didn’t realize how much power Staub could produce playing half his home games somewhere else—not to mention what might happen once he’d gained more experience.

The Astros fired Hatton as manager in the middle of 1968, replacing him with Walker. Meanwhile, Staub was in the midst of a disappointing downturn. Some of his lesser numbers were due to luck catching up with him—he’d been fortunate on balls in play in ’67—and some were due to the Year of the Pitcher, when things were so tough on the hitters that the mound was lowered for the ’69 season. But the bottom line is that Staub was still just 24, and already had four good seasons to his credit. Astros management saw something else, though.

Nuance was not Harry “The Hat” Walker’s forte. Seizing on an opportunity to bail on a player he didn’t like, Walker huddled with Richardson on trade possibilities that could whisk Staub out of town, preferably in exchange for proven veteran talent. The Expos, by their own design, would prove to be the perfect fit. McHale and Fanning were both big Staub fans, and they’d collected multiple flippable veterans to dangle in trade for just such an opportunity. Staub, of course, had one other admirer who helped seal the deal: the same man who’d praised the ginger-domed outfielder’s skill while taking a subtle jab at Walker’s instructional abilities in
SI
. Now skippering the Expos and drooling to get Staub, Gene Mauch went to meet with the Astros, leveraging contacts he had within the organization.

The Astros liked Jesus Alou, the 13
^th
overall pick in the expansion draft. This was peculiar, given Alou made Staub’s supposedly
disappointing stats look stellar, coming off a .263/.278/.317 (average, on-base percentage, slugging) fiasco in ’68. But Alou still had youth and potential on his side as well, just two years older than Staub at 26. The Expos were willing to add another expansion draft pickup, 33-year-old former Pirate Donn Clendenon, to seal the deal.

The two teams made the trade official on January 22. Clendenon flew to Houston to tour the facilities and meet the Astros’ brass. A few days later, he announced that he would … retire. Clendenon claimed he could make as much money working for the Scripto pen company as he could playing for the Astros, and he backed up his words by going to Atlanta to do just that. But the skinny around baseball was that from his visit alone, Clendenon had already come to loathe the Astros brain trust almost as much as Staub did.

Whatever the reason, the Expos were now in trouble, because the Astros wanted Clendenon and wouldn’t take anyone else. The trade looked stillborn, leaving the Expos without their potential franchise player.

Time for shenanigans.

“So John McHale had worked with Bowie Kuhn [who had replaced Eckert] in the commissioner’s office, he was his number-two guy,” said Bronfman. “I’d invited Bowie to spring training. Now Bowie, it was his first year as commissioner. He was the new kid on the block. So I remember, we were in a meeting for some time, we were told Kuhn was about to arrive. McHale said to me, ‘Go put your uniform on.’ ‘You’re kidding.’ ‘Do what I asked you. Go put your uniform on.’ Staub had arrived, and McHale said the same thing to him. ‘Rusty, go put a uniform on and go throw a ball. Play catch or something.’ ”

Even though the trade was unofficial, Staub already had an Expos uniform. And then …

“We see Kuhn arriving. So we go out to the field to greet
Kuhn, and there’s McHale, Fanny, me. And I’m standing with Kuhn, and all of a sudden someone pulls me by the back of the scruff of the neck. It was [Expos travelling secretary] Gene Kirby. All of a sudden, I’m not next to Kuhn anymore, and a guy with an Expos uniform with flaming red hair is standing next to Kuhn, and the rest of us are standing next to them, wearing Expos uniforms too.”

“I always had a contact with an
AP
photographer,” recalled Fanning. “It dated back to my days with the Braves, who also trained in West Palm Beach. So whenever we needed a picture on the wire, I always called the guy to do it—we staged these things for him. So this time he comes out and takes this picture of Bowie, John, Charles, Rusty, and me. The photographer sent that all over the world. And John had a huge grin on his face, ‘Well, that’s that,’ John always said. We publicized this picture, and it was tantamount to Rusty being a Montreal Expo.”

The scheme drove the Astros—especially their outspoken owner “Judge” Roy Hofheinz—mad. With one publicity stunt, the Expos cemented the deal as far as Kuhn, and the rest of baseball, were concerned; the commissioner wanted the trade done, for fear of greater backlash if Houston backed out. The Expos and Astros would eventually make a revised deal official, just before Opening Day. McHale went to Atlanta and convinced Clendenon to unretire and play for the Expos. Montreal traded him later in the year to the eventual World Series champion Mets. The Expos then flipped Jack Billingham, Skip Guinn, and $100,000 to Houston to complete the Staub trade. It was a colossal relief for the deal’s centrepiece.

“I knew nothing about Montreal,” said Staub. “What got me was how much respect I had for Mauch, and how much he wanted me on his ball club. I knew I had to get out of Houston because of how they were operating—they brought my family into it, it was
sick. While everybody was deciding my fate in terms of Clendenon playing or not, I told the commissioner I would not go back to Houston, I would not play for them.”

Le Grand Orange would become a local hero on a team that struggled mightily for the first several years of its existence. But for Montrealers, the thrill of seeing baseball
chez nous
trumped any fleeting disappointment over any one loss, or even one hundred losses. One of the first, and greatest, thrills happened on April 8, 1969—the first time the Expos ever took the field for a regular-season game.

On a sunny day at Shea Stadium, the Expos sent 33-year-old veteran cast-off Mudcat Grant to the mound to face Tom Seaver. No big deal—all Seaver had done in his first two big-league seasons was win 32 games, post a 2.47 ERA, win National League Rookie of the Year, and make the All-Star team twice. He would remain a beast in ’69, going 25–7 and winning his first Cy Young Award while leading the Mets to one of the most dramatic and surprising World Series titles in baseball history. This, then, was what you might call a colossal mismatch.

The team’s architects hardly cared. This was going to be a momentous day, even if the Expos lost 20–0.

“It’s still one of my biggest thrills in baseball,” recalled Fanning. “Opening Day at Shea Stadium, brand-new unis no one had ever seen, these crisp uniforms on a beautiful day in New York City. Mayor Drapeau throwing out the first pitch next to Charles and McHale. The Canadian flag. The Canadian national anthem being sung. Those were thrills that brought tears to my eyes.”