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 (40 page)

The owners’ proposal wasn’t entirely without merit. The 58–42 revenue split in ’94 was atypically large, and teams were still years away from the explosion in local TV revenue that would dramatically swing the balance of financial power in the owners’ favour. Also, it was certainly true that several small-revenue teams were under the gun financially—none more so than the Expos. The combination of spotty attendance, sub-par local media deals, and numerous other factors had forced the Expos to slash expenses. Montreal, especially, needed a more generous revenue-sharing system in the worst way.

But there was just no way it was going to come out of players’
pockets—not after they’d fought for so long to finally get unfettered free agency. And certainly not after the owners had colluded to hold down free-agent salaries in the ’80s—with one of the most hawkish being Milwaukee Brewers boss Bud Selig, who was now pushing to restrict salaries again as baseball’s acting commissioner. Feeling there was no other way to avoid having owners impose their will, the players went on strike on August 12.

For the Expos, who’d surged to a 74–40 record that was the best in all of baseball, this was certainly a tough break. But the consensus in the clubhouse was that the strike wouldn’t last. A couple of weeks, maybe. Worst case, they’d be back playing around Labour Day.

“Felipe told us to stay in town,” said Floyd. “Stay in town, and they would call us and keep us updated.”

Nearly three weeks went by before the two sides finally sat down to try to hammer out a deal. Despite the presence of federal mediators, however, the talks went nowhere. On September 8, four weeks into the strike, the Players Association offered a plan that would levy a 1½ percent tax on the highest-payroll teams, which would then get funnelled to the poorest clubs. Also included in the plan was a measure that would have teams share 25 percent of gate receipts. The owners turned the deal down.

Throughout baseball, anger and frustration were building—nowhere more so than in Montreal. The Expos had struggled in one way or another for their entire existence. The expansion team that Bronfman and his partners had fought for nearly got handed to another city. Plans for a new ballpark got delayed and delayed, until the Expos finally ended up with a gigantic, money-losing lemon in Olympic Stadium. Star players started bolting. Bronfman sold the team. Brochu and his consortium ran the organization on a shoestring budget, with the Expos carrying the second-lowest payroll in baseball.

Yet somehow, against all odds, this underfunded team had run roughshod over the rest of the league, potentially setting up the first World Series trip in the club’s existence. Losing that chance would be unfathomably painful. The lost revenue of a cancelled season (and playoffs) would have dire consequences for the Expos’ bottom line, which would likely lead to money-driven panic moves. It would deny an incredibly talented and supremely entertaining group of players the chance to play out their dream season. Above all else, it would break the fans’ spirits, turning thousands of Montreal baseball supporters against the game forever.

On September 14, the death blow was delivered. The season was cancelled. For the first time in 90 years, there would be no World Series.

“There was no other way to put it,” said Floyd, “other than just … devastation.”

Claude Brochu didn’t it see it that way, however. He expressed disappointment over the season ending and the Expos being denied a shot at a playoff run. But he was also adamant about getting a revenue-sharing system that he hoped would help the Expos remain viable over the long haul.

“I think for baseball, it was the greater good,” Brochu said. “You can’t just be thinking in your own self-interest. You shouldn’t be a part of ownership if that’s the way you’re thinking. We needed [revenue sharing] or we couldn’t survive. It was a life-or-death struggle. So, I don’t buy that, that I didn’t look out for the best interests of the team. That’s exactly what I did, and I was ready to sacrifice the season to do it, despite how good the team was.”

I asked Brochu if he regretted the cancellation of what might’ve been a World Series in Montreal.

“I think it would have bumped up [revenue] to some extent, and maybe it would have been a little easier [in 1995 and beyond]. But I would have had to look at the financials. We were getting killed. We had no central revenue, no television money, no big crowds. I’ve done a calculation. I thought, if we had gone through to the World Series, we might have broken even.”

For Brochu, the bottom line was that revenue sharing would improve financial conditions across the league, ushering in what he called “the golden years.” Baseball would indeed experience a resurgence after the strike, thanks in part to revenue sharing, but also to Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak, as well as the Sosa-McGwire home-run race that captivated fans throughout North America. But the Expos never got to share in baseball’s bounty. Even if Brochu’s long view had merit, Montrealers were livid over what had happened to their team. No one wanted to hear excuses or rationales.

I sure as hell didn’t. I cried like a damn baby the day they cancelled the season. I even did something I never thought possible: I gave up on baseball. If this was how the game I loved was going to treat fans—especially Expos fans—then screw it, this wasn’t worth the heartache.

But baseball was Expos’ play-by-play man Dave Van Horne’s livelihood, and he had to press on. He got back to work when play resumed, though he did stage a kind of silent protest. Van Horne carefully wrote the names of the entire 25-man roster on a little index card, then placed that card in his wallet, where it would sit through the harsh winter that followed that ’94 disaster, into 1995 and onward.

Ask him about it today and Van Horne will pull out that card, read through the names, and flash a sad smile. Twenty years after baseball sabotaged the best team in Expos history, he remembers what might have been. That card—that incredible roll call—will sit in his pocket for as long as he lives, a reminder of a dream destroyed.

Y
ou could spend half an afternoon recounting the many dark days in Expos history.

October 19, 1981: Blue Monday, the closest the Expos ever got to a World Series. December 10, 1984: the day they traded Gary Carter away, Charles Bronfman’s frustrations with the game and rising salaries leading to the ouster of a legend. June 14, 1991: the official completion of the franchise sale, a transfer of ownership from Bronfman to the Claude Brochu–headed consortium that led to dire times. And of course, August 12, 1994: the day the players went on strike, denying the best Expos team ever its shot at glory.

But for sheer on-field impact, it’s tough to beat April 5–8, 1995, one of the most destructive three-day periods for the Expos—or any other franchise. Just a few days earlier, on March 31, district court judge (and future Supreme Court Justice) Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction against the owners, preventing them from using replacement players in regular-season games.
That ruling ended the strike, which had lasted 232 days. It also prompted Brochu to make a call, to Kevin Malone. The controlling partner’s message to the general manager was a simple one: get rid of three of the team’s best players, and do it immediately. Marquis Grissom, Ken Hill, and John Wetteland were about to become ex-Expos.

Brochu’s reasoning made sense, on the surface anyway. The cancellation of the last 48 games of the 1994 season, along with the playoffs and World Series, had blown a big hole in the Expos’ finances. Brochu claimed the team lost $15 million in ’94 as a result, though there’s no way to verify that, since baseball teams aren’t required to open their books (and never do). Grissom, Hill, and Wetteland would cost a shade over $8 million combined in ’94 and then would all get raises in ’95 (they’d end up making $13 million between the three of them that year). Add Larry Walker, the best player of the four and a free agent who wasn’t going to be re-signed under any circumstances, and Brochu and his partners would be dodging about $18 million in salary commitments for the 1995 season.

Meanwhile, fans had grown incredibly bitter and frustrated after everything that happened in ’94, and though the Expos had tried to respond to that frustration by slashing season-ticket prices, total attendance was sure to drop precipitously. Aside from the fans’ disenchantment, there was the likelihood that the team wouldn’t be as good (or as exciting), and that the abbreviated, 144-game season would wipe out nine home dates. Rising operating costs and plummeting income, Brochu says, forced his hand.

“If the whole ownership group had said, ‘All right, we’ll put the money in, keep them,’ then I would have considered it,” Brochu explained. “But when we first worked out the [new partnership deal], I’d asked everyone: ‘All right, are you prepared to put any money in?’ ‘No.’ Everybody looked down. It was, ‘No.’ Clear. ‘No,’
and that was it. When they said that, I had to commit to having no cash calls. So I said to Kevin, ‘We cannot go into this season with these four guys—we can’t do it. I can’t take the risk, we’re going to lose too much money.’ ”

Of course, the Expos’ cash crunch was partly Brochu’s doing. He’d voted along with his fellow owners for the plan that ultimately (and predictably) alienated the players and caused the strike in the first place. A dissenting vote might not have mattered anyway, given other owners’ commitment to their cause. But even if you could understand Brochu’s point of view, you could understand the fans’ side too: that the man in charge of their favourite team had sold them out.

And now he was selling the team’s star players. Teams trade established veterans for prospects all the time, and it often works (the Expos themselves had done it, trading Rusty Staub to the Mets 23 years earlier, an unthinkable move at the time that worked out well anyway). But ditching four front-line players at once was a lot more extreme. Still, Malone could make it a manageable proposition; all he needed was some time, and a little bit of leverage.

He got neither of those things. The Expos would play their first game on April 26 that year—meaning Malone had less than four weeks to make his moves. Practically speaking, he had even less. The deadline to offer players arbitration was April 7 (normally the arbitration date would be months earlier, but the strike had pushed everything back), and Brochu didn’t want to offer arbitration only to have the big four accept, leaving the Expos on the hook for their 1995 salaries. That gave Malone just
one week
to dispose of four of the best players in the league.

Malone tried to lobby his boss for more time, but Brochu refused. Okay, then how about keeping one or two of the four players. Same reply—no.

“We’d traded quality guys before, just never in those circumstances,” said Malone. “Everybody in baseball knew we had to move these guys. Getting full value was going to be very difficult.”

Not difficult. Impossible.

On April 5, Malone traded Ken Hill back to his former team, the Cardinals. In return, the Expos got three players: pitchers Kirk Bullinger and Bryan Eversgerd, and outfielder DaRond Stovall. These were relatively young players, with Eversgerd’s 67 2/3 innings pitched in 1994 the only major league experience among them. But they were not really prospects: Stovall had the highest pedigree as a fifth-round pick, and none of the three ever made
Baseball America
’s top 100 or any other prospect list. They would later bear this out, with Bullinger and Eversgerd combining to throw just 28 innings for the Expos, and Stovall garnering just 78 at-bats … for his entire major league career.

Malone’s second trade that day sent John Wetteland to the Yankees. In return, the Expos got only one player: Fernando Seguignol, a 6-foot-5, 257-pound giant of a first baseman with great raw power—and no earthly idea how to tell a ball from a strike. The English translation for the French word
guignol
is clown, an appropriate description in this case, given how badly the Yankees clowned the Expos in the trade. But hey, the move came with
some
good news. New York sent back $2 million in the deal, which Brochu and his partners used to balance their self-imposed microscopic budget, because putting another cent of their own money into the team to build a winner would surely have triggered the immediate bankruptcy of Bell, Desjardins, and all the other gigantic conglomerates that owned a piece of the Expos.

The next day, the third domino fell, as Malone shipped Marquis Grissom to Atlanta. In return, the Braves delivered three players: outfielders Roberto Kelly and Tony Tarasco, and pitcher Esteban Yan. Tarasco lasted just one season in Montreal, and quickly
proved he had no business starting in the big leagues. Yan never suited up for the Expos at all; Montreal sold him to Baltimore the next spring, and he later went on to play for six additional teams, lasting 11 mediocre seasons in the majors. His biggest contribution to Expos folklore came in an episode of
The Simpsons
years later, when Bart and Milhouse, pretending they were big-league ballplayers, conjured up the two most obscure names possible: “I’m Tomokazu Ohka of the Montreal Expos! And I’m Esteban Yan of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays!” As for Kelly, he played just 24 games in Montreal before getting flipped to the Dodgers; at least Malone was able to turn that lemon into lemonade, acquiring Henry Rodriguez.