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 (43 page)

Much of the blame for the waning attendance, and the team’s faltering image, lay with Olympic Stadium itself. The collapsed beam, the roof that never worked, and the cold, cavernous, uninviting atmosphere within the seating bowl were all turnoffs. The location in the East End, away from major population centres, was a major drawback. Fans who lived in the western suburbs lost interest in schlepping all the way to the stadium. People from other parts of the city didn’t want to cross bridges or tunnels. The large business community downtown was geographically closer, but—with no fun restaurants, bars, or ancillary activities of any kind nearby—the Big O wasn’t appealing to them either.

Brochu knew all this, and knew that getting out of Olympic Stadium and into a new, baseball-only park was the best way to help the team survive (maybe even thrive) long-term. To build support for that new stadium, Brochu needed to convince everyone—Major League Baseball, potential financiers in the
Quebec premier’s office, and the media—that the Big O wasn’t fit for baseball.

But there was a fine line between strategic anti-marketing and being so negative (and convincing) that fans took Brochu at his word and decided they, too, should stop going to the ballpark. The commissioner’s office joined the anti–Olympic Stadium campaign, with Bud Selig insisting that the old park was untenable. In ’97, attendance slid another 7 percent to an average of 18,489 fans a game. In 1998, the bottom dropped out: the Expos drew fewer than a million fans, the per-game average of 11,295 representing a 39 percent free-fall. Though many factors combined to squash attendance, for many fans it felt as though a restaurant owner was inviting you to eat at his restaurant, then telling you there are cockroaches in the soup. There
were
cockroaches at the Big O—literally and figuratively—but when Selig backed Brochu’s play, it came off to many locals as an American outsider sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.

Brochu started thinking about a new ballpark back in 1992—soon after the 55-ton chunk of the building crashed to the ground. By 1996, he’d started commissioning focus groups to provide feedback on what they’d like to see in a stadium.

I know, because I was
in
one of those groups. A friend of mine had received an invite to be part of it; not a baseball fan, he arranged to have the invite transferred to me. When I walked into the room, there were 11 others there, all brought in to render their ballpark opinions. Five minutes in, I was giving a long answer to one of the first questions posed to the group. Fifteen minutes in I was more or less the only voice being heard, the foreman of a jury that had 11 level-headed folks and one lunatic who did nothing but think about baseball. A lot of minutiae got discussed that day: ticket prices, giveaways, concessions. The two biggest takeaways were: 1) if you’re going to build a new ballpark, make
it either open-air or possibly open-air with a retractable roof that works; and 2) build the damn thing downtown, to capitalize on the massive, untapped market of office workers eager for an activity to add to their
cinq à sept
rituals. Make happy hour even happier, and people will pack the joint.

On June 20, 1997, Brochu publicly announced his new stadium plan. The park would be built in the heart of downtown, on a plot of land donated by the federal government, bound by Notre-Dame, de la Montagne, St. Jacques, and Peel streets. It would be a $250 million open-air park, with Brochu later stumping for an addition $100 million to be spent on an umbrella-like retractable roof. Even the 22-year-old narcissistic me held no delusions of grandeur that Brochu had based the plan on my rants in the focus group, but it was still exciting to see that the Expos’ big boss shared the same vision. Designed by Daniel Arbour & Associates and architecture firms NBBJ and HOK, the stadium would include 35,000 (heated!) seats, and an old-school brick facade with architecture that, to Brochu, evoked downtown’s old Bonaventure train station. The new stadium, which later secured naming rights from Labatt Breweries, would open in 2001 as Labatt Park.

Local media, for the most part, supported the plan. Plenty of U.S.-based teams had threatened to relocate if they didn’t get a new publicly financed stadium. But in the Expos’ case, it wasn’t so much a threat as a mortal lock. The owners had lost tens of millions of dollars, attempts to recruit new corporate partners had failed, and though revenue sharing had temporarily plugged the hole in the dike, the continuing dearth in local revenue streams meant status quo couldn’t hold up much longer. “This isn’t blackmail,” read the resulting
Montreal Gazette
editorial in response to the stadium plan, “but rather simple logic.”

Getting the media’s support was nice. But what Brochu and the Expos needed far more were endorsements from those who
would sign the cheques. To raise the $250 million needed to build the stadium, Brochu proposed a mix of private and public funding. On the private side, the Expos would attempt to sell $100 million worth of personal seat licences. PSLs became a trendy stadium financing option in the ’90s, a plan by which the buyer pays a large sum of money to secure the right to buy season tickets. Brochu would eventually get $40 million in PSL commitments, an impressive number given that ground hadn’t actually been broken on Labatt Park yet, and that PSLs are a shady scheme—one in which a licensee who no longer wants season tickets can either try to sell the seat licence … or forfeit the licence back to the team. (Either way, the team wins.) Brochu approached local businesses with the PSL plan first. He then proposed selling commemorative bricks, which individual buyers could inscribe with personalized messages for the low, low price of $299 a pop.

The bigger chunk of the money, $150 million, however, would come from the government. The plan discussed by Brochu and Quebec’s finance minister (and later premier) Bernard Landry called for taxes on player salaries rather than direct, out-of-pocket contributions by the province. The plan made sense in theory: if the Expos were to leave, that tax revenue would be gone anyway. But it was also a presumptuous plan, one that assumed that tax money (and whatever “non-direct” revenue sources Brochu and Landry could dream up) would cover the full $150 million price tag, and that the project would have no cost overruns. Given Brochu’s relatively tiny $250 million projection and the track record of many gigantic overruns on U.S.-based projects, the need for more money from the province seemed a lock. All of that before we even get to the $100 million Brochu said it would take to build a retractable roof (for that, the Expos’ managing partner suggested ticket taxes, a wildly over-optimistic proposal).

Though Landry would remain supportive throughout the discussion process, his boss wasn’t a fan of the plan. The day after the introductory stadium press conference, Premier Lucien Bouchard weighed in.

“When we’re closing hospitals,” said Bouchard, “I’m not sure we should be opening stadiums.” Besides, he continued, “we already have a big stadium, which cost a few dollars and isn’t finished being paid for.”

While Brochu tried to figure out a way to convince the premier, the front office was failing in its attempt to convince the fans—especially when Pedro Martinez was traded away after the 1997 season.

Dealing one of the two most talented pitchers the Expos ever had (a Pedro vs. Randy Johnson debate would be a fun one) was part of one last rebuild before Labatt Park could open in four years. But the fans’ reaction was much harsher than Brochu expected: after so many years of watching the Expos cheap out on players—Carter, Dawson, Walker, Grissom, Hill, Wetteland, Alou, and more—and then lose them, Pedro was the last straw. The wild but promising Martinez of 1994 had matured into the best pitcher in the league. He’d thrown nine perfect innings on the road against the Padres in ’95 (losing the perfecto and no-hitter in the 10
^th
, sadly), cranked his strikeout-to-walk rate to new heights in ’96, then conquered the universe in ’97. That season, Pedro tossed 241 1/3 innings, struck out 305 batters, and posted a 1.90 ERA during a sky-high offensive year that we would later come to realize was the apex of baseball’s steroids era. (The Expos were as complicit as any other club, with one player describing the clubhouse as “Grand Central” for steroids. Several Expos from that era later appeared in the Mitchell Report, a document released in 2007 that detailed performance-enhancing drug use by dozens of players, following an independent investigation led by former U.S.
senator George Mitchell.) On a lousy team that won only 78 games that season, Pedro
was
the show, pocketing his first of three Cy Young Awards at age 25. As bad as all the other trades and defections had been, never before had the Expos traded away someone with that electric a combination of youth, talent, flair, and lovability. Shipping him off to Boston was nothing short of a back-breaker.

“I was a season-ticket holder for a long time, with a group of people,” said Mitch Melnick. “And when Pedro was traded I said, ‘Fuck, I’m not givin’ any more money. This is fuckin’ ridiculous.’ All they could get was Carl Pavano and Tony Armas? Fuck! We just traded a Hall of Fame pitcher!!!”

While fans fumed, Brochu’s partners began to turn against him as well. Provigo’s Pierre Michaud and pharmacy chain owner Jean Coutu in particular went from harsh critics behind closed doors to ripping Brochu in public—then to actively plotting against him to rebuild the consortium with someone else at the helm. Eventually even Jacques Ménard (one of Brochu’s earliest allies when he started recruiting local businesses to buy the team from Charles Bronfman) and Mark Routtenberg (the one consortium member Brochu considered a true friend and saw socially) flipped sides. The reasons for revolt depend on who you ask: to the partners, Brochu’s actions during his time as managing partner painted him as either incompetent, a glory hound, or both. To Brochu, the partners’ rebellion amounted to sheer jealousy that he (as the Expos’ public face in MLB’s eyes), and not they, called the shots.

On September 2, 1998, Brochu and Ménard headed a group of four that met with Bouchard in Quebec City. This time, the premier delivered his message of skepticism face to face: he wasn’t going to support a new ballpark for the Expos, not when the province was having problems ranging from the aforementioned hospital closings to the far more popular Montreal Canadiens facing financial woes of their own.

The Habs’ struggles emphatically underscored the monumental challenge the Expos were facing. After the Expos briefly passed them in popularity in the early ’80s, the Canadiens quickly reclaimed their status as the kings of Montreal, winning Stanley Cups in 1986 and 1993, and, with the exception of ’94, dwarfing the Expos in fan fervour. But by the late ’90s, the local economy was so shaky, and the supply of well-heeled potential local investors so low, that even the city’s hockey gods couldn’t find a suitor.

“You’d had all the cash leave the province,” said Elliott Price, referring to the 1976 sovereignty referendum and the slow exodus of businesses afterwards. “Think about how crazy it is that nobody would buy the Canadiens. How could you not buy the Montreal Canadiens?!”

The Habs finally found a buyer in 2001, when American businessman George Gillett purchased the team and its arena, the Molson Centre, for the dirt-cheap price of $185 million. The Molson (now Bell) Centre had itself been financed privately: if the Habs had to build their own arena, a baseball stadium receiving public money was a tall order indeed.

But at the end of the ’98 season, three thousand fans assembled downtown to rally to support the stadium proposal. On stage, Rusty Staub, Gary Carter, and the team’s newest star, Vladimir Guerrero, got a massive ovation. Two of the highest-ranking Expos were notably absent, however. One was Felipe Alou, who was in a dispute with Montreal over a new contract and was being courted by the Dodgers. The other was Brochu, who was trying to resolve the Alou situation before returning to his primary goal of pulling a stadium deal out of a hat. Maybe it was for the best, given the fire sales he’d engineered and the beatings he’d taken in the press. Still, even without Alou there, those in attendance described the mood as optimistic. Even festive.

“The rally merely confirmed the general mood this week,” wrote
Montreal Gazette
columnist Jack Todd, “which was that despite the mysterious status of Alou, the absence of Claude Brochu and reports that Brochu is on his way out as managing partner, the future of the Expos in Montreal looks brighter than it has at any time in the past three years.”

A few days after the rally (and with Alou’s three-year extension closer to being finalized), Brochu returned to Quebec City to meet with Bouchard once more. This time, Bud Selig himself came along to plead the Expos’ case, but again, talks went nowhere. Brochu would allege that his partners had poisoned the well against him, telling Bouchard that he should back a stadium plan—but only if Brochu were no longer in charge. Whether legitimate financial concerns or backroom dealings caused Bouchard to balk (probably both, though much more of the former) made no difference for Expos fans. For them, what mattered most was that the dream of a beautiful new downtown stadium and the financial security it promised the team ($50 million a year in additional revenue to start, per Brochu’s estimates) appeared dead.

By the end of the 1990s, Brochu’s former partners had finally forced him out. That left the now ex-managing partner to collect a payout of $15 million (plus, according to sources, more down the road). With Brochu gone, Ménard led a search for a new managing partner, but as the search dragged on, everyone involved—including Major League Baseball—started to worry. If a new investor couldn’t be found, that would mark the end of the Expos. After years of dodging bullets,
Nos Amours
were now perched on the edge of destruction.

Only two sources of hope remained. On the field, the Expos had Guerrero, a powder keg of talent who reminded old-time baseball fans of Roberto Clemente. Montreal was so confident in Guerrero’s abilities, the team shocked the baseball world by
actually spending some damn money, locking Vladi up for five years on a $28 million contract.