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 (44 page)

Off the field, Ménard and company realized that only one investor was willing to step forward. For years, he’d dreamed of owning a major league team. A decade after their first round of talks with him had gone nowhere, the Expos were finally willing to offer him that chance. The fate of the franchise rested in Jeffrey Loria’s hands.

H
istory, Winston Churchill told us, is written by the victors. Clearly, Winston Churchill wasn’t a Montrealer.

Claude Brochu’s fall from grace was partly deserved: the way he handled some major decisions, especially the post-strike fire sale of 1995, irreparably harmed the Expos, both on the field and in the minds of jilted fans. But the structure of the team’s partnership—in which Brochu was the public face of the team while his well-heeled partners lurked in the shadows—thrust a disproportionate amount of blame on Brochu. The partners represented some of the biggest, richest, most prestigious companies in Quebec. Any of them could have put in more money at any time to help the Expos navigate the many land mines the team faced during the ’90s. They chose to offer nothing. Then, as time went on, they destroyed Brochu in the eyes of the public. These were powerful figures, each with many well-connected friends in the media, in boardrooms, in the premier’s office—everywhere. By the time they were through with their smear campaign, Brochu
had been cast as public enemy number one, while their own reputations remained unharmed in many people’s eyes. History, as it would turn out, was written by the eventual losers.

Fans brought signs to the Big O calling for Brochu’s ouster. Which was fine, of course: force your GM into trading John Wetteland for cash and Fernando freaking Seguignol, and you deserve every bit of the fans’ scorn. But the backlash went far beyond signs at the ballpark. For the last couple of years of his time as the consortium’s managing partner, Brochu had a bodyguard follow him everywhere. A
bodyguard
. Because he ordered some crappy baseball trades. Such was the power of his very loud silent partners, that they could manipulate public opinion perfectly to completely avoid blame for the Expos’ downfall, with a few unhinged locals even making Brochu fear for his damn life. And such was the power of group psychology, that in the face of an extremely complicated situation in which many parties were to blame, the public could single out one person. When you’re trying to build a mob mentality, a scapegoat is what you need more than anything. Claude Brochu was that scapegoat.

Like Brochu, Jeffrey Loria (and his stepson and team executive vice president David Samson) made plenty of mistakes in the two years that they owned the Expos. But the level of vitriol that Expos fans threw Loria’s way back then (and even now) far exceeded the actual damage done by the team’s new leaders. The demise of the Expos played out over 20 years. It started with Charles Bronfman’s disillusionment, the Gary Carter trade, and the team losing its southern Ontario broadcast foothold to the Blue Jays, then got worse in the ’90s when no one with money or real power would step forward to support the team. You could even argue that the root causes traced back another decade further, to architect Roger Taillibert breaking ground on Olympic Stadium, one of the worst facilities anyone could ever dream up for a baseball team. Those
are complex, nuanced explanations that weren’t (and still aren’t) easy for some people to digest. Much easier to pick a villain and pin it on him. First it was Brochu, and, after he left, Loria became that villain.

“No more business as usual.” Those were Loria’s first words in his first press conference. No more business as usual with the team’s microscopic payroll. No more business as usual getting by with a season-ticket base so tiny you’d think it was for a series of elementary school plays. No more business as usual broadcasting games for next to nothing. In return for his investment, Loria wanted to own a baseball team that could compete with the rest of the league.

Once that short, blunt speech ended, Loria’s first course of action was simple. He was going to spend real money, and buy real players.

Loria took control of the team on December 9, 1999, and just 11 days later, the Expos signed Graeme Lloyd to a three-year, $9 million contract. From a baseball standpoint, this was a spectacularly stupid move. Lloyd was a 32-year-old left-handed reliever who’d had only a couple of decent seasons. He was the kind of player who might get acquired by a stacked team looking for one more minor piece before making a run at the World Series. Every year, teams sign pitchers of Lloyd’s calibre to one-year deals for fairly small sums of money. Yes, the Expos’ bullpen had struggled mightily ever since the breakup of the 1994 powerhouse. Still, to spend this much on Lloyd smacked of an excessive desire on Loria’s behalf to prove his commitment to winning—and of the New Yorker’s quite obvious Yankees fetish (Lloyd was a former Yankee).

Two days later, the Expos made another bad baseball move. With eyes for another Yankee, they acquired 30-year-old Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu from New York. In return, they gave up three young pitchers, two of whom (Jake Westbrook and Ted Lilly) went on to have long, successful careers: both retired after the 2013 season with a combined 28 seasons in the majors under their belts.

About three months after the Irabu deal came yet another big move: in a three-way trade, the Expos shipped 25-year-old first baseman Brad Fullmer (a homegrown player with pop, making the league minimum and under team control for four more years) to Toronto, and got back Lee Stevens (a 32-year-old, arbitration-eligible first baseman about to make $3.5 million in 2000) from Texas. That season, Fullmer broke out, cranking 32 home runs for the Jays. Meanwhile, Stevens hit .265 with 22 home runs, and remained exactly what he was before and what he’d be thereafter:
a semi-functional, below-average major league first baseman who had no business making real money. Loria found Stevens’ first underwhelming season so impressive that he gave the mediocre first baseman a two-year, $8 million contract extension too.

Thanks almost entirely to those three players, the Expos’ payroll jumped to $33 million in 2000, nearly double the $17.9 million in 1999 and far above the team’s previous all-time high of $19.3 million in ’97.

No one held any illusions of superstardom when it came to Lloyd, Irabu, and Stevens. But it was certainly a change of course from the old plan, which included grand strategies such as: “Let’s trade the best pitcher in the league, who’s 25 years old and one of the most popular players we’ve ever had, so that maybe, if everything breaks perfectly, we can field a competitive club four years from now, when this hypothetical new stadium finally opens.” For the Expos, the moves Loria had just bankrolled were most certainly
not
business as usual.

In December 1999, Loria told the
New York Times
’ Murray Chass the Expos could turn their fortunes around “by establishing stability, commencing a new marketing program and bringing in a winning attitude and winning players.” He continued, “We can build this franchise to where it was in the ’80s and the early ’90s.” Loria talked a good game too.

But there was trouble from the start. After all those moves, the 2000 team was still terrible, losing 95 games. Michael Barrett, a catching prospect who got converted to third base, followed a decent rookie season in ’99 with a terrible 2000, hitting .214 with just one home run. Orlando Cabrera, another young player with promise, cancelled out his solid defence at shortstop by hitting just .237 with a .279 on-base percentage. Twenty-two-year-old centre fielder Peter Bergeron, whom the Expos hoped might become an effective leadoff man … was not effective, hitting
.245 with limited power. The two biggest disappointments, however, were the ex-Yankees that Loria had coveted. Irabu was a human tire fire, posting a 7.24 (!!!) ERA, which made the fact that he couldn’t stay healthy a big relief. At the same time, Graeme Lloyd might’ve had the unluckiest year ever foisted on an Expos player. He missed the entire season after having shoulder surgery; at the start of the season, his wife, just 26, died due to complications from Crohn’s disease; then, in August, a tornado destroyed his home in Florida.

Spending all that money was a nice symbolic gesture—but symbolism wasn’t going to win ballgames. Loria (and GM Jim Beattie) simply didn’t spend their money wisely; if they were going to buy free agents or make trades, they needed to target better players. Or at least, rather than blow a ton of money on crappy veterans, they could’ve plowed some of that cash into the draft. The mid-to-late 1990s had been a wasteland of picks, a disaster for an Expos team that had made a living through scouting and player development, going all the way back to their aggressive offer to woo Gary Carter away from quarterbacking at UCLA. Even so, if the Expos had recommitted to spending big money on big prospects, that plan would’ve taken years to bear fruit (with the best high schoolers a good three or four years from making the Show, and maybe seven or eight years from approaching their peak). Neither Loria nor anyone else had the luxury of being
that
patient, not when the Expos needed to win back local support immediately or risk extinction. Unfortunately, with elite players increasingly adding the Expos to their lists of teams on their no-trade clauses and free agents avoiding the growing headache in Montreal, all that was left was to overpay for half-decent players and pray for a miracle. The 2000 season was the opposite of a miracle. It was a year so depressing that it immediately wiped out whatever little hope had been built up when the new owner arrived.

“[Loria] increased the payroll, improved the team, spoke to the Chamber of Commerce, and he thought that would lead to some movement with the new ballpark, that people would start committing to it,” said Mitch Melnick. “Nothing happened. Nothing. People were … waiting. They wanted to wait to see if this team was really that much better with a new owner. It’s not that they had doubts about Loria right away—those came later. But, it was like, ‘I don’t want to spend $10,000 if I don’t know this team is going to be any good.’ ”

And the team still didn’t have a baseball-friendly ballpark to draw people in.

In the summer of 1999—months before the ownership transfer officially took place—Loria, Samson, Jacques Ménard, and a local contractor had met with representatives from Major League Baseball and the sports arm of architecture firm HOK. The Brochu-era plan to build a traditional-looking stadium had been scrapped, and now, the new Expos contingent (led at this point by Ménard) wanted to build the stadium for much less than the cost of other parks: around $250 million. The new design was far more modern, with grand, curved contours and lots of glass, as well as a retractable roof. HOK had designed several throwback ballparks that opened in the ’90s, its signature project being Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore. At the meeting, HOK representatives checked off the dozens of problems with the cheaper proposal, telling the contingent that the new plan was going to fail miserably.

You could see both sides of the issue. From MLB’s perspective, messing with the successful formula that HOK had laid out in Baltimore and other markets seemed an unnecessary risk (not to mention the stadium
did
look somewhat flimsy, even if it had aesthetic appeal; the retractable roof might’ve ripped off the place after the first stiff breeze). But the Expos group saw things differently.

“I was at Morgan Stanley [before being asked by Loria to come work for the Expos],” Samson told me in a 2013 interview in Miami, “and these were my first experiences dealing with people in baseball. I learned that anything different is wrong. That’s the view within baseball. That’s the old, old-boys network. I didn’t agree. Just because something is done in a different way doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Of course, design still wasn’t the biggest problem—funding was. Disagreements over design could be hammered out over time. Even the initial reticence from the local business community didn’t seem like a deal-breaker. What was essential, though, was that the Expos secure financial support from Quebec City. This was Ménard’s dossier: the interim head of the consortium was supposed to negotiate with Bouchard to secure the province’s co-operation. Where Brochu had failed, Ménard vowed to succeed. When he approached Loria to take over the team, Ménard told the prospective new owner that the stadium deal’s negotiations were all but done. When Loria and Samson actually took over the team, they quickly realized this wasn’t true. The government hadn’t agreed to any kind of financial plan. In the end, it never did, and Loria and Samson never got a single meeting with Bouchard or his underlings to convince them otherwise.

“In business you can do all the due diligence you want,” said Samson. “But it’s not until you’re behind the wheel that you really know whether the tires work.”

All four tires blew out at once. The team still stunk. The new ballpark never happened. And the next setback was an even bigger rude awakening.

Dissatisfied with local TV and radio deals that were much smaller than any other major league team’s, Loria went to meet with the networks. He travelled to Toronto to meet with TSN, the national, all-sports cable TV network. TSN said it was willing to
pay $5,000 a game, when—according to sources—the network was paying the Jays at least $200,000 a game.