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 (45 page)
Authors: Jonah Keri
“That meeting lasted about 30 seconds,” said P. J. Loyello, Expos PR man from 1995 to 2002.
The next meeting was with CJAD, a prominent English-language radio station in predominantly French-speaking Montreal. CJAD’s offer was: nothing.
“I think we’re going to have an issue here,” Ted Blackman, CJAD’s program director, told Loria. “We don’t offer money; we don’t pay for these deals. We have a brokerage deal with the Alouettes, we have a brokerage deal with the Canadiens.”
That was Montreal’s sports landscape in the late ’90s and into the next decade. The beloved Habs couldn’t even get proper media deals, so what chance did the lowly Expos have? The prevailing sentiment at CJAD was “they need us more than we need them.”
Meanwhile, Mitch Melnick was working for Team 990, an all-sports, English-language station. CJAD refusing to pay for Expos games presented an opportunity, so Melnick went to Team 990’s general manager Lee Hamilton to take his temperature on a possible deal.
“He said, ‘I’ll be happy to make a deal … if they’re willing to
pay
$1,000 per game,’ ” recalled Melnick. “It’s Loria’s first year, and Lee wanted him to pay $1,000 a game. Shell out $162,000, and he would carry the Expos.”
No major league owner in their right mind, in any city, would accept that kind of deal—not when other clubs were pulling in tens of millions of dollars between radio and TV rights. Samson figured local broadcasters would come around, that after a hot start,
they
would approach the Expos to work something out. That call never came.
“Negotiation” was not the message that got conveyed to the public. After 31 seasons of Expos games on local English radio,
there were none in 2000. Instead of radio, the Expos decided to broadcast their games in English on the Internet. This was a radical and cutting-edge move, but one that drew an audience that was just a fraction of the size of what they used to get on the radio. For everyone but a few tech-savvy early adopters, this was a devastating setback, not only to fans, but also to the voice of the Expos, Dave Van Horne.
“It wasn’t very pleasant,” Van Horne told Rich Griffin in a 2011
Toronto Star
article. “My daily escape was the two and a half to three hours I was behind the mic to do the ballgame [broadcast over the Internet]. The rest of the time was spent wondering what I was going to do the rest of my life. A good part of that season was spent agonizing over what was next for me, for my family, for my livelihood. Openings at the major league level don’t come up very often.”
For many fans and local media members, the math was simple: before Loria, they could sit out on the porch on a summer night and listen to Van Horne’s dulcet voice. Once Loria arrived, many people couldn’t do that anymore. So obviously, Loria had to be at fault. A narrative quickly emerged: this aloof art dealer and his fast-talking, short-statured, Napoleon-complexed stepson—these
New Yorkers
—were sabotaging the team. This was a far easier stance to adopt than accepting the obvious: that the Montreal business community, and now Montreal’s media outlets, wanted no part of the Expos.
“They [didn’t stop having] radio because they were purposely torpedoing the franchise,” said Melnick. “There was no radio because nobody wanted to pay for it. If there had been money from the media, and if the local guys had gone into their pockets and said, ‘We’re gonna build a ballpark,’ things would have been different, absolutely.”
The last tire to blow was Loria’s relationship with his partners in
the consortium. But in this case, it would be largely his own doing.
In May 2000, Loria issued the first cash call to his partners. For a typical partnership, this would be standard operating procedure: spending had gone up with Beattie’s acquisition of players over the winter in the hopes of improving the ball club. More money would be needed for other expenditures in the future, as the cost of doing business in Major League Baseball continued to climb. To keep pace, both Loria—who’d bought a 24 percent stake in the team for $18 million Canadian (about $12 million U.S. at the time, with the lopsided exchange rate)—and his partners would need to chip in to pay the tab.
Loria put in his share. No one else did.
This was the Raymond Cyr philosophy, being played out in real time. Bell, Nesbitt Burns, Desjardins: the representatives from these and most of the other consortium members had viewed their earlier investments as charitable donations. They painted themselves as white knights who’d done right by the community by contributing the equivalent of a rounding error on their companies’ profit and loss statements. But also like Cyr, they had made it clear that there would be no more money coming—ever. Not to keep the 1994 team intact; not to keep Pedro Martinez; not to make a stadium deal happen by financing a big chunk of it themselves—never. (Jean Coutu, grocery store chain Loblaw Companies, and Charles Bronfman’s son, Stephen—who’d been approached about a majority position before Loria—made an exception to the “never” rule, investing $1 million each at the same time that Loria put his money in, with a commitment to invest another $9 million each later on.) Brochu had let this stand, running the ball club on the puniest of budgets in a quixotic attempt to both win games and avoid bankruptcy. Loria had different ideas, figuring that to make money, he and everyone else would have to spend some.
There was no other way to increase investment. With no English radio, minimal revenue from French radio, and not much more from all TV ventures combined, media money was nearly non-existent. Attendance had been dreadful, diving to 9,547 fans a game in ’99, then ticking up to a still ugly 11,435 in 2000. Outsiders had begun to mock the fan base for its lack of support, but they were, frankly, way off base in their criticisms. After years of being told there were cockroaches in the soup, many Montrealers had done what anyone would do in that situation: go to a different restaurant. To get any kind of positive momentum going, all of the partners would have to bite the bullet, hoping that a little spending now would lead to better results down the road.
Loria’s partners, however, pleaded for a different course of action. The easiest way to raise money, they argued, would be to trade the team’s highest-paid player. Once again.
Yes, to keep the Expos going, the most popular opinion in the room was to trade a 25-year-old superstar, the franchise player signed to a team-friendly contract who’d become the one and only reason for fans to bother showing up at all. To solve our problems, they said, let’s dump Vladimir Guerrero.
Vladimir Guerrero’s first major league home run was, like so many of his other feats over the years, a revelation. The date was September 21, 1996, and the Expos, for a change, were contending down to the wire: they’d end up with a chance to make the playoffs all the way ’til the second-to-last day of the season. With one out in the ninth, Montreal trailed Atlanta 5–3. On the
mound for the Braves was Mark Wohlers, a nearly unhittable closer who dialled up his fastball into the high-90s. The Expos needed to mount a rally, and this was just the third game of Vlad’s career. To Don Sutton, the Braves’ colour commentator, leaving Guerrero in this spot was the wrong move. Though it wasn’t his team making the decision, Sutton seemed almost
angry
about it.
“Here’s a kid coming in against the best closer in the league, and you’re only down by two,” Sutton lectured. “This is a white flag.”
Half a second later, the first pitch Guerrero saw was a fastball. It was low, a couple of inches below the knees, and was outside, off the plate by a couple more inches. This was the kind of pitch that a hitter
might
swing at to protect the plate with an 0–2 count: maybe a weak swing, choked up on the bat, to foul the ball away and keep the at-bat alive. Wearing no batting gloves (as was his habit for the rest of his career), Vlad hacked at the pitch. Down two in the ninth and needing at least a baserunner to bring the tying run to the plate, this was an impetuous swing—something you wouldn’t see from almost any other hitter in the league in that spot. We’ll let Braves play-by-play man Skip Caray, and Sutton, take it from here.
Caray: “Fly ball, pretty well hit to right field. Back goes Dye into the corner, looks up … that ball is gone.”
Sutton: “Like I said, it’s a brilliant move. No it’s not, it’s a
lucky
move. That’s something … that just absolutely … happened … and it turned out well … for the Expos.”
Caray: “Trying to think with Alou, I guess he figured the kid’s a good fastball hitter, and there’s a good fastball pitcher out there. It certainly worked.”
Sutton: “This looked like a good pitch, out away from him. It may not have been a strike! But boy, he leaned out there and drilled it.”
Trying to rationalize Guerrero and where he could be used was a futile, even counterproductive exercise. Your eyes would process what would happen, but your brain just couldn’t accept it. It had to be
lucky
. Vlad defied everything you thought you knew about baseball. How could it be anything other than luck?
There was nothing typical about him. Vlad grew up unfathomably poor in the southeastern Dominican Republic town of Nizao. As Dan Le Batard wrote in his excellent 2002 Guerrero profile for
ESPN The Magazine
, little Vlad drank from puddles because the shack he lived in had no running water (or electricity). When a hurricane blew the tin roof off their hovel, Vlad’s family of seven squeezed into one tiny room, sharing two beds, then waited and waited for the hurricane-caused flooding to subside, while subsisting on milk and sugar dropped from rescue helicopters. Rather than go to school, he toiled the fields, harvesting tomatoes, melons, and onions. School was a luxury, and he frequently missed classes as a young child; his education ended for good after the fifth grade.
“I feel guilty about that,” Vlad’s mother told Le Batard, “but we had to eat. The storm didn’t kill anybody in our town, but the hunger after it did.”
When he wasn’t working, young Vlad was playing baseball. And when his older brother Wilton got invited to a Dodgers training camp, 16-year-old Vlad (he’d lied and said he was a year older) tagged along. The raw skills were obvious: 6-foot-3 with a rocket arm, brimming with athleticism. The governing expression for Dominican players was (and still is), “you don’t walk off the island”—meaning to impress scouts, you need to swing away. Even by those standards, Vlad was a freak of nature, a player so long-armed, and so strong, that he could reach out and hit balls four, six, even eight inches off the plate. And hit them
hard
. Vlad roped the ball all over the field that day under
the Dodgers’ watchful eyes, and earned a 30-day contract. It might have been longer, but the Dodgers didn’t know what to make of the kid: he’d shown up with no shoes, then injured his hamstring trying to leg out a double. According to legend, Vlad realized he wouldn’t be able to run after the injury. His next time up, he hit a home run instead—so he could trot slowly around the bases.
At any rate, the Dodgers never followed up. So Vlad returned to doing manual labour, while playing any form of baseball he could on the side. It was Fred Ferreira—dubbed “The Shark of the Caribbean” because of his knack for finding and signing diamond-in-the-rough players—who discovered Vlad next. The Expos’ international scouting director signed him in March 1993. Then came a breathtakingly fast ascent.
Vlad hit .314 in rookie ball in 1994. The next year, in the Single-A South Atlantic League, he hit .333, cracking 21 doubles, 10 triples, and 16 home runs in 110 games. The prospect hounds started salivating, and
Baseball America
named Guerrero the ninth-best prospect in the game before the 1996 season. That ’96 campaign was the stuff of legends: as excited as we were to follow the Expos through their surprise 88-win season, all we kept hearing about was Vlad. This being 1996, you couldn’t get reams of information on faraway prospects online like you can now. Instead, the news would leak out in dribs and drabs, a tiny two-line mention in agate type, or a cryptic quote buried at the end of a Sunday notes column. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was just an eight-hour drive from Montreal. But it was more fun to let your imagination run wild, picturing Vlad destroying the Double-A Eastern League with his cannon for an arm, his gazelle-like strides, and that lethal weapon of a bat. His final numbers that year were obscene: .360/.438/.612, with 32 doubles, eight triples, and 19 homers in 417 at-bats … at age 21.
When word spread that the Expos were going to call him up for the end of that season, we went nuts, and started plotting to get to every one of his games. Meanwhile, Montreal’s coaching staff held a meeting to discuss how to handle this guy, this once-in-a-generation talent—who was also the least disciplined player many of them would ever see.
“I’ll never forget that meeting as long as I live,” said Jim Tracy, who’d been promoted to become Felipe Alou’s bench coach. “Felipe called the staff into his office. And with that deep-ass voice of his, I heard this message: ‘Leave him alone.’ That’s what he said. ‘There’s going to be mistakes. The ball’s not going to be thrown to the cut-off man early on. His plate discipline is going to be very raw at best. Leave. Him. Alone.’ ”
That’s what everyone did, from the first day of his career ’til the last. What followed was a highly abnormal existence for a major league ballplayer. Vlad lived with his mom, bulking up on her cooking, then brought her to the ballpark with giant dishes full of food for the rest of the team. When the Expos later acquired Wilton from the Dodgers (he’d made it to the big leagues too, albeit in much less spectacular fashion), Mom and the two brothers lived together in Vlad’s downtown apartment. Vlad was painfully shy, speaking only Spanish and turning away interview requests, feeling embarrassed at his lack of education (his nickname, since childhood, was “El Mudo”—“The Mute”). He never watched video of opposing pitchers, never studied their tendencies, and often didn’t even know their names. His one study habit—if you could call it that—was to step into the batter’s box on his PlayStation. One of the oldest axioms in sports is to practise the way you play. No problem for Vlad: he swung at everything on PlayStation, too.
But damn it, Felipe was right. The world left Vlad alone, and he rewarded all of us with an unforgettable career.
The numbers were magnificent, certainly, including a 2002 season in which he missed a 40–40 campaign by a single home run (it looked like he got his 40
th
too, but for a missed call by an umpire). But the best way to describe his incredible career is through other people’s stories. Those who watched Vlad play walk around with indelible memories.
Bill Geivett (former Expos farm director):
“In 1994, [Vlad] was in the Gulf Coast League, in rookie ball. We were gonna go over to watch the Mets, and then I was going to watch the West Palm Beach team play at night in Kissimmee. So, we drive over to watch the Mets, and I want to see all the guys, but I want to see this Guerrero kid that I’ve been hearing about. So I go out there, and the first pitch he sees, he hits it over the fence. Then I watch him make a play in the outfield, and he throws it in. I said, ‘Let’s go. I’ve seen enough.’ ”
Jeff Blair:
“Rondell was down in Harrisburg on injury rehab, and he claims he saw a pitch where the ball bounced in front of home plate. Whoever threw it stumbled. The ball bounced in front of home plate … and Vlad knocked it over the centre-field fence. Over the wall, at least 400 feet. The greatest description of Vladimir Guerrero I ever heard was that he swings like he’s hitting a tennis racket. All he has to do is get some part of the bat on the ball, and he’s going to crush it.”
Jim Tracy:
“We were sitting there in the dugout and I saw Pete Harnisch throw a two-strike split-finger. It hit the dirt. [Vlad] swung, and hit it. It looked like a three-wood going out toward left-centre field, and it got stuck between two pads on the outfield wall. I remember Barry Larkin standing at shortstop, as he’s in his position, and when the ball got hit I saw Larkin just
start to move. By the time he turned around, the ball was literally stuck in the pads for a ground-rule double. Felipe looked over at me and said, ‘Hey, Trace, did that ball bounce?’ I said, ‘Yes, Skip, once before he hit it, and once after he hit it.’ When he was a kid and came to the big leagues, you could throw a ball somewhere in the vicinity of the first-base dugout, and there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t take a swing at it.”
Doug Glanville (former MLB outfielder):
“I was with the Phillies, and Amaury Telemaco was pitching. He’s going over the scouting report. What should you throw him? Outside? No. Inside? No. After a couple of minutes, they just told him, ‘Throw the pitch, and pray.’
“Another time, Vlad hit a line drive off a knuckleball. At the Vet. Desi Relaford was playing shortstop. He put his glove up
after
it whooshed by his head. I didn’t even react and it was by me, hit the wall. Hardest-hit ball I’ve ever seen.”
Manny Acta (former Expos third-base coach):
“He drank like a fish. Ate a ton. Fifty thousand cans of beer, and a bag of rice. Never bothered him. He’d show up to the park hung over, and hit bombs, like it was nothing.”
Glanville:
“2001, it’s the ninth inning, tie game, and Rheal Cormier is trying to unintentionally intentionally walk him. First pitch, in the dirt. The second, at his eyeballs. Third pitch is at least eight inches outside. He reaches out … opposite-field walk-off.”
Rheal Cormier:
“There’s no pitch he can’t reach. I’ve seen him hit balls a foot outside off Greg Maddux for a home run the other way. The guy is not human. He should be in another league.”
Acta:
“Vlad comes to the park one day, rubbing his palms together. ‘Kevin Brown is pitching today, I’m going to crush him.’ Keep in mind Kevin Brown might’ve had the nastiest sinker of his generation. He has a decent Hall of Fame argument. First pitch: monster home run. [Vlad] comes back to the dugout, cackling. Cackling!”
What I remembered most vividly about Vlad was his arm. There’s a YouTube video of him long-tossing a ball at Yankee Stadium, from the left-field foul line, over the wall in right-centre … at least 370 feet. The problem was, he was
so
confident, so cocksure he could throw out anyone, anytime—that it occasionally cost him.
May 30, 1998, Expos vs. Pirates at old Three Rivers Stadium. I’m on one of my classic baseball road trips with the Maple Ridge Boys, high on Primanti and a chance to see Vlad break some other team’s heart. Unfortunately for the Expos, their closer Ugueth Urbina doesn’t have it that day. Four batters in, he’s loaded the bases with one out, putting the Expos’ two-run lead in jeopardy. Jason Kendall raps an outside fastball to right, and the ball bounces in front of Vlad, scoring the runner from third easily. We rise to our feet anticipating what’s going to happen next: Vlad’s going to charge in, field the ball, and fire a chest-high strike home, cutting down the potential tying run and saving the game for the Expos. Sure enough, Vlad charges … fields the ball cleanly … winds up … and airmails the catcher by 10 feet. The bases clear, Pirates win.
He had hubris, and he had balls. That’s what made him so much damn fun to watch, win or lose. He never got a championship in Montreal—or anywhere else. That doesn’t change what he was: a player who was truly beyond belief. When I’m old and grey, and most of my other memories have escaped me, I’ll still tell my great grandkids about Vladimir Guerrero. Some people you just never forget.