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 (46 page)

No self-respecting owner would unload a player
that
good, three and a half years before the end of the player’s contract, just to save a few million bucks. That included Loria. The art dealer’s Manhattan gallery featured exquisite works of art by some of the masters, such as Amedeo Modigliani and Henry Moore. But Loria was a baseball fan to the core, and he knew a superstar when he saw one. Whenever someone from the baseball world would visit his gallery on East 72
^nd
Street, Loria would point to a big installation that looked completely out of place in the art world. It was a life-sized cardboard cutout, of Vladimir Guerrero. That, he’d tell anyone within earshot, is my most valuable piece of art. There was no way Vlad was getting traded.

The partners immediately realized the gravity of the situation. If Loria answered the cash call and everyone else ignored it, they might end up looking like unsupportive misers. As a compromise, they
loaned
Loria the money to pay down the team’s debt and keep operations running. After that first cash call, Coutu told reporters that Loria was “trying to take the team away from us.” Meanwhile, several consortium members ran to their PR firms, knowing that if Loria made additional cash calls and they didn’t answer them, they’d need to do some heavy spinning to come out looking like the good guys—just as they had in the Brochu days. Then, a few months after that first cash call in May 2000, Loria issued another one.

Now, the partners were becoming seriously concerned. Raymond Bachand of the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Quebec asked Loria to step down, with his initial $18 million investment handed back to him. Loria refused: by answering the second cash call himself with no one else putting forth any money, he’d just diluted the value of his partners’ shares, gaining a larger share of the team himself. That process continued into 2001, while the atmosphere at the Big O somehow got even gloomier
(the Expos lost 94 games and drew fewer than eight thousand fans a game, one of the lowest totals for any team in decades). Loria kept putting out cash calls, watching them go unanswered, and scooping up a bigger and bigger controlling interest in the team. By the time Loria finally left the Expos in 2002, he’d accumulated a staggering 93 percent equity share, after purchasing less than one quarter of the ball club to start.

At the very least, we can say that Loria was both a shrewd and ruthless businessman. From the start, he had Samson do most of the talking on day-to-day operations, swooping in only when he needed to grab greater control of the team. Realizing very quickly that his partners wouldn’t match his investments, Loria saw an opportunity to assume nearly total financial control of a very rare and precious commodity—a Major League Baseball team—and he seized it. On the surface, there didn’t seem to be anything illegal about what he had done; taking advantage of others for being stubborn and cheap isn’t against the law.

But as you might expect, Loria’s outfoxed partners saw something far more nefarious. They became convinced that Loria had planned this all along.

“We [lobbied] Bud Selig near the end,” Stephen Bronfman told me in a 2011 interview. The partners insisted to the commissioner that Loria was a carpetbagger. “Bud would say, ‘Well, we don’t like him either,’ ” continued Bronfman. “It was a lot of cockamamie.”

Bronfman’s father Charles, who’d been friendly with Selig for decades, had tried to speak up on the consortium’s behalf, but to no avail. All of it made the partners wonder if there was a conspiracy in place—if after dealing with the embarrassingly small crowds, annual losses, and bad publicity coming out of Montreal for so many years, Selig might’ve set a plan in motion to yank the Expos away. There’d been rumours for years that the team might move, with the most frequently rumoured destination being
Washington, D.C.: if Loria and Selig were in fact in cahoots, Loria nabbing 93 percent of the team would’ve certainly made it easier for the league to move the Expos.

“I believed in the conspiracy theory,” Stephen Bronfman told me in 2011. “I think they were embarrassed with the Expos’ situation, and they wanted to move the team. I think there was something in the works to do something with the situation here. They didn’t like what was going on.”

A set of events at the end of the 2001 season made clear that yes, Major League Baseball and most of its owners wanted the Expos gone. On November 6, 2001, the owners voted 28–2 in favour of contracting two teams, the Expos and the Minnesota Twins (who had a stadium problem of their own in the outdated Metrodome), with the Expos and Twins being the lone dissenting teams. The plan called for the two clubs to play lame-duck seasons in 2002, after which they’d end operations, with their players getting scattered to the other 28 teams via a dispersal draft.

Then, in early 2002, MLB completed a most suspicious three-way franchise swap. John Henry, the owner of the Marlins who wanted to upgrade to a better situation, got awarded ownership of the Boston Red Sox despite not being the high bidder when the team went up for sale. To make the deal work, Henry sold the Marlins to Loria for $158.5 million, and, completing the loop, Loria sold the Expos to Major League Baseball for $120 million plus a $38.5 million interest-free loan. For his two-year investment in Montreal, Loria reaped an enormous profit,
and
positioned himself to take over a less troubled team without laying out a penny of his own money on purchase day. He also put the Expos’ fate directly in MLB’s hands, just as the consortium members left behind had suspected.

In July 2002, the partners filed suit against four people: Loria, Samson, Selig, and MLB chief operator officer Bob DuPuy. The
way they did it was a massive overreach, however. They filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act lawsuit: the kind of strategy that governments often use to prosecute organized crime. Though the sequence of events that took place between Loria’s arrival in December 1999 and his official exit in February 2002 certainly looked suspicious—from Loria consolidating most of the team’s shares, to the contraction announcement, all the way to the shady franchise merry-go-round that benefited everybody except the Expos—the plaintiffs couldn’t prove a conspiracy by RICO standards. The case ultimately got kicked to an arbitration panel, which ruled in favour of the defendants.

With MLB taking over in 2002, it finally looked like the end of the Expos. The team was either going to move, or if the league kept its word, be eliminated completely. All that remained, it seemed, was one final season.

The last days of the Montreal Expos were sad, surreal, and even occasionally exciting. What began as a plan to put a failing franchise out of its misery as quickly as possible turned into a long, drama-filled slog, the likes of which baseball had never seen before—and never will again.

It started with the vote for contraction. Only the targets dissented, which meant that the Toronto Blue Jays were one of those 28 teams that voted to wipe out their Canadian neighbours. That lack of solidarity offended many Expos fans, especially those with long memories. John McHale had fought like hell to get Toronto a major league franchise. For years, the Expos and Jays played the annual Pearson Cup exhibition game, further stoking the friendly rivalry between the two cities. During the 1992 World Series in Toronto, Paul Beeston could have picked just about anyone to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before the Jays’ first home game, but he picked Charles Bronfman, honouring the Expos’
owner for bringing baseball to Canada in the first place. The arrival of interleague play made for some fun matchups, too: On Canada Day, 1997, Jeff Juden outduelled his childhood idol—and eventual Cy Young winner—Roger Clemens at SkyDome, to this day one of my favourite baseball memories (and possibly the most Canadian day ever for a fan, given that my buddy Jon and I sprinted three kilometres from the game to Molson Amphitheatre to catch the last 45 minutes of a Rush concert).

But as was the case with Brochu, Loria, Selig, and all the other villains of Expos lore, the circumstances weren’t as simple as some people made them out to be. Baseball’s owners always had a way of building consensus and aiming for unanimity, and just as a Brochu vote against the salary cap and other salary-squashing measures wouldn’t have stopped the ’94 strike by itself, a token vote in the Expos’ favour wouldn’t have stopped the landslide of sentiment that led to contraction getting ratified. Still, Toronto could have done
something
. Years earlier, the Pittsburgh Steelers voted against the NFL moving their rivals, the Cleveland Browns, to Baltimore. Browns owner Art Modell got his wish and wrested the team away anyway. But Cleveland fans never forgot that their rivals stood with them in their time of need. The Jays didn’t do that. They kicked the Expos while they were down, and it hurt like hell.

With the spectre of contraction looming, MLB assumed control of the Expos in February 2002. That gave the team, now wards of the state, just a few weeks to prepare for the start of the season. To do so, the Expos would need to use every resource at their disposal. Unfortunately, they had virtually none. Jeffrey Loria had taken
everything
. He grabbed the computers, the scouting reports, the radar guns, and the personnel—including Jim Beattie’s GM replacement Larry Beinfest, P. J. Loyello (to head up PR), and several other baseball ops and business-side execs. Plus he would have a reunion with Dave Van Horne, who’d taken his
trademark “Up, Up, and Away!” home-run call to Miami in 2001 after Loria yanked the Expos off English radio, then continued on with the Marlins when Loria arrived in ’02. Another life-sized Vladimir Guerrero cutout once sat innocuously in the Expos’ business offices at Olympic Stadium: Loria took that too, as if it might appreciate like a Monet painting.

It was all a lucky break for at least one individual, though. That’s when Omar Minaya got the call. How’d you like to be the new general manager of the Montreal Expos, Bud Selig asked. Minaya jumped at the chance. Dominican-born and New York-raised, Minaya was 43 years old, and had spent nearly a quarter century in professional baseball. He’d gone from 14
^th
-round draft pick to minor league ball, played in the Dominican and in Italy, scouted for the Texas Rangers, then eventually landed with the New York Mets, where he’d climbed to the position of assistant general manager. He’d long hoped to become a GM, and now the
commissioner
was calling, offering him the chance to become the first Latin-born general manager in Major League Baseball. He had to say yes. Just one problem.

“I had 72 hours to put the whole staff together,” Minaya said. “In 72 hours, training camp was going to open.”

Minaya wasn’t exaggerating. Thanks to Loria, and to remaining staffers jumping at new opportunities with the Expos seemingly about to fold, the team had only six employees left on the baseball operations side: farm director Adam Wogan, Randy St. Claire (who worked as a pitching coach in the minor leagues and would later get promoted to major league pitching coach), Triple-A manager Tim Leiper, long-time trainer Ron McClain, long-time office assistant Marcia Schnaar, and Monique Giroux (who worked for the Expos from day one, starting as an intern, then eventually transitioning to media relations and staying to the bitter end).

Thirty-three years after that first frantic spring, the Expos had come full circle, scrambling to cobble together enough people and infrastructure to resemble a viable major league team. Minaya hired anyone he could find. He brought in support staffers who’d been fired by the Marlins after Loria had poached many of Montreal’s key people. He gave young people a chance, including Dana Brown, who rose from the role of scout with the Pittsburgh Pirates to scouting director with the Expos, just as he hit his 35
^th
birthday. But Brown was ancient compared to Alex Anthopoulos. Hired in May 2000 as an intern, Anthopoulos started out making copies, sorting mail, and driving people to the airport for seven bucks an hour. By 2002, he’d shown enough initiative to get … another internship for seven bucks an hour, this time in the storage room, organizing game tapes. Not long afterwards, at age 25, he got promoted all the way to assistant scouting director.

This was Expos University to the highest degree: with the smallest staff of any major league team, first-semester freshmen like Anthopoulos suddenly found themselves taking graduate-level baseball seminars. “You had so much work thrown on you, and I was just a sponge, soaking it all up,” said Anthopoulos. “It was, by far, the most fun I ever had in the game.”

For all the pressure on the front office to put a respectable product on the field under brutal circumstances, fun was the operative word for many people who worked for that 2002 team.

“There was the risk of the team contracting, sure,” said Tony Siegle, Minaya’s assistant GM. “We all worked late, seven nights a week. We went home to change underwear, that was it. We didn’t care! It was great.”

The team on the field was fun to watch, too. The Expos had lost 90 or more games for four straight seasons, and the most buzz-worthy development of their truncated off-season had been
inviting a washed-up Jose Canseco to spring training. No one expected much. To everyone’s surprise, the Expos stormed out of the gate in 2002, winning 17 of their first 27 games and grabbing a tie for first place as of May 1. But they were doing it without Felipe Alou. The beloved manager, after a quarter century with the Expos organization, had been fired in May 2001; the truth was that it suited both sides well by that point, given how bitter everyone had become. The new manager, Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, got much of the credit for inspiring the troops. In reality, Robinson was a poor tactician who bunted far too often, and while many praised his wisdom and experience, others didn’t appreciate his sometimes grumpy personality.

The bigger contributing factor was the same ingredient the Expos had used time and time again to build teams amid constant attrition: the farm system. Guerrero was the star, leading the league in hits and total bases, winning the Silver Slugger Award and finishing fourth in MVP voting. Now, though, he had an able supporting cast. Jose Vidro shed much of the baby fat and the defensive yips that made him a questionable prospect, settling in as the starting second baseman and hitting .315 with 19 homers and 43 doubles. His double-play partner, Orlando Cabrera, still wasn’t a great hitter, but his bat had improved, and that, combined with his terrific defence at short and 25 stolen bases, made him a solid everyday player. Another homegrown player, Brad Wilkerson, smacked 20 homers with a .370 on-base percentage. Smartly returned to his natural position of catcher, Michael Barrett’s all-around game improved, and he formed a reliable tandem behind the plate with Brian Schneider.