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 (48 page)

To the Expos diehards, Montreal hadn’t failed baseball. Baseball had failed Montreal.

T
en years after the Expos left Montreal and became the Washington Nationals, the memories live on.

A few weeks after that last game in Montreal, the Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. One of Boston’s most popular players was Pedro Martinez. When a TV reporter tracked Pedro down in the clubhouse and thrust a mic in his face, a million thoughts had to be rushing through the pitcher’s head. He had to acknowledge his new adopted city, and the joy everyone in Boston felt after ending an 86-year World Series drought, one of the most notorious streaks in sports history. Most of all, he had to express his own feelings after winning his first championship. This was the culmination of more than a decade of dominance in the majors. It was also the celebration that he—and all of Montreal—might’ve had 10 years earlier if the stars had aligned a little differently. Amid all that chaos, his teammates jubilantly celebrating behind him, the camera’s blinking eye pointing at him, and all those thoughts to process, he offered this:

“I would like to share this with the people of Montreal that are not going to have a team anymore. But my heart … and my ring is with them too.”

Sometimes, those memories come flooding back in a chance meeting. Like when Jeff Blair flew to San Francisco in 2007 to cover Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the all-time home run record. There, he ran into some old friends.

“Kirk Rueter was doing some work for the Giants,” recalled Blair. “He showed up at the clubhouse one day and F. P. Santangelo was there. So we just started talking, just shooting the shit. Then Felipe sees us, so he comes over too. I remember Lee Jenkins was there covering Bonds, too. Lee’s standing there watching this conversation for five, ten minutes. ‘Does that happen all the time?’ he says. ‘Yup. Pretty much.’ ”

The dozens of ex-Expos players that I talked to for this book told hundreds of stories about their time living in Montreal. They all loved it. Many of them had come up through the minor league system, making Montreal their first stop in the big leagues. They remember living in the Manhattan building downtown, a high-rise that housed countless players over the years, and was a short Metro ride from the ballpark—a shorter walk to the city’s famous nightlife. Yeah, the stadium stunk, and going through customs before and after every road trip was a pain in the ass, and, in rare cases, Doritos were hard to find. But player after player spoke in glowing terms about the city and its fans; how they wished they could’ve remained Expos for longer, but for the economic realities of the game. At the end of many of these conversations, they would offer a fleeting, wistful thought: Wouldn’t it be great, they’d say, if baseball came back to Montreal someday?

It always seemed like idle chatter. Now? Well, maybe not.

Three days after this book gets published, there will be a Major League Baseball game at Olympic Stadium, the first of a
two-game series. One of the participants will be the Mets, whom the Expos played in both their first and last games. The other will be the Blue Jays. The Jays were the ones who pushed to make the games happen, in fact—hoping to extend their appeal into Quebec, a large untapped market of potential fans, most of whom didn’t latch onto Toronto (or any other team) after the Expos left.

But there will be other forces at work that weekend as well. One of them will be Warren Cromartie.

On February 16, 2012, Gary Carter died from a hyperaggressive form of cancer at the age of 57. Seven and a half years after the Expos’ last game, Carter’s untimely death dug up feelings many fans didn’t even realize still existed. There was grief over Carter’s passing, as people remembered not only a great player, but also a beacon for the community. Carter was a symbol of Montreal baseball in its glory days, and remembering those days suddenly made people want to relive the past. Cromartie was deeply affected by Carter’s passing. And he saw an opportunity to help fans channel those feelings of nostalgia.

“I came to Montreal and wanted to spend some time in the city,” Cromartie told me. “It had been years since the Expos left. I got off the plane and this family recognized me. ‘Where can we go to look at something [related to] the Expos?’ they asked me. It really knocked me back. I had to think about it. Then I realized there’s nothing in Montreal with ‘Expos’ on it. That hit me real hard. It’s like the Expos were never there. So I said to myself, ‘You know what, let me try to get people talking about baseball again here.’ ”

Not long afterwards, Cromartie launched the Montreal Baseball Project (MBP). In the summer of 2012, MBP hosted a gala in Montreal, honouring Carter and the 1981 team that he helped lead to within a game of the World Series. More than half of that ’81 team showed up: Andre Dawson and Tim Raines, Bill Gullickson, Ellis Valentine, and many others.

That event begat other events, and other people becoming interested in rekindling the Expos flame. Matthew Ross has helped galvanize local interest via his ExposNation fan page, which to date has more than 167,000 likes on Facebook. He’s organized two trips to Rogers Centre for Jays games, bringing two hundred Expos fans with him for the first one, nearly a thousand for the second. There was a pitch-and-catch event with Steve Rogers in 2013. Fun ventures that for an hour, or maybe an afternoon, got a small subset of Montrealers jazzed up about baseball again.

Now, everyone’s thinking bigger. MBP commissioned a $400,000 feasibility study on whether a major league ball club could work in Montreal under current economic conditions. The study found that, yes, a team could be viable. The proliferation of sports channels in Canada presents a media revenue opportunity that didn’t exist during the Expos’ dying days. Rogers snatching hockey broadcasting rights away from Bell Media and its TSN subsidiary—thus creating a giant hole in TSN’s programming—could increase demand for another sport (and another team) to cover. The improvement in Montreal’s economy, MLB’s far more generous revenue-sharing program … these and other factors could make baseball a success in Montreal.

Still, as of January 2014, it’s a spectacular long shot. Montreal doesn’t have a stadium that’s suitable for baseball. No billionaire—or multi-billion-dollar company—has expressed any interest in bankrolling a hypothetical baseball team. At the moment, no team is for sale, nor are there any plans for expansion on the horizon. Moreover, Major League Baseball has a long institutional memory, and the league might not be keen on revisiting the only city ever to lose a team in the past 40-plus years. So for now, it will remain a twinkle of a thought. MLB will go about its business; Montrealers will tend to their own.

Until then, the spirit of the Expos will live on. The organizers of those Jays-Mets exhibition games are expecting huge crowds. For those two days, we could see 60-, 70-, maybe 80,000 or more fans pack the Big O. There’ll be some Jays fans, sure, maybe a few Mets fans, too. But the majority will be Expos fans, summoned to the ballpark after 10 years away, clutching Youppi! dolls, donning the old baby-blue jerseys, and wearing the old pinwheel caps—the ones everyone used to mock, now a fashion statement for a new generation, many of whom barely remember
Nos Amours
, if at all. Whatever the future holds, those two days will be a party, the kind Montrealers used to throw when their team was hot, when everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Here’s hoping there’ll be more parties to come.

I
n the fall of 2007, I got an email from Random House, sent by someone I didn’t know. That person liked my work, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing a book. This email would eventually transform my entire career. My life, really.

I’d wanted to be a professional sportswriter for years, dating back to high school in Montreal. That pursuit proved to be a monumental challenge: graduating from Concordia University in 1997, I found a landscape that offered few to no opportunities for aspiring sportswriters. I’d landed a job as an intern, then as a cub reporter covering community news for the
Montreal Gazette
. But cracking the sports desk was likely to take years, and finding assignments more invigorating than high-school field hockey several more. This wasn’t the
Gazette
’s fault—not with a strong staff of beat writers and columnists in house. Rather, it was the harsh reality associated with a limited publishing world that hadn’t yet made many inroads on the Internet. In those days, there were only two writers regularly producing the kind of content on the web that I devoured: Rob Neyer for what was then called ESPN SportsZone; and Bill Simmons, writing for something called Digital City Boston (one of several moderate-traffic online regional hubs owned by AOL).

In the 10 years that followed, my fledgling career as a community news reporter evolved to include daily stock market coverage for
Investor’s Business Daily
. Hoping to at least nudge my way
closer to sports, I concocted a plan to join the group of brilliant writers and analysts at Baseball Prospectus. In late 2001, Rany Jazayerli, one of the group’s original members, wrote a post asking for people to join the Strat-O-Matic league that he and fellow BP writer/original Joe Sheehan helped start. I figured if I could join that league, maybe I could make friends with Rany and Joe—and somehow talk my way into writing for BP.

This was not going to be easy, though. Expecting a handful of emails for the four slots he needed to fill, Rany instead got more than a hundred replies, so he made everyone fill out long, detailed applications. Respondents had to describe everything from their ideal 25-man Strat-O-Matic roster to details about their baseball backgrounds. Three of the replies were slam dunks from immensely qualified applicants who’d been playing Strat for years, with tons of experience playing the online game that members of Rany’s North American Strat-O-Matic Association (yes, NASA) used. A close race ensued for the fourth league vacancy, and the application Rany ultimately chose came from an avid baseball fan who had never played the online version of the game. In fact, he hadn’t played any Strat-O-Matic at all since he was 14 years old, giving it up right around the time he discovered girls. Still, Rany liked one line in particular on that person’s application: it asked that he take pity on me, since I was a Montreal Expos fan.

The Expos got me in that league, and a few months later, I wrote my first piece for Baseball Prospectus, where I spent four great years. Working for the group afforded some tremendous opportunities, including contributions to the Baseball Prospectus annual, working with a ludicrously talented group of writers on a book called
Baseball Between the Numbers
, and doing occasional freelance work for
ESPN.com
. But as great as those gigs were, I still hadn’t achieved my goal of writing about sports for a living.

So when that email from Random House arrived, 10 years after graduation, I couldn’t believe my luck. Or really, anything about the email. It took several more emails before I figured out the connection, and grew to trust the guy on the other end. Turned out Paul Taunton used to read an old Montreal Expos message board at
BaseballBoards.com
(later
FanHome.com
, now
ExposForever.com
, part of the Scout network of team sites), where I used to post. This was years before I started writing anything about baseball: I was at that point a dude in his early-to-mid 20s who’d read some Bill James and Rob Neyer, and had a big (virtual) mouth. As it happened, my fellow boardie had become a big Expos fan while attending McGill in the late ’90s, and found my stats-infused, obsessive posts about Expos first baseman Lee Stevens interesting. (To say that I hated the relatively big money the Expos were paying Stevens would be an understatement.)

Paul kept tabs on me during my years writing for Baseball Prospectus and
ESPN.com
(and later FanGraphs and Bloomberg Sports). When Random House formed a partnership with ESPN Books and he went looking for a relative unknown who could write a compelling book about baseball, his attention turned to a fellow Expos fan. We batted around ideas for months, and finally the perfect one came thanks to Steve Wulf at ESPN (a terrific writer, as well as a savvy editor): a hybrid sports/business book on the unlikely darlings of 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays. That book became
The Extra 2%
, and a few months after publication, I got an email from Grantland deputy editor Dan Fierman asking if I’d like to contribute to the site. A few months after that, I got my wish: 14 years after university, I’d finally landed a gig as a full-time sportswriter.

Though you could argue that other factors played into the fulfillment of my professional dreams, it all boiled down to the Montreal Expos, to my insane, unwavering devotion to the team, and to some 3 a.m. message board diatribes about Lee Stevens. I’d
probably be filing TPS reports if not for the Expos. They formed the foundation of my sports fandom, and it’s thanks to
Nos Amours
that a math-obsessed kid who carried a Little Professor calculator around when he was three years old cultivated that love for numbers into a career writing about the analytical side of baseball.

I owe thanks to Paul Taunton for seeing potential in a wise-ass message board poster, for helping shape
The Extra 2%
into what it became, and, soon after that book came out, for suggesting we work together on a book about the Expos, this time on behalf of Random House Canada. I’d also like to thank his colleagues Ruta Liormonas, Deirdre Molina, Brittany Larkin, Linda Pruessen, Five Seventeen, Erin Parker, Sean Tai, Sheila Kay, Anne Collins, Marion Garner, Matthew Sibiga, Brad Martin, Kristin Cochrane, Duncan Shields, James Young, and the rest of the team at Random House Canada.

Rob Neyer has gone from being a role model after whom I patterned my career to the person responsible for first reads on both
The Extra 2%
and
Up, Up, & Away
. This is a stroke of incredible luck for which I can never thank Flying Spaghetti Monster enough. Rob has beaten a huge number of bad writing habits out of me over the past five years, doing so with patience and encouragement. I was a better writer after
The Extra 2%
than I was when I started it, and I’m a better writer today than I was when I started
Up, Up, & Away
. Thanks to Rob, I’ve even learned the correct usage of “may” versus “might,” for the longest time my mortal grammatical enemy.