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 (5 page)

The nine men who started for the Expos in the first regular-season game in franchise history formed a ragtag group of cast-offs. Some of them never amounted to much, while a few others offered colourful backstories but few major contributions to their new team’s cause. Here are the Opening Day Nine:

Maury Wills, SS:
The 21
^st
pick in the NL expansion draft, Wills was 36 years old when the Expos picked him, six years removed from winning an ill-begotten MVP award, and past his physical prime. He could still play, though, having swiped 52 bases the year before, still playing respectable defence and legging out his share of hits.

But he sure as hell didn’t want to play in Montreal. Wills jaked plays blatantly, making half-hearted efforts on defence, failing to run out groundballs, and drawing boos from the usually fawning first-year crowd. Jacques Doucet, who started his career covering the Expos as a beat writer for
La Presse
before going on to call games as the team’s primary French-language play-by-play man for 33 seasons, counts Wills as one of the few players with whom he didn’t get along in all his years covering the team and announcing its games. Everything came to a head when Wills slugged beat writer Ted Blackman on the team bus a few weeks into the season.

Was Wills frustrated that his best days were behind him? Not according to Bronfman.

“Bullshit,” said the owner. “Hell no. To him, he had gone from the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he was famous, to goddamn Pittsburgh, and now he’s going to this honky-tonk joint in Montreal where they goddamn spoke French, and the infield
is terrible, and you’re playing in a bandbox, it was a Triple-A stadium. Who needs that? So he played like he didn’t give a damn, and he didn’t.”

Wills played 47 games for the Expos, posted the worst numbers of his career, then got traded back to the Dodgers (along with Manny Mota, for Ron Fairly and Paul Popovich). Like magic, Wills’ performance shot back up immediately.

“I said to John McHale after, ‘John, this teaches us a lesson: never trade for anybody unless that guy feels it’s a promotion,’ ” recalled Bronfman, who’d tossed a subtle compliment Staub’s way. “ ‘Wills obviously felt like it was a demotion. They’ve got to feel like it’s a promotion to come to Montreal.’ ”

Gary Sutherland, 2B:
At 24, Sutherland was one of the youngest players left unprotected by any NL team. The Phillies saw him as a light-hitting second baseman who might be able to hit for a decent average thanks to a high-contact approach, but with little to no power and below-average defence—and thus limited upside. The Expos ended up getting all of that, except without the decent batting average. Lacking both speed and pop, Sutherland was an easily-defensed player who’d go on to post low batting averages (.239, .206, .257) and poor on-base percentages (.289, .271, .302) in his three years in Montreal.

Sutherland was a popular teammate, though, and is still highly regarded by ex-mates to this day. You could live with him as your 25
^th
man. But as the Expos’ everyday man at the deuce in ’69, he was overexposed: the kind of player an expansion team was bound to carry as a placeholder until someone better came along.

Rusty Staub, RF:
Having long ago abandoned his given name of Daniel Joseph, Rusty earned a nickname on top of a nickname
when Blackman playfully dubbed him Le Grand Orange. (The proper article in front of “orange” would normally be the feminine “la,” but as Blackman said, “If you think I was going to put a feminine article on his name, you’re crazy.”) Staub was one of the best players in the league during the Expos’ inaugural season, batting .302/.426/.526: monstrous numbers at a time when pitchers still ruled the game. He became the Expos’ first superstar, nearly as much for what he did off the field as what he did on it. (Much more on Staub later.)

Mack Jones, LF:
It might seem odd to think of an Atlanta-born, African-American man as a doppelgänger for a ginger-pated, pale-skinned New Orleans native, but Jones and Staub formed perfect bookends for those early Expos teams. Reduced to part-time duty with the Reds in 1968, Jones was left unprotected in the expansion draft and became the Expos’ second pick after Manny Mota. Still just 30 when he took the field at Shea Stadium to start the ’69 season, Jones showed he had plenty left in the tank. He hit .270/.379/.488 that year, mirroring Staub’s profile as a high on-base, good-power guy in putting up the best numbers of his career. Slowed by injuries, however, he’d be out of baseball just two years later.

Bob Bailey, 1B:
If it seems like John McHale and Jim Fanning had a little Billy Beane in them … well, it’s mostly a coincidence. If walks and on-base percentage were underappreciated during the
Moneyball
A’s era, they were flat-out ignored 45 years ago by nearly everyone except Earl Weaver. But the Expos’ front office didn’t search under rocks for OBP sources the way Beane and his Oakland predecessor Sandy Alderson did. They simply looked for underrated players. Just as Staub and Jones provided value that wasn’t obviously reflected in
their batting averages (especially their early-career batting averages), Bailey too was a low-to-moderate batting-average guy who had a strong batting eye. Mostly, though, he was just a guy no one wanted.

The Pirates signed Bailey in 1961 out of Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California for $135,000, the richest signing bonus ever given to a player to that point. In his first full season in 1963, he hit .228/.303/.328, a crushing disappointment that, as with Staub’s early-career scuffles, ignored the reality that most players aren’t anywhere close to finished products in their early 20s. Bailey had weaknesses certainly, playing poor defence at third base and averaging a merely decent 12 homers a year in his first four full major league seasons, not remotely enough to live up to this early hype.

What he could do, though, was walk. In his third full season with the Pirates at age 22, Bailey drew 70 bases on balls. He struggled with injuries the following year but actually boosted his walk rate, drawing a free pass in about 11 percent of his times at bat and posting an impressive .279/.360/.447 line (24 percent better than league-average results based on advanced, park-adjusted stats). That still wasn’t enough for the Buccos, who traded him to the Dodgers for … future Expos teammate Maury Wills. Nagging injuries ate into Bailey’s playing time and hurt his performance over the next two years, certainly. But the Dodgers, like the Pirates, were fed up with a player widely believed to be a bust. Even with blank rosters coming into the expansion draft, neither the Padres nor their expansion cousins in Montreal bothered to use one of the top 60 picks on Bailey. Instead, the Dodgers more or less gave him away.

Surprisingly, Bailey quickly became one of the most potent hitters on his new team. Though sidetracked again by injuries, he still hit .265/.337/.419 over 111 games in 1969; the Expos
recognized he could do less harm defensively at first base than at third, so that helped too. The next season, all that bonus-baby potential finally rampaged through the rest of the league. In 1970, Bailey flashed a .407 on-base percentage (sixth-best in the NL for players with 400 or more plate appearances), while finishing second in slugging average (.597), and tied for 14
^th
in home runs (28, the same total as the 39-year-old Willie Mays). Though that season proved to be the best of Bailey’s career, he became a reliable right-handed power hitter who also ranked among the top 10 in walks three times.

Bob Bailey might’ve been a flawed player—if you’re grading on a steep curve, perhaps he really was a bit of a disappointment—but the man could do some things well. And when you’re a brand-new franchise trying to build something from nothing, that’s saying a lot.

John Bateman, C:
A bruiser listed at six foot three, 220 pounds—at a time when that was actually huge and not just the dimensions of CC Sabathia’s left leg—Bateman smacked 17 homers in 1966 with the Astros. Unfortunately, he had few other obvious skills. Bateman couldn’t stay healthy either, playing in just 74 games during the Expos’ debut season and angering Mauch for ballooning well past his reputed playing weight. A plodder even by catcher standards, Bateman managed to lead the league by hitting into 27 double plays in 1971. Like most of his teammates, Bateman soaked up playing time and fit in well on a close-knit group, lived in Montreal year-round, grew to love the city, and became a central part of the community. But he too was a standby, dutifully squatting through April shiverfests at Jarry and August scorchers in St. Louis while the Expos built a farm system that would produce more talented replacements. Few would work out better than Bateman’s eventual successor.

Jose “Coco” Laboy, 3B:
Laboy had never played a major league game when the Expos grabbed him with the 54
^th
pick of the expansion draft at 28, long past the age at which most prospects make the Show. With Bailey moving to first base and no better options, the Expos rolled out the Puerto Rico–born Laboy on Opening Day at third base … and got more than they expected. Appearing in 157 games, Laboy cracked 18 homers and drove in 83 runs. In a weak first-year class, Laboy finished second in Rookie of the Year voting, losing out to the Dodgers’ Ted Sizemore.

Then it all fell apart. Laboy hit just .199 the next year, lost his everyday job, and played his last major league game in 1973. Despite the speed with which he came and went, Laboy left an impression on old-time Expos fans and ex-teammates that has yet to fade. “He played his heart out,” gushed McGinn.

Don Hahn, CF:
Another player who made his big-league debut in the Expos’ first game, Hahn started all three games of that first series against the Mets … and no more that whole season, the great majority of which he spent in the minors. In a reversal of the bonus-baby phenomenon, Hahn was just 20 when he broke in, but also a modestly-paid rookie who’d been a 17th-round draft choice by the Giants three years earlier. The Expos needed a body to man centre field on Opening Day, settled briefly on Hahn, then spent most of the next decade scrambling to find someone who’d stick.

Jim “Mudcat” Grant, SP:
One of the first successful African-American starting pitchers in the majors, Grant broke in with the Indians in 1958. He earned his nickname after roommate Larry Doby declared him “ugly as a Mississippi mudcat.” Grant made the All-Star team in 1963 and 1965 as a starter, but by the
end of the 1968 season he had become almost exclusively a relief pitcher. Still, he’d put up strong numbers in ’68, posting a 2.08 ERA and allowing just one home run in 95 innings for the Dodgers. They left him unprotected in the expansion draft anyway, and the Expos took a flyer, eventually deciding on Grant as the man who’d throw the franchise’s first-ever official pitch.

It didn’t take long to realize this was a mistake. Grant got blasted for 33 runs and 64 hits in his first 51 innings. On June 3, the Expos swapped Grant to St. Louis for fellow pitcher Gary Waslewski. A year after getting that Opening Day start, Grant split the 1970 season between Oakland and Pittsburgh, working exclusively as a reliever—where he belonged at that point in his career. He had a huge year, tossing a staggering 135 innings with a 1.86 ERA. This was a classic case of talent scarcity forcing Montreal into putting a player in the wrong spot. It would take several more years for the Expos to develop enough quality talent to curb those kinds of mistakes.