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 (7 page)

“I didn’t go to spring training because of my military obligations,” Stoneman said. “So I started the season late, and just could never get it going. There wasn’t really any reason for it, no injuries or anything like that. When I showed up they stuck me straight into the major leagues—I didn’t even go to the minor leagues straight out of basic training. That didn’t work too well.”

Whether or not Stoneman’s National Guard stint contributed to his lousy 1968 season, the Cubs left him unprotected for the expansion draft, which is how the Expos landed him. But despite his modest pedigree, Stoneman had talent: he’d shown he could hack it in the majors in his rookie season, and he was just 24 years old when the Expos scooped him up. Here was an opportunity for McHale and Fanning to make good on one of those hidden gems they hoped to find.

Stoneman and McGinn, roommates for three years with the Expos, also served in the same Army National Guard unit in Winooski, Vermont—a two-hour drive from Montreal. The commitment at that time required six months of training to start, then five-and-a-half years of 39 round-trips a year. With that many drives to Vermont required, Stoneman and McGinn were bound to miss the odd game.

“The majority of the hard stuff was during the two weeks in the off-season we had to do,” said McGinn. “Drills, marches. Activities camouflaging people out in the woods where you’d have to find them. Marching. Building small buildings. A lot of manual stuff. I remember we had guard duty one night. We had to get it done to defer from being drafted [into service for the Vietnam War]. Most clubs put enough money in you, they obviously didn’t want you to end up in the draft.”

Things really got crazy when Stoneman and McGinn—as well as teammates Mike Wegener and Terry Humphrey—had to drive across the border to fulfill their military commitment, then hustle back up to Montreal to play the same night. Players would wake at 3:30 or four in the morning, get in the car, and make it to formation 6:30 a.m., ready to start their duty day. They’d clock out at 4:30 p.m., then drive back to Montreal.

“One time I did all that, and I had to pitch that night,” Stoneman said. “I got up early in the morning, drove to Vermont and drove back, same as usual. It went great. I don’t know to this day how. We were facing the Pirates at Jarry Park. I’m driving back and I mean really fighting traffic. Everybody’s pulling into the parking lot, fans, everybody. I’m trying to get past those people so I can get in, pull one uniform off and put the other uniform on. I remember facing Bob Veale of the Pirates. And it just went great. I threw a shutout. That was probably my proudest moment, but I was totally exhausted. So what happened the next day? I had to
get up at 3:30 the next morning to make it down to Vermont for more duty.”

Military obligations aside, his first season with the Expos didn’t start well for Stoney. In his first start, the Mets crushed him for four runs right out of the gate, and Mauch pulled his right-hander after just a third of an inning. Stoneman pitched better in his second start against his old club in Chicago, going 8 2/3 innings and striking out nine. But he still gave up seven runs in a 7–6 Expos loss.

His third start wasn’t supposed to happen. There’d been a rainout the day before in Philly, the elements so harsh that the Expos didn’t even bother leaving their hotel. The next day, April 17, Grant was supposed to start against the Phillies. Instead, Mauch made a change.

“When I got to the ballpark, the ball was in my shoe,” Stoneman recalled. “Everybody’s shoes were sitting in front of the locker in every clubhouse and the starting pitcher always had a ball in his shoe. That’s not how you found out, but that was just kind of a traditional thing, the ball would be in your shoe. But I knew before going to the ballpark because I got a call that morning from the pitching coach. I told Mud. He wasn’t too pleased.”

The day didn’t start auspiciously, as leadoff man Tony Taylor drew a walk. But Stoneman quickly began carving through the Phillies’ lineup. He struck out Philly’s 3 and 4 hitters, John Briggs and Deron Johnson, to end the first. He induced several groundouts and lazy flyouts (nine groundball outs and nine flyball outs in total). Stoneman did walk five, but there were only two close calls, both early in the game. In the second, Phillies shortstop Don Money hit a flyball off the end of his bat to centre. Expos centre fielder Don Bosch misplayed it, thinking it was hit harder than it was. Bosch broke back, then came racing in for a shoestring catch. The other scare came in the third, as Stoneman left a ball up to Taylor, who stung a line drive to right … but right at Staub.

As the innings wore on and Stoneman piled up routine outs, a buzz started rippling through the Expos dugout.

“We knew what was going on,” said Staub. “I had three doubles and a home run in that game, so I was really focused. It was one of the great nights of my career. Really it was one of
the
great evenings, especially for a new franchise.”

The Expos built a 7–0 lead, leaving Stoneman to focus on the task at hand. In the ninth inning, he had to get through the meat of the order: number-two hitter Ron Stone, followed by Briggs and Johnson. In the end, it was shockingly routine. Stoneman struck out the first two batters, then got Johnson to roll over on a gimme groundout to short.

The totals for the game: seven runs on 13 hits for the Expos, zero runs and zero hits for the Phillies. In a two-hour, 24-minute game played in front of just 6,496 people at old Connie Mack Stadium—just the ninth regular-season game in Expos history—Stoneman twirled a no-hitter.

“The greatest thing I remember,” recalled his roommate McGinn, “is we were staying at the Chase Park Plaza hotel in St. Louis a few days later, and they sent him an eight-inch cheesecake. They were famous for it. That’s what I remember, this big huge cake from the hotel, congratulating him. That’s how we celebrated.”

No other expansion team has ever come close to bagging a no-hitter so soon into their team’s history. The Mets waited 50 years before Johan Santana finally pulled it off in Queens. This, then, was a big moment for the Expos, an on-field breakthrough to go with the team’s other, more incidental firsts that year. Montreal fans were over the moon that baseball had returned. With a thin roster that would lose a lot of games and take years to build up, those fans would take any real baseball they could get.

O
ver time, the Expos would become known locally as
Nos Amours
—the ones we love. As with almost any expansion team, though, the losses piled up in the beginning, and star power was scarce. Baseball-hungry fans streamed into Jarry Park in the early years for another reason: to see visiting stars do their thing.

Those who packed old Delorimier Downs to see the Montreal Royals had never stopped pining for baseball. They parked themselves in front of their TVs every Saturday to watch the MLB Game of the Week. They flipped through the newspapers—English and French alike—to scan the box scores, and they devoured the game stories to follow their favourite players and teams.

Jacques Doucet recalled starting at
La Presse
in 1962, the youngest person on the sports desk by several years. His boss insisted he stay ’til the wee hours every night during baseball season, writing up not only the score but a detailed recap of every game, including those played on the West Coast. When the Expos finally arrived in ’69, Doucet became the team’s beat writer for
La
Presse
, while also serving as official scorer at Jarry Park and occasionally filling in for Jean-Pierre Roy doing colour commentary for the French-language radio station CKLM 1570. The baseball diehards who would read his accounts—plus those in the
Montreal Gazette
,
Montreal Star
, and
le Journal de Montréal
—could now do something they couldn’t before.

“They had the opportunity to see, to almost touch the top players of the National League,” said Doucet, sitting in his living room in Montreal’s South Shore. “It was a novelty, that you could see Willie Mays, or a Steve Carlton, or a Tom Seaver, or a Willie Stargell, the big names that you had read about, watched on TV. Now you could see them in the flesh. You could get an autograph or take a picture with them too, because way back then, when the players were not making millions and millions of dollars, they were more accessible than they are today.”

It didn’t matter how close you were to the Expos at first. You, or somebody close to you, had already built allegiances to other teams and players, forged over years of watching baseball without a hometown team.

“This was a few years in, and I remember my own son Stephen, he was eight,” said Bronfman. “He obviously was a big baseball fan by then, so I said to him, ‘Do you want a [jersey with a] number?’ He said number eight. I said, ‘Steve, [light-hitting Expos outfielder] Boots Day is a nice little player, but he’s not a great player. Why don’t you choose some other number on our team? He said, ‘Dad, this is not our team.’ I said, ‘Then who’s number eight for?’ He said, ‘Willie Stargell.’ Even my own son wanted some other team’s All-Star’s number.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out why Stargell was popular in Montreal (or why he was notorious, depending on your point of view). Aside from being one of the league’s most powerful hitters on one of the best teams, Stargell hit 17 home runs at Jarry Park, more homers
than any other visiting player. The elements heavily impacted results on the field in Montreal, and right-handed hitters frequently complained about the stiff wind that would knock down flyballs headed to left field. Lefty swingers like Stargell, on the other hand, often benefitted from the wind, which carried many seemingly routine flyballs over the wall.

“You would do your best,” said Steve Rogers, a right-handed starter who called Jarry Park home for the first four years of his career and would become one of the best pitchers in Expos history. “The flags would be whipping to right field, but you at least had left field and centre field to pitch to. If the wind was calm, it was just a bandbox. With a little fence too, so you’d get these balls that would be doubles most other places, they’d fly out for home runs there.”

Stargell rarely hit cheapies, though. On July 16, 1969, he launched a shot over the right-field wall that travelled an estimated 495 feet. The ball flew so far that it soared out of the entire stadium, landing in a municipal swimming pool outside the ballpark. That blast marked the first time anyone had hit a ball into the pool, and quickly cemented Stargell’s reputation as the beast of Jarry Park. The chlorinated resting place for his home runs would come to be known as
la piscine de Willie
—Willie’s pool. When Stargell and the Pirates visited Montreal in 1982, his final season, the city of Montreal presented him with a life preserver, honouring the baseball he sent to a watery grave.

The Expos did have one bona fide star of their own, however. He would become one of the deadliest hitters in the league, and a hero to the entire province. Rusty Staub, Le Grand Orange himself, was the one player the Expos could put up against just about anybody.

Staub had to endure big changes upon arriving in Montreal. The day he flew in to meet his new bosses, it was 78 degrees
Fahrenheit in Houston … and below the freezing mark in
la belle province
. And on a team that hadn’t yet played a major league game, he’d have to take on new responsibilities: star player, and beacon to the entire community. Staub was up to the task.

“He had so much charisma,” said Bronfman. “He liked the fans, and he learned a few words of French to help. He had been sort of a semi-star in Houston; now he wanted to be a big star. He found the place where he could be that big star.”

Free of the poisonous relationship he’d endured with Astros management, Staub thrived. In ’69, he cranked 29 homers and drew 110 walks against just 61 strikeouts. Going by OPS+ (an advanced metric that accounts for a player’s on-base and slugging ability, and also adjusts for park effects), Staub tied for the fourth-best hitting performance in the National League that year, trailing only future Hall of Famers Willie McCovey, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente. He posted impressive numbers the next two years too, hitting .274/.394/.497 (with 30 home runs) in 1970, and .311/.392/.482 in 1971, making the All-Star team in each of his first three years in Montreal.

“He was our only All-Star,” said McGinn, Staub’s teammate in Montreal from 1969 through 1971. “They had to pick a guy from every team, of course. But he was by far the best we had—very deserving. He was a great hitter, had a strong arm. And as Gene Mauch put it, he led the league in fantastic catches of routine flyballs. Always sliding and diving. Gene would say to him, ‘Why don’t you take a couple steps up and catch the ball!’—instead of running and sliding. That’s how it always was with Rusty, though. In ’68 I faced him when I was with the Reds and he was with the Astros. He could really hit. But he had so many people wanting him to do other things, tearing him one way and another.”

In Houston, his hitting coach and manager tried to screw with his swing almost every day, but in Montreal, the expectations
were different. The Expos trusted Staub to hit as he saw fit. They embraced his eccentricities, such as Staub bringing a full set of cooking implements on every road trip (a few years later, he would become a restaurateur). But they did place a different kind of demand on him, sometimes tacitly, sometimes more overtly. They urged Staub to become the face of the team, and an ambassador to the community. This was a challenge he happily embraced.

Staub’s first step was to learn to speak French—some French anyway, somewhere between knowing what his own nickname meant and true fluency. He’d go out to lunch with francophone friends and insist that they speak French the whole meal. “Comment dit-on”—“How do you say”—became his go- to phrase. Staub sought practical knowledge in particular. He wanted to get around town, order in restaurants, tell cabbies where to go. What he wanted most of all was to learn baseball terms in French, to be able to converse with French-speaking media and fans.