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 (10 page)
Authors: Jonah Keri
The rest of that 1970 draft didn’t produce any front-line talent either, with the Expos landing a few bit players but nothing approaching a building block for the future. The two best players drafted by the Expos that year—Phil Garner and Roy Smalley—never even signed with the team, going back to school instead
before enjoying impressive careers with other clubs. The 1971 draft was even worse, with only four players ever making it to the Show, and only two of those ever playing for the Expos. It wasn’t a total loss, though. With the fourth overall pick in 1971, Montreal landed a four-time All-Star, two-time champion, and Hall of Famer. His name was Condredge Holloway, and he accomplished all of that in the Canadian Football League.
You could forgive the Expos for losing 289 games over their first three seasons, given how little talent they began with; hell, Seattle/Milwaukee lost 287 games in their first three years, while San Diego dropped 309. And of course Montreal wouldn’t fully realize the extent of its early draft failures until later. Still, getting nothing out of their first four drafts except a short-lived starting catcher, a few bench jockeys, and a Toronto Argonaut? These were the types of colossal mistakes that could get an entire front office fired.
Instead, patience prevailed. Teams came up empty (or nearly empty) in drafts all the time back then, and still do now, even with far more sophisticated scouting tools at teams’ disposal. The one strategy the Expos did implement in those years was a willingness to spend money to produce great players.
“Obviously Charles had the wherewithal to support this,” said Van Horne. “More importantly, he had the intelligence—and it’s probably one of the reasons he was so successful in the family business—that he knew to surround himself with good people, to trust them, and to give them leeway and encourage them to make decisions. He was very hands-on, but he was hands-on sitting behind John and Jim and Danny Menendez and Mel Didier and all those baseball people, learning.
“He was always there and always had the final word when it came to the purse strings. But he yielded to the baseball people. Charles wanted to give them the finances necessary to build one
of the outstanding farm systems and organizations in all of baseball. He let his fellow partners know that this was the McHale show, so the partners knew where they stood as far as baseball was concerned. Not to say they didn’t have input, but Jim and John made all of the baseball decisions. Charles gave them that liberty to do that.”
The Expos did offer competitive signing bonuses to their draft picks, which never hurts a team’s chances to land future front-line players. But the gaps between bonuses weren’t nearly as big in the ’70s as they would become in later decades. Moreover, many of the Expos’ best picks would come from later rounds. What Bronfman did well, and did frequently, was sign stacks of relatively small checks, thus making a big impact overall.
Another example of Bronfman’s generosity: When the Expos arrived in New York to play that first-ever regular-season series, Bronfman wasn’t happy with the team hotel. No no, he said, this isn’t good enough for us. So the team upped and left for the Waldorf Astoria. He would throw parties at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, inviting all the major league staff, minor league managers, coaches, and instructors. There is no evidence to suggest that athletes perform better after being draped in gold-plated terrycloth robes, or that a pitching coach can lop a half-run off his ace’s ERA because he’s had some champagne and a few pigs in a blanket. But it couldn’t have hurt.
Incentives, on the other hand,
do
motivate people. In the spring of 1970, Bronfman gathered all of his minor league managers, coaches, and instructors, and his major league coaching staff in his home. He gave a heartfelt speech, then gave everyone a big raise, making them one of the highest-paid player development departments in the league. It wasn’t without precedent: Baltimore’s Oriole Way of scouting and player development produced a cavalcade of stars over the years, from Brooks Robinson to Jim Palmer,
Eddie Murray to Cal Ripken Jr. The Dodger Way dated back to Rickey, with generation after generation finding their way to Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida, and eventually to the majors. Bronfman’s largesse cultivated loyalty from his employees and attracted some of baseball’s most-skilled teachers, which in turn made farm director Danny Menendez’s job easier. For McHale, Fanning, Didier, and Menendez, the goal was simple.
“We had to have the best damn farm system in baseball,” said Bronfman.
After those first four mostly fruitless drafts, one of the Expos’ prime targets in 1972 was a high-school shortstop from California, a multi-sport star who’d gotten more than a hundred football scholarship offers. The Expos had scouted him since he was 16. Now, with the draft approaching, at least three other teams were also on his trail. Expos scout Bob Zuk got the order: run misdirection, bend the truth, lie if you must. Just get other teams off his scent. So Zuk spread the word. The prospect they were after was too keen on playing football. Besides, he was damaged goods, coming off a major knee injury. Oh, and if you wanted to sway him into choosing baseball as his vocation, the bidding would start at $100,000.
In retrospect, you could ask why other teams fell for all that subterfuge, rather than doing more due diligence and learning the truth. But the draft is a fickle and scary beast, a process so rife with failure that teams will pass on a premium prospect if they don’t like the look on his face, let alone if he’s an injury risk asking for a fortune. This time, the Expos’ trickery worked. With their third-round pick, number 53 overall, they reeled in their man. They signed him for half what they claimed he’d demand, luring him away from a commitment to UCLA, where he’d signed a letter of intent to play quarterback.
Only thing was, they had other plans for their new find. Though he had spent only eight games behind the plate to that
point, they intended to convert him to catcher. They would arm him with the best instruction to hone his defence, and nurture the power-hitting ability they felt would play at the highest level. After years of searching, they had found the player around whom they’d build the first winning teams in the franchise’s history, the one who would eclipse Staub’s performance and fame, and further the Expos’ overriding mission: to turn fans’ attention from stars on other teams to the stars of their own.
In the beginning, he was just a kid. But he would prove to be
The
Kid.
The Kid and the Kids (1974–1976)
T
he Expos nearly ruined Gary Carter’s career before his 19
th
birthday. And worse—Carter helped.
Though the team announced it planned to develop Carter as a catcher, at first they weren’t ready to commit all the way. This made some sense, at least in theory. The Expos had drafted catcher Barry Foote third overall just two years before selecting Carter, and though they were bullish on Carter from the start, as the team headed south for spring training in 1973, it was still too soon to give up on Foote.
With Carter and Foote bound for Daytona Beach, the prudent move would have been to work with both as catchers. But while the Expos would eventually develop a reputation as a team with exemplary player-development skills, they could be just as impatient as everyone else. And with good reason: the novelty of a new franchise was starting to wear off, and attendance was waning. Entering their fifth season, the Expos still stunk. Moreover, their roster consisted mostly of dull players, retreads from other teams, or second-rate
prospects who played only because the alternatives were grim. If Carter was going to be as good as everyone believed, why not get him on the field as soon as possible, through any means necessary?
Those means included giving Carter a spin in the outfield. The Expos organization would make many mistakes over the course of its existence, but the “Carter as outfielder” experiment proved to be one of the most spectacularly dunderheaded.
Not long after the players hit camp, Carter ran into his first setback. Which is to say, he ran into a wall. “Split his head open,” recalled Steve Rogers, who’d make his major league debut a few months later. “Carter played outfield like a bull in a china shop. He almost killed himself out there.”
This was typical for “The Kid,” so named for his endless enthusiasm on the field. Though that enthusiasm sometimes bloomed into recklessness, even self-administered lobotomies couldn’t deter Carter, or his employer. After getting his first big-league cup of coffee in ’74, he broke into the lineup for good in ’75 … and promptly cracked a rib while attacking Jarry Park’s 5-foot outfield fence to make a catch.
Bored with merely injuring
himself
, Carter’s next mishap was a twofer. Chasing after a flyball during a June 1976 game against the Braves, Carter crashed into centre fielder Pepe Mangual, a collision that knocked Mangual out of the lineup for six days. Carter got the worst of it, though, breaking his thumb and landing on the disabled list for a month and a half. Carter was already having a mediocre season at the time of the injury, and his performance tanked when he returned from the DL. The team’s next big hope hit just .199 with two home runs over his final 47 games of the season.
Eventually, everyone got the hint. In 1977, Carter finally took over as the team’s everyday catcher. He would later become one of the greatest power-hitting catchers of all time, an elite game-caller, and one of the league’s most popular players with fans.
Steve Rogers was both a great pitcher and one of the most brutally frank players the Expos ever had. That pull-no-punches approach lives on decades later, with Rogers now working for the MLB Players Association (MLBPA). Rogers and Carter eventually teamed up to form the greatest of all Expos batteries, as well as a fierce mutual admiration society. But while Carter came to be loved by Rogers and other teammates, he wasn’t so warmly received at first. In a wide-ranging interview at MLBPA headquarters in New York, Rogers explained why.
“In ’75, we didn’t fare well. You had Gary Carter, Barry Foote, and … turmoil. Gary was the saviour of the Expos before he ever set foot in the major leagues. Early on, I was on the side of Barry Foote, because I knew Barry; I had gone to instructional league with Barry. Barry was a hell of a catcher. With Gary it
was more that the organization had touted him before he ever made it to the major leagues. He was the guy that was going to turn it around.
“Then Gary’s attitude when he came up was all this ‘rah, rah’ stuff and everything like that. There was this perception that he was a certain way, he was The Kid, he was just 19 years old. The one thing I can always say about Gary is he had a quarterback’s arrogance. He had been offered that full scholarship to UCLA to be their quarterback, so he had that kind of vision, that ‘I’m going to get it done’ type of vision. And he had the cockiness that goes along with that. At the heart of all of that was that he truly wanted people to like him and he would do anything in the world to make it happen. Sometimes that combination rubbed people the wrong way.
“But the honest truth is I never had any feeling of malice toward Gary. By the time the transition took place and Barry had been traded and Gary was now behind the plate, my relationship with Gary had changed. Even though I liked Barry, Gary was a good catcher for me and we worked well together. By the end, I counted him as a friend and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it.
“He developed into a great catcher. The last four or five years when I was throwing to him, we would both be thinking ahead, four or five pitches deep. In other words, he knew my entire repertoire, and how to use it. I threw a split-finger for a changeup; I might throw three in a game. It was always so great that I’m setting the ball in my glove, thinking about what to throw, and he’s calling that split-changeup at exactly the right time. And Gary was a gamer. I’ve seen him go out there on one leg. He couldn’t even stand on it. He’d be out there with an injured leg, in the middle of a pennant race, gutting it out. We were lucky to have him.”
