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 (13 page)

There were other damaging moves too. Trading Mike Marshall, one of the best and most rubber-armed relief pitchers in the game—then watching him win a Cy Young Award the next season with the Dodgers—didn’t help either.

Then there was the manager situation. It’s all well and good for people running an expansion team to preach patience, but eventually that patience wanes. Fans stop going to the ballpark. And the manager starts arguing with the front office about certain players and how to handle them. That was the rift that finally tore John McHale and Gene Mauch apart.

“They butted heads over personnel,” said Dave Van Horne. “I think what didn’t sit well with John especially was what happened at the end of the ’75 season. It’s September and we’re fighting for every win we could get. They’re discussing the call-ups in late August and one of the call-ups mentioned was a guy by the name of Gary Roenicke.”

The Expos’ first-round pick (eighth overall) in the 1973 June draft, Roenicke played well enough at Double-A in 1975 to earn Eastern League MVP honours. McHale felt that a September call-up could allow Roenicke to gain valuable major league experience, and maybe give a jolt to a losing team. McHale and others in the front office felt it was time for a youth movement that could be something to build on for the 1976 season.

“Mauch said no, he’s not ready,” Van Horne recalled. “ ‘I don’t need Roenicke, my outfield is fine,’ he insists.”

In the end, Mauch’s desire to go with veterans won out, and Roenicke didn’t make his major league debut until the following June. McHale, already frustrated by seven seasons of stagnation,
saw Mauch’s stubbornness on
l’affaire Roenicke
as the last straw. At season’s end, McHale fired the team’s first manager.

McHale would later tell confidants that it was one of his biggest regrets; not just the firing per se, but that he didn’t work harder to resolve his differences with Mauch. With Mauch gone, McHale huddled with Bronfman to find a replacement. The two men agreed on their preferred candidate: Tommy Lasorda. A former pitcher for the Montreal Royals, Lasorda appeared in just 26 games in the majors as a player. What he did do, however, was impress observers with his managing skill while working in the Dodgers organization. He then impressed Expos brass in face-to-face meetings, enough for McHale to extend an offer for Lasorda’s first big-league managing job, in Montreal. Lasorda went back to his bosses in L.A., leverage in hand—and not wanting to see a bright, homegrown managerial prospect bolt, the Dodgers promised Lasorda he could have Walter Alston’s major league managing job as soon as the seven-time National League pennant winner and four-time World Series winner retired. A year later, Lasorda took over. Lasorda’s Dodgers would become Expos’ nemeses for many years to come.

With Lasorda out of reach, the fallback plan was Karl Kuehl. Though the results weren’t yet evident in the Expos’ win column, the organization’s well-run player-development system was starting to bear fruit. As manager of the Triple-A Memphis Blues, Kuehl was considered a big part of the system’s success, having helped groom some of the Expos’ brightest young prospects.

“He moulded Gary Carter,” said Cromartie. “He’d work with Carter every day, out early, out late, teaching him how to block balls in the dirt. He made a big difference in turning Carter into the ballplayer he became.”

McHale hoped those teaching chops would translate well at the big-league level, and that Kuehl could transform the Expos from
a team plagued by growing pains into a perennial contender. The gambit would fail miserably—spectacularly, even.

Trouble started almost immediately. After the McNally/Messersmith ruling, outraged owners fought to maintain their traditional dominion over players. They locked out the players for 17 days, interrupting spring training in 1976. When the lockout ended, Kuehl got into an argument with Foli, a silly dispute that foreshadowed bigger problems later that year. Under Mauch, players had been forbidden from wearing facial hair. When players returned from the lockout, Foli was one of several veterans sporting a mustache, even though McHale and Jim Fanning wanted to keep the facial hair ban going under the new skipper. As Foli got set to take the field, Kuehl confronted his shortstop.

Shave your mustache off, the manager said.

May I wait, Foli asked, to talk to McHale and Fanning first?

No. Do it now.

The conflict only escalated: pulled from the lineup late in one April game, Foli quarrelled with Kuehl in the dugout. After another clash during a late-May game against the Phillies, Kuehl benched Foli in favour of light-hitting backup Pepe Frias. Foli stewed on the bench for three games, the third of which was a 6–2 loss to the Cardinals in which Frias committed three errors. Rather than back the manager’s play, Fanning told Kuehl to get Foli back on the field.

Things deteriorated from there. Players lamented Kuehl’s poor communication skills. He didn’t win any raves for his in-game tactics either. Kuehl was finally fired in August, and his interim replacement, Charlie Fox, closed out the season by managing 34 games. Then he, too, was finished.

As if bad trades, a bad manager, and the end of the team’s post-expansion honeymoon period weren’t enough, the Expos faced
another, more esoteric challenge in their quest to become beloved contenders: volatile, and sometimes violent, politics.

The birth of the Expos coincided with the most chaotic period in the history of the Quebec sovereignty movement. In the early 1960s, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) began speaking out and acting out in favour of Quebec separation from the rest of Canada. Unlike community groups and political parties that supported Quebec’s independence through peaceful means, the FLQ carried out numerous acts of violence. At first, the incidents were small in scale, including mailbox bombings in wealthy, mostly English-speaking neighbourhoods such as Westmount. Then, two months before the Expos played their first game, the FLQ bombed the Montreal Stock Exchange, injuring 27 people. The group’s notoriety peaked in October 1970: over a span of a few weeks, the FLQ kidnapped British Trade Commissioner James Cross and Quebec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte (whom the FLQ later killed); issued a list of demands that included the release of imprisoned FLQ members; and triggered the mobilization of army troops as well as the implementation of Canada’s War Measures Act and a resulting suspension of
habeas corpus
.

The so-called October Crisis terrified many Montrealers, but it had little to no effect on the Expos, or anyone who played for, worked for, or followed the team at that time—at least if dozens of interviews for this book are to be believed. It took a legitimate, sovereignty-focused political movement for anyone involved with the Expos to become spooked.

By the mid-’70s, the Parti Québécois (PQ) had risen to prominence. The party’s leader, René Lévesque, broached the possibility of a province-wide referendum to vote on Quebec separation. In 1976, the PQ gained enough support to mount a serious challenge to the incumbent Liberal Party in the Quebec general election.
For Bronfman, the rise of the PQ and the mere whisper of a chance that a referendum might get called triggered both denial and anger.

On the eve of the election, the Expos owner gave a talk to a Jewish community group. Unaware that there was a reporter in the room, and more strident than he should have been due to the uncertain political climate, Bronfman said a number of things that he quickly regretted.

“I ranted and raved and said that these guys were anti-Semitic, and if they got in I’d leave, I’d take my family out, I’d take [Seagram’s] out,” Bronfman said of the PQ.

At the time, Bronfman believed he had inside information from government sources, definitive proof that the PQ was going to lose. A
Montreal Star
reporter called him later that day to press him on the matter. If you’re going to move your family in the event of a PQ victory, the reporter asked, what will you do with the Expos?

“I said, ‘Well, under normal circumstances I’d sell it,’ ” Bronfman recalled. “ ‘But who’s gonna buy it in a separate Quebec? So I guess I have to take it with me.’ Hello, headlines the next day! I was in deep doo-doo.”

The doo-doo was deep indeed. The city’s English media roasted Bronfman for threatening to move the team. French media painted him as intolerant. Months after the PQ won, Bronfman was still getting vitriolic letters egging him on, trying to call him on his threat and/or bluff. He’d see PQ ministers at ballgames and get into arguments with them when they wouldn’t stand for “O Canada.”

“It was war,” he said. “It affected my everyday life, because I felt that I was being made a scapegoat.”

Beyond Bronfman’s own encounters, however, the effect of the owner’s comments began seeping into everyday Expos business.

“We were at the Windsor Hotel in late ’76,” said long-time Expos public relations man Rich Griffin. “Dave Cash was brought
into town, and we had a press conference at the Windsor. The media was gathered there, including this sports columnist for
La Presse
who was very political. Very PQ. The floor opened for questions. The columnist asks, ‘Monsieur Bronfman, you promised you were going to move Seagram’s if the PQ won. When is that going to happen?’ Meanwhile, Dave Cash is just sitting there. He has no idea what’s going on.”

In the end, Bronfman’s threats proved idle. His family stayed put. Seagram’s didn’t make any major changes; even if Bronfman had wanted to do something drastic, he would’ve had to battle a cavalcade of people to make it happen—including his brother Edgar, the president of the company. And the Expos remained in Montreal.

But Bronfman’s tirade, while more candid (and wildly inappropriate) than what others might’ve offered, was—minus the accusations of anti-Semitism—not that far removed from what some Montreal-based business leaders were thinking.

The Royal Bank of Canada, the largest corporation in the country, kept its official headquarters in Montreal, but moved its operational head office to Toronto. Sun Life, the then-Montreal-based insurance and financial services giant, objected to the PQ-led passing of the Charter of the French language in 1977. More commonly known as Bill 101, the charter defined French as the official language of Quebec. For a huge company like Sun Life, one of the major frustrations came from a clause that required corporations to use French when communicating with French-speaking employees. By January 1978, Sun Life had shifted its headquarters to Toronto as well. And in a cruel twist of irony, another financial services giant kept only its titular headquarters in Montreal while moving its operational headquarters to Toronto. That company? The Bank of Montreal.

The PQ did go on to hold two referendums, one in 1980 and one
in 1995. But despite a close call in ’95, the province never separated. Today, Quebec remains a Canadian province in good standing.

Still, for many major companies, the perception that the Montreal business community could get hurt by a PQ election became a reality, although one that was largely self-inflicted. When Canada experienced rapid economic growth for much of the ’80s and early ’90s, Montreal, stripped of much of its corporate clout, lagged well behind. The erosion of the city’s business community would eventually prove to be more harmful to the Expos’ future than any one lopsided trade or disposable manager.

But those down times would come later. With the 1977 season approaching, the Expos were in fact about to launch a new era, backed by a sharp, combative, and colourful manager, in a new, gigantic ballpark. Despite the growing woes of its hometown, the most successful period in the franchise’s history was about to start.

J
ean Drapeau’s promise of a new domed baseball stadium for the Expos became a bigger running joke with each passing year. The note he sent to the National League in 1968 pledging a new ballpark by Opening Day 1971 as part of the deal for an expansion franchise proved a farce. A few months later, the league granted an extension stretching to 1972; that deadline, too, came and went with no new park. A few weeks after the Expos played their first game, Charles Bronfman was asked when they could realistically expect a new stadium. “About 1973 … I should think.” When Jim Fanning was asked in April ’71 for a target date, he said he was confident the Expos could play in their new home by 1975. Probably. Maybe.

At the heart of the stadium discussion was a grander plan, however—one hatched by Drapeau back in 1963. It was the biggest of all his big dreams, one that the mayor felt would enhance his city’s reputation around the world. He wanted to lure the Olympics to Montreal.

The city’s first attempt to reel in the summer games ramped up in April 1966, when Montreal finished third behind Madrid and eventual winner Munich for the right to host the (ultimately tragic) ’72 Olympics. Montreal again won the Canadian Olympic Association’s nomination to represent Canada in bidding for the 1976 games. Drapeau’s hope was to build a new stadium that could accommodate not only the Expos, but the Canadian Football League’s Alouettes, concerts, and other events as well—while also serving as the main locale for the Olympics. The grandest plans projected a $124 million (Canadian) cost for a majestic, domed stadium that would include all the latest amenities for multiple uses. By comparison, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium broke ground in April 1968, was completed in July 1970, and cost less than half of Montreal’s projected amount.

On May 12, 1970, votes were counted for the ’76 Games. Round one of voting had been tight, with Montreal competing against Moscow and Los Angeles. In round two, a verdict was reached. Though Moscow and Los Angeles would host the games in 1980 and 1984, in 1976 the Olympics were coming to Montreal.

If the Olympics were Drapeau’s baby, the stadium would be too—right down to its designer. The mayor had grown impressed with the work of French architect Roger Taillibert. In Paris, Taillibert had gained acclaim for designing the Parc des Princes soccer stadium and other venues. He was a reputable choice, but what was distressing was how Taillibert’s hiring came to light. Drapeau struck a clandestine deal with Taillibert soon after the city won the Olympic rights, but the public didn’t learn about it until reading a March 1972 piece in the
Montreal Gazette
. An editorial in the paper described the situation this way: “It is extraordinary that even in Montreal’s municipal autocracy the mayor would keep such an important matter … a secret for so long.”