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 (17 page)

Still, Williams saw the value of putting up with Lee’s foibles given what the left-hander could offer. Lee was as smart a pitcher as you would find, keenly aware of his limitations and able to squeeze as much value as possible out of a turf-burning sinker and wide array of breaking pitches. “He has a fantastic attitude,” said pitching coach Jim Brewer in
The Year the Expos Almost Won the Pennant
. “If all the pitchers were like him, I’d be paid for doing nothing.”

Finally, Williams had the team he wanted. The ’79 Expos carried five right-handed pitchers and five southpaws. The team had supremely talented young players entering their prime years, a deep starting rotation and lots of options out of the bullpen, strong defence and a capable bench, plus power and speed—all blended with the kind of characters that could give other managers fits, but suited Williams and his just-show-up-and-play approach perfectly fine.

The Expos immediately proved they’d become a very different team than the losing bunch of the previous decade. Storming out of the gate, they won 15 of their first 20 games, capped by a perfect
7–0 homestand against the Padres, Giants, and Dodgers. Several pitchers caught fire from the start. Lee led the way, winning three of his first four starts, posting a 3.00 ERA and tossing a two-hit shutout against the Cubs. But what really stood out were the contributions of pitchers in lesser roles. Working mostly in long and middle relief in his first full big-league season, Palmer chewed up multiple innings at a time, pitching well in April en route to a 2.64 ERA over 123 frames. Schatzeder, the fifth starter and swingman, did everything from notching a four-inning save against the Phillies to pitching six innings of one-run, eight-strikeout relief against the Dodgers to putting up 10 innings of one-run ball in a crucial September game against the Cardinals. Sanderson formed the third leg of the team’s excellent young trio, posting the best strikeout and strikeout-to-walk rates on the staff over 168 innings in his own first full major league season. Rogers, meanwhile, got off to a slow start in ’79, finishing the year with very good but not quite elite numbers as he recovered from his elbow and shoulder problems. But the young guns—as well as relievers Sosa, May, Fryman, and Bahnsen—pitched well, allowing Williams to aggressively pinch-hit for tiring starters, keeping his front five fresh throughout the year. After ending their month of May with a 10–2 run, the Expos stood at 29–15, 3½ games up in the NL East. By July, they’d built a 6½-game lead, sitting on a 46–29 record.

Expos fans responded by … losing their damn minds.

Empty, the Big O was a dark, cold, forbidding place. It was massive, and far from the bosom of bustling downtown Montreal. It was, in the absence of a good and interesting team, a lousy place to see a baseball game. Management knew all of this. And with the club improving on the field, the front office got to work on the fan experience. For the many fans who travelled to Olympic Stadium by Metro, the entire walk-up experience became electric. Exiting at the Pie-IX stop (pronounced pee-neuf), you would walk
shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of fans from the subway car, through a tunnel, and up a ramp leading directly to the stadium entrance. The second you passed through the turnstiles, you found yourself in the middle of a big party, loud and raucous (but not too raucous) and inviting. Straight ahead was a beer garden, flanked by an Oompah band with the volume at 11. In a city that had French as its main language and English as number two, the whole setup surprisingly felt like Oktoberfest, right down to the music. You could count the number of people who knew
all
the words to “The Happy Wanderer” on one hand as you wandered to your seat after a beer or five, but every living soul in the ballpark knew the chorus. And whether it was pre-gaming in the concourse or celebrating a big Expos rally with the help of Fern Lapierre’s booming organ, that chorus echoed through the building’s cavernous expanse.

The combination of winning baseball and that festive environment drove attendance sky-high. A June series against the Phillies drew two crowds of 40,000-plus. An early-July weekend series against the Dodgers brought in 46,502 on Saturday, and 46,601 on Sunday. A late-May doubleheader against the Cardinals drew 52,539 crazies. A Friday night twin bill in July against the mighty Pirates beamed in 59,260 fans. That magical 1979 marked the first time the Expos drew two million fans in a season, a feat they repeated in three of the following four years—and it would’ve been five straight if not for the strike in 1981. Montreal finished second, third, or fourth in the league in attendance in each of
those five seasons, outdrawing some of the biggest-name teams in the biggest cities. It sounds crazy now, but in ’82 and ’83, the quirky, goofy Expos even outdrew the big, bad New York Yankees.

“It was the most fun you could have at a Major League Baseball game,” said Michael Farber. “This was before Wrigley Field became a theme park, and there was really nowhere else like it. You walked through that tunnel, you hear ‘Valderi, Valdera’ … this German song from this Oompah band … who does that?! The hat with three colours, we’d never seen that before. The scoreboard even had these cardboard-cutout chickens that went
bawk-bawk-bawk
every time an opposing pitcher threw over to first base.

“All of it might have seemed Mickey Mouse to the rest of the major leagues. But it was
our
Mickey Mouse. Montreal prides itself on being distinct, and the Expos were certainly distinct. Tom Boswell and I had this discussion once, about how
delightful
it was to be at the Big O in those days. It was utterly charming without being traditionally, basebally charming. It was
Montreal
charming.”

It was especially charming when the young lineup was clicking, which happened in ’79 far more often than ever before. Six of the Expos’ eight starting position players were 25 or younger, and only one (Tony Perez) was older than 30. The hitting star that year was Larry Parrish. Shaking off the injuries that had limited him in the two previous seasons, Parrish batted .307 and set a team record by slugging .551, with 30 home runs and 39 doubles. Meanwhile, Gary Carter was an all-around terror, hitting .283 with 22 homers and cementing his status as one of the best defensive catchers of his generation. Dawson smacked 25 homers, stole 35 bases, and ran down everything in or near centre field, more than making up for his sometimes prodigious out-making at the plate. The bench also improved, as Williams had hoped. Ousted from his starting job, Cash turned around and hit .321 as a reserve. Veteran Tommy Hutton, the acknowledged leader of the Bus Squad, contributed a
number of big pinch-hits. White was outstanding, hitting .297 with a sparkling .391 on-base percentage. Finally, Ken Macha batted only 36 times all year, but established himself as an unlikely team leader, with the kind of personality that would one day enable him to become a big-league manager.

“He didn’t let any player that had status get away with anything,” Lee now says about Macha. “He saw everything and he reported on it and questioned every athlete on his integrity. He was the kind of guy who could tell the king he’s an asshole and get away with it.”

The bench, and the team, still needed a little something extra for the stretch run, however. The Expos had fallen into a minislump heading into the All-Star break, losing five games off their first-place lead in just two weeks. With a lineup dominated by right-handed hitters (and several free swingers), a left-handed bat became management’s top priority. On July 20, they landed the perfect player.

Rusty Staub, the one and only Grand Orange, was back in Montreal.

“I still remember Rusty Staub’s first game back at the Big O,” said Serge Touchette, who took over
le Journal de Montreal
’s Expos beat in 1976 and covered the team for the rest of its existence. “They’re playing Pittsburgh, eighth inning, down a run, runner on first. The PA announcer didn’t even get to say Rusty’s name. As soon as he touched the on-deck circle, people went nuts. Chuck Tanner changed pitchers. And the whole time, Rusty is standing there, waiting, and people were just losing their minds. This kept going and going, for several minutes. It was the greatest ovation I’d ever heard in my life.”

Staub didn’t come through with the big hit in that first game back home, but he did put up solid numbers over the final two months of the season. Meanwhile, the Expos went 15–11 in
August, shaking off their losing July. But the “We Are Family” Pirates were on fire, tacking on a 21–9 August to their 20–11 July, grabbing the division lead and threatening to put the season on ice.

Down 3½ games heading into Labour Day, the young and untested Expos refused to crack. First, they ripped through a 10-game winning streak, with one nail-biting victory after another. There was Cromartie’s walk-off base on balls in the bottom of the ninth against the Astros to start the streak, then an incredible comeback three days later in which the Expos tallied one in the seventh and two in the ninth to tie, followed by Rodney Scott’s walk-off single in the bottom of the 10
^th
to beat the Reds. Win number seven came on a Mets error, also in the bottom of the 10
^th
. The final win of the streak was a classic. Promoted to the rotation late in the season, David Palmer tossed eight shutout innings against the Cubs on September 6, bagging the win after Carter homered in the top of the ninth for the game’s only run. That outing capped a five-start stretch in which Palmer allowed just four runs, with three of those five starts resulting in nothing but goose eggs.

Still, the Pirates clung to a one-game division lead, which widened to two games after a Montreal loss and a Pittsburgh win on September 7. Time for another streak, with the Expos ripping off seven in a row, the seventh win coming on a Scott walk-off single in the bottom of the 11
^th
of a Saturday doubleheader that packed 48,459 fans into the Big O. Incredibly, frustratingly, the Pirates hung on to the NL East lead—even after 17 Expos wins in 18 games. What happened the very next day might’ve gone down as one of the greatest moments in franchise history, had the season ended differently. Playing yet another doubleheader against St. Louis, the Expos smashed the single-day attendance record they’d set in July, pulling in 59,282 fans. The game was 1–1 after two innings, but each side’s pitchers allowed not a
single run over the next seven frames. In the bottom of the 10
^th
, the first two Expos went down quietly. Then Carter doubled and the hot-hitting White drew an intentional walk. With a chance to escape the inning, Cards second baseman Ken Oberkfell booted a groundball, loading the bases. And with the game on the line, the singles-hitting Cash—the man who’d lost his starting job, the guy who hadn’t hit a home run all year—strode to the plate.

And blasted a walk-off grand slam over the left-field wall that sent a crowd the size of a small city into spasms of ecstasy.

“The Big O could be a nasty place,” said Touchette. “It was cold and damp and windy. That stadium cost a fortune, you still had no roof, the turf was terrible, and the city didn’t want to pay any more for it. You had to live with the problems. It was brand new, and it might have been the worst stadium. But in those years, at a moment like that, it sounded like the best place in the world to watch a baseball game.”

As great as the atmosphere was in that first, heady winning season, the Expos caught some bad breaks too. Weather in Montreal that summer was terrible, with rainout after rainout forcing doubleheaders in September. From September 3 through September 16, the Expos played 17 games in 13 days, including four home doubleheaders (and twin bills on consecutive days that weekend against the Cardinals). They got no luck with their road schedule either, with rainstorms galore causing five more “away” doubleheaders to be scheduled for the season’s final month:
nine
doubleheaders on the docket that month, all told. Somehow, some way, they plowed on. They swept back-to-back doubleheaders against the Mets at Shea Stadium September 19 and 20. More bad weather forced a third straight doubleheader on September 22, which the Expos split before taking the series finale the next day.

The team should’ve been running on fumes at that point. They’d lost their reliable shortstop when Chris Speier missed two
weeks earlier in September. Rogers, coming off that painful bone-spur injury and surgery, had been advised by Dr. Jobe to throw about 160 innings for the year—190 at the most—and he’d run up 236 2/3, getting lit up multiple times down the stretch and appearing totally spent. All the while, Carter’s determination was nearly unfathomable. He played through a brutal ankle injury, refusing to take a seat and catching four games in those two days at Shea in absolute agony. He hit, too, banging out 14 hits in his final 31 at-bats of the season.

Unbelievably, through all that, the team rolled into Pittsburgh on September 24 leading the Bucs by half a game, about to start a four-game series that might decide the season. They began with another doubleheader, losing the opener to drop into second place. Trailing 6–3 after seven innings in the nightcap, the Expos rallied yet again, scoring three in the top of the eighth, then parlaying a Valentine RBI single in the top of the ninth into a thrilling 7–6 win.

And just like that, it all fell apart.

The Pirates clobbered the Expos 10–4 and 10–1 over the next two games, giving Pittsburgh a division lead it would never relinquish en route to a World Series title. Still, no one could possibly fault the Expos for coming up short. Carter didn’t play again that season after the doubleheader in Pittsburgh. Rogers somehow gutted through eight innings of two-run ball in a last-ditch effort to salvage the year on September 30, only to get no run support in a heartbreaking 2–0 loss. The Expos ended up winning 23 of 34 games in September, a magnificent performance that might’ve been enough in nearly any other season, against nearly any other team.