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 (28 page)

The one-and-only Youppi! was the first mascot to be ejected from a Major League Baseball game. A true Montrealer, after the Expos moved to Washington, DC, Youppi! became the first official mascot of the National Hockey League’s storied Montreal Canadiens.

Manager Felipe Alou, the Expos all-time wins leader, shares some wisdom with Andre Dawson, who ended his playing career with the Florida Marlins.

The last great Expo: Vladimir Guerrero.

T
oronto, like Montreal, had a rich baseball history of its own well before the big leagues arrived. The minor league Toronto Maple Leafs were founded in 1896 and played for 71 years, going from unaffiliated status all the way up to Triple-A. Also like Montreal, Toronto then went through nearly a decade without professional baseball. This made locals nostalgic for the sport, and made local politicians and businessmen want to do something about it.

By 1975, it looked like the city might finally get its wish. The San Francisco Giants were hemorrhaging money, and the league had seen enough. Baseball’s inter-league committee, in charge of expansion and franchise moves, determined that Toronto could be a profitable landing spot for the Giants. By January 1976, an agreement in principle had been reached, with the Giants getting sold to a group led by Labatt Breweries for $13.25 million, then moving to Toronto to play at refurbished Exhibition Stadium. But a last-minute appeal by San Francisco’s mayor earned the city a
temporary restraining order from a judge, which gave the mayor time to locate a new local owner. The good news for Toronto, however, was that the inter-league committee’s dual mandate was no accident; baseball’s expansion moves, from the early ’60s through the ’90s, usually stemmed from failed relocation attempts. A few months after San Francisco got its reprieve, Toronto got its expansion team.

In a stance that seems unthinkable now, the biggest pro-Toronto advocate on the committee—the man who made the most aggressive push to bring a second major league team to Canada—was none other than Expos president John McHale.

“I’m fighting like hell to get a franchise for Toronto,” McHale said in 1975, as talks for that city heated up. “It would be great for us up here [in Montreal].”

What McHale might’ve seen as an opportunity for a healthy rivalry, or a chance to further stoke baseball fervour in Canada to the benefit of the Expos, turned out to be something different altogether. The Blue Jays, in fact, would eventually help kill the Expos.

When the Expos were at their best, from 1979 through 1982, they were the toast of Canada. If they could surpass hockey’s revered Canadiens during that time, it was a lock that they towered over the Blue Jays, an expansion baseball team that hadn’t to that point even managed a winning season. The Expos also had an eight-year head start on the Jays, which had allowed them to build a national radio network and establish a national TV presence that fostered new fans throughout the country. During the Expos’ glory years, stations in far-flung Canadian cities started carrying the pennant race games of August and September.

“It was, ‘Oh, the Expos are in it again,’ ” said Rich Griffin, who got a close look at both sides of the rivalry over the years. “And then we’d get all the people from Toronto come to visit—that’s where I met writers like Larry Millson and Allan Ryan. They
would all come down and stay with the team for an entire homestand. Some of them would go on the road for the final months. I think that probably pissed the Jays off because they have their own team and those writers were coming to us instead. There was not a lot of love lost between the two organizations.”

Though they played their games 500 kilometres away (and in a different league), the Jays knew they were nonetheless competing with the Expos for fans and air time. Expos games were being broadcast in Ontario cities like Windsor and Belleville, which the Jays considered their home turf. But slowly, the balance of power began to shift. After six straight losing seasons, Toronto reeled off two straight 89-win campaigns starting in 1983. And the Expos’ run of contending seasons ended with that ugly sub-. 500 campaign in ’84.

The time was right for the Jays to strike. They began lobbying Major League Baseball to punt the Expos out of the highly populous and lucrative southern Ontario broadcast region, making it exclusive Blue Jays territory. Charles Bronfman pleaded Montreal’s case with the league.

“I spoke to [MLB Commissioner] Bowie Kuhn and said, ‘Look, if you don’t permit us to televise across the country—we’re Canada’s team right now—what you’re going to do is, you’re going to ghettoize us, and we’ll become just the French team, and the Blue Jays will become the national team,’ ” Bronfman said. “ ‘This is contrary to every goddamn reason I [agreed to own] the Expos. I did it to integrate Quebec into Canada. Now you’re gonna ghettoize us, to separate Quebec?’ ”

Kuhn offered a compromise: the Expos could broadcast 15 games a year on TV in southern Ontario. Bronfman resisted, telling the commissioner that the Expos would get as many games as broadcast partners wanted to show on their airwaves. Kuhn shot back that they would do no such thing.

“I’m doing this in the best interests of baseball,” Kuhn told Bronfman. He then reminded the Expos owner that Montreal, like every other team, wasn’t allowed to bring legal action against the league to plead its case.

When Peter Ueberroth succeeded Kuhn as commissioner, Bronfman tried to lobby Ueberroth to change the terms of the agreement. Ueberroth replied that the Expos could have the 15 games Kuhn promised. After that, they’d have to pay for broadcast rights.

In other words, you can take your request and shove it. The Expos weren’t going to pay for the privilege of having their games broadcast in an area they’d already had for the duration of their existence. And just like that, they were effectively shut out of the richest TV market in Canada. They’d been ghettoized as Bronfman feared, with open broadcast rights allowed only in Quebec and the relatively sparsely populated Maritime provinces. Toronto reaped the rewards, accelerating a power shift that would see the Jays ultimately replace the Expos as Canada’s team.

The Expos could’ve protected their interests earlier by hammering out an agreement with the league establishing their broadcast rights throughout the country. But Charles Bronfman, John McHale, and company mistakenly perceived the Jays as an ally rather than a threat. McHale’s stoic, old-fashioned business approach had blinded him to the cocaine epidemic ripping through his team’s roster; Griffin, Dave Van Horne, Jacques Doucet, and others argue that it also prevented him from taking the kind of aggressive approach that might’ve prevented the Jays from muscling the Expos out of the country’s most essential broadcast territory.

Chalk it up to the Jays’ shrewdness, the Expos rolling over, an inevitable decision once Toronto got its own franchise, or all of the above. Whatever the case, Kuhn’s decision ravaged the Expos
franchise, causing more long-term harm, arguably, than Blue Monday or anything else that happened on the field.

While the Montreal metro area, then as now, ranked around middle of the pack in terms of major league cities’ market size, the Expos would later face obstacles that other teams didn’t have to overcome. The widening gap between the American and Canadian dollars became a problem, with the Expos collecting local revenue in Canadian dollars but paying the bulk of their expenses (most notably player salaries) in American funds. While the Expos remained mired at Olympic Stadium, the attendance and ticket price booms that rival teams got from building new ballparks widened the gap between Montreal and the rest of the league. The Big O’s deteriorating condition and generally unappealing backdrop for baseball was one of several factors that drove fans away. These and many other poor business conditions would later make it impossible for the Expos to stay afloat (much less turn a profit or even break even) unless the team slashed payroll by trading away star players and letting them leave via free agency. Had those other problems not cropped up, sure, maybe the Expos could’ve subsisted on TV and radio revenue derived primarily from Quebec and the Maritime provinces. But with all those factors collectively working against them, they couldn’t afford to lose the southern Ontario market.

“As soon as they lost access to southern Ontario, they lost the heart of the Canadian commercial business, corporate support, and sponsorship support,” said Van Horne. “All of a sudden, the Montreal Expos were exactly that. They were Montreal’s team. They were no longer Canada’s team, and they couldn’t survive just being Montreal’s team. They couldn’t get the rights for television feeds or sponsorships, because once you took away the southern Ontario market from the sponsors they weren’t going to put money into it. They didn’t need their gains in Fredericton
and Sherbrooke and Quebec City. They needed to have both the Montreal and Toronto markets, and they didn’t have that anymore. As we look back and see what happened after that, it really started a long, slow downward spiral.”

The team on the field didn’t look too hot either. The 1985 Expos contended in the first half of the season and even climbed to 14 games above .500 in late July. But they were no major threat to win—not with the Cardinals taking 101 games. By year’s end, the Expos had allowed more runs than they scored, suggesting a team that probably got lucky in eking out 84 wins. Things got worse in ’86, with Montreal managing just 78 wins, finishing 29½ games behind the eventual World Series Champions, the supercharged Mets.

Even more than sheer win-loss records, however, the mediocrity of those mid-’80s Expos teams was reflected in the makeup of their rosters. Years of poor drafts finally caught up to them, negating the successful player development in the ’70s that built the contenders of the past. Few homegrown stars remained: instead, too many roster spots were filled by dull, unproductive players acquired from other teams.

As the rosters turned over, so too did the ranks of those in charge.

Near the end of the ’84 season, McHale handed the general manager’s reins to Murray Cook. If being battle-scarred was an important criterion for the job, the Expos had found the right man. Over a span of just 19 months in the Yankees organization, Cook went from director of player development to general manager to scouting director, with both his authority and job security challenged on a daily basis by George Steinbrenner during the mercurial owner’s most unhinged days. Previously, Cook had worked for 21 years with the Pirates, including six years as scouting director.

Cook was thrust into a tough spot in Montreal. The day he got hired, he was told to trade Gary Carter, and he finally hammered out the deal in a stairwell of the Opryland Hotel during the ’84 winter meetings with Mets execs Frank Cashen and Joe McIlvaine. (You wonder how Mets history might’ve been different if the Expos had accepted New York’s offer of Mookie Wilson instead of Herm Winningham in the trade.) Cook got similar trade-him-now orders two years later with star closer Jeff Reardon. Meanwhile, the three years Cook spent as GM wasn’t enough time for a new generation of homegrown products to develop as hoped.

Baseball even adopted a new rule thanks to a bad hand dealt to Cook. In the 1985 amateur draft, the Expos owned the eighth pick and nabbed Oklahoma State outfielder Pete Incaviglia. But Incaviglia wanted to play in Texas (and
not
Montreal). Five months after the draft, the Expos finally signed Incaviglia … and immediately traded him to the Rangers. Incensed, MLB later introduced the so-called “Incaviglia Rule,” stipulating that no player taken in the amateur draft could be traded for at least one year.

Aside from the Carter trade, one of Cook’s biggest immediate chores was finding a manager to replace Bill Virdon, who’d been dismissed after two disappointing seasons. Two notable names emerged in the hunt for his replacement. One was Felipe Alou, the long-time minor league manager and occasional major league coach who’d consistently impressed several higher-ups in the organization—just not enough to get hired as big league manager.