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 (29 page)

The other was Earl Weaver.

“That was John McHale’s [idea],” recalled Cook. “We met with Earl at the airport in Miami. Meeting with him, it was obvious even to John that Earl was living in the past. John loved Earl Weaver. But Earl wouldn’t have fit in Montreal. He just kept talking about the glory years in Baltimore.”

The Expos instead chose Buck Rodgers. The former big-league catcher had managed parts of three seasons for the Brewers, losing his job 47 games into the 1982 campaign only for Milwaukee to reach the World Series under new manager Harvey Kuenn. Rodgers then managed in the Expos’ farm system, guiding the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians to a championship and earning Minor League Manager of the Year honours.

A 180-degree flip from Virdon and his dour demeanour, Rodgers was “a real people person,” said Jeff Blair, who covered the Expos for the
Montreal Gazette
during much of Rodgers’ tenure as manager. Players gave Rodgers high marks for running a harmonious clubhouse. But nobody loved him more than the writers. Blair remembers many late nights spent in Rodgers’ company closing down Grumpy’s bar on Bishop Street. Like other newspapermen, Blair couldn’t get enough of Rodgers and his stories, baseball-related or otherwise.

In addition to the new manager, the Expos’ new scouting director was Gary Hughes. Mel Didier’s departure after the 1975 season had taken its toll on the Expos’ scouting pipeline, and though Montreal drafted some excellent players thereafter under Danny Menendez, not even the most ardent Expos die hard could deny that the team had lost its title as the model franchise for scouting and player development. Hughes had already worked as a scout and executive for the Giants, Mets, and Mariners—then worked with Cook in the Yankees organization—when he got called to come to Montreal. He replaced Fanning, who’d served as scouting director from 1983 through 1985, and got kicked back upstairs with Hughes’ arrival. The first meeting of the two men left an immediate and major impression on Hughes.

“I got to the office at a quarter to nine, and the only person there was Jim,” said Hughes. “He couldn’t have been more gracious, he was so happy to have me here. I thought, ‘Is this guy for
real?’ He was the most solid, gentle, genuine person I’ve ever met. We got rid of the scouts who cost him his job, so we started with a clean slate. They were dissatisfied with his drafts, which is funny—that year they had Incaviglia in the first round, they also got [future 13-year major league veteran starting pitcher] Mark Gardner in the eighth round, and they didn’t do badly in the second round with Randy Johnson. I always say, ‘Do you know what my first number-one pick did? Eight to thirteen in San Quentin.’ That was Kevin Dean, our first-round pick in ’86 who went to prison.”

Though Hughes maintains a self-effacing view of the near half-century he’s spent in the game, his track record in Montreal was exceptional. Hughes combined with farm directors Bob Gebhard, Dave Dombrowski, and John Boles to sign and develop 65 players over six years who went on to play in the big leagues. You could also measure the farm system’s success by the high number of scouts and player-development people who went on to high-profile jobs with other teams later in their careers. That list included future big-league managers Mike Quade and Joe Kerrigan, future general manager Frank Wren, and a long list of future scouting directors.

But along with the new arrivals, there was a notable departure: McHale resigned as club president in 1986. From his thumbs-up for Montreal as an expansion city while serving as MLB deputy commissioner to his 17 years as Expos president and six years as GM during the most successful run the team ever saw, McHale’s contributions were invaluable. From day one, he gave the upstart franchise an air of credibility. He oversaw the construction of a farm system that churned out two Hall of Fame players (as of 2014), turning a rag-tag roster into a perennial contender.

“John was highly respected throughout baseball,” said Van Horne. “Charles’ caveat on taking the franchise was based on McHale accepting the position of president. To give you an idea
of his stature—had he not gotten involved with the Expos at the time, John probably would have become the commissioner. He would have been good at that job too.”

Still, the time had come to step aside. At age 65, and 45 years after signing with the Tigers and starting his long journey through professional baseball, McHale was ready. Replacing him was someone with no experience running a baseball team, who nonetheless held Bronfman’s trust, an ambitious Seagram’s executive vice president named Claude Brochu. We’ll get to his story a bit later.

Though the Expos won just four more games than they lost from 1986 through 1991, those six years with Hughes running the scouting department and all those savvy talent evaluators working with him laid the foundation for what would become the best team in franchise history. At the same time, Cook’s knack for yanking quality players off the scrap heap proved highly valuable—especially considering what happened in the winter following the 1986 season. Dealing with an already depleted roster due to drafting and player-development failures and several key players going to other teams, the Expos now faced the prospect of losing their two remaining stars, Tim Raines and Andre Dawson.

Raines had established himself as one of the best players in the National League by that point, shaking off his drug-marred 1982 season and hitting .315 from 1983 through 1986. You could make a strong argument that Raines was in fact
the
best player in the NL over that stretch, having led the league in on-base percentage (.401), runs scored (445), stolen bases (305), and (as we can now see through the benefit of hindsight and advanced stats) Wins Above Replacement. He’d just turned 27, and had won the batting title, led the league in OBP, and made his sixth straight All-Star team in ’86. Dawson by that point was no longer one of the team’s two best players—not after years of knee injuries had
eaten into his numbers and limited him to fewer than 140 games played in each of the previous three seasons. But even at age 32 with cranky knees, Dawson was still a valuable player and the last link to the crop of homegrown stars that came up with the team in the mid-to-late ’70s. By all rights, Raines and Dawson should’ve been hotly pursued in a deep free-agency class that included other stars such as Jack Morris.

But these weren’t ordinary times. At Commissioner Ueberroth’s behest, every team agreed to a set of controls that would depress the price of free agents. Clubs would make every effort to avoid handing out multi-year contracts, and under no circumstances would they offer more than a three-year deal for a position player or two-year deal for a pitcher—no matter how good that player might be. With other teams showing little to no interest in free agents, players would be forced to crawl back to their own teams at a discounted rate.

Though collusion hadn’t been proven yet, the players’ union had already filed a grievance: everyone knew
something
was up. Moreover, Cook spoke publicly and loudly about Dawson’s ailing knees, a move that figured to further depress the outfielder’s already iffy market value. Understandably, Dawson was livid.

“The hurtful part about it was how Bronfman and McHale let it get to that point,” Dawson told me in a 2013 interview. “I was a product of that farm system, I played 10 years for them in the big leagues. They knew I was committed to the organization, they knew I wanted to retire as an Expo; that it meant a lot to me, that I wasn’t even being mindful of what that might mean to my career and [health] if I continued to play on that turf. But I could see that the writing was on the wall, that there was no sense of loyalty.”

Fed up with his bosses in Montreal and finding no interest from other teams, Dawson and his agent Dick Moss showed up at Cubs spring training in Arizona with a signed blank contract in hand.
He’d take any offer Chicago would give him. Cubs GM Dallas Green offered a one-year, $500,000 deal, plus up to $250,000 in incentives if Dawson ticked off a list of accomplishments that included a highly unlikely National League MVP award. This was a serious lowball offer, even if you were pessimistic about Dawson’s advancing age, and his knees. The Hawk accepted anyway, marking the end of his Expos career. That season, he blasted 49 homers, knocked in 137 runs—and won that MVP.

Raines, too, says he didn’t want to leave. But he also grew angry at the Expos for their negotiating tactics, which included the seemingly self-defeating step of sharing information with other teams. As with Dawson, Raines couldn’t find other suitors willing to negotiate fairly; the biggest offer he got from anyone else was a two-year proposal from the Astros for less than the $1.5 million he’d made in ’86 alone.

“I really didn’t want to leave, but I also wanted to be paid fairly for being an All-Star player,” Raines said. When nothing close to that kind of offer came, Raines relented. “I went back to the Expos and said, ‘Look, we can get this done.’ ”

Thanks to the league-wide collusion, those negotiations happened too late to bring Raines back for Opening Day the next season. (MLB’s free-agency rules stipulated that teams had until early January to work out a deal with a player from the previous season; Raines’ deadline to re-up with the Expos passed, meaning he’d have to wait until May 1.) The best player in the league was barred from participating in spring training, much less playing in games that counted in April. Instead, Raines spent the winter as well as the first month of MLB’s regular season working out at a high school in Sarasota, Florida. He then muddled through a couple of games of rookie ball in a rushed effort to regain his timing. On May 1, just hours after being allowed to negotiate again, Raines signed a new three-year, $5 million deal to return
to the Expos. The next day, Raines took the field for a Saturday matinee at Shea Stadium, coincidentally NBC’s nationally broadcast Game of the Week, with Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola calling the action.

“They weren’t sure if I was going to be ready to play,” Raines recalled. “I was probably as nervous as I’ve ever been in my career. I go to batting practice, and I didn’t hit one ball out of the cage—it was just like when I came up in ’79 and couldn’t hit anything. I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ ”

What came next was, given the circumstances, the greatest performance by an Expos position player, ever.

With the team short of power hitters, Raines was installed in the lineup’s third spot. On the first pitch he saw from David Cone, Raines crushed a triple off the right-field wall. In the third inning he drew a walk, then stole second and scored on a single. In the fifth, Raines smashed a groundball to the right side, a sure base hit if not for a terrific diving play by Mets second baseman Tim Teufel. Then, more hitting: a single to right in the sixth, an infield single and a run scored in the ninth, part of a two-run Expos rally that tied the game at 6–6. In the bottom of the 10
^th
, the first three Montreal hitters reached base against tough Mets lefty Jesse Orosco. That brought Raines to the plate. The first pitch missed for ball one. Here’s Scully and Garagiola on NBC:

Raines’ one-man onslaught launched what would become arguably his best season. Offence was up across the majors that year, but even adjusting for that league-wide surge, Raines’ numbers stood out. In just 139 games, he scored a staggering 123 runs, best in the National League. He stole 50 bases in 55 tries, set a career high with 18 homers, hit .330, and set career highs in on-base percentage (.429) and slugging average (.526). Though Dawson won the MVP award that year thanks to voters’ obsession with homers and RBI, Raines (as well as Tony Gwynn, Eric Davis, Dale Murphy, Jack Clark, and several other players) had a better overall season. And while the Dawson-infused Cubs finished last with their new slugger on board, the Expos won more games that year than in any other season in the ’80s, contending down to the final days of the season.

Raines got pockets of support from some fellow lineup mainstays. Tim Wallach enjoyed his finest season, smacking 26 homers, leading the league with 42 doubles, and knocking in 123 runs. Venezuelan first baseman Andres Galarraga, one of the franchise’s first homegrown stars from Latin America, hit .305 in his breakout year. Right fielder Mitch Webster, another buy-low find by
Cook thanks to a logjam in the Blue Jays outfield and a shrewd trade, batted .281, stole 33 bases, and banged out 53 extra-base hits. Still, Montreal struggled overall, ranking just ninth out of 12 National League teams in park-adjusted offence. The three least productive starters were Hubie Brooks, Mike Fitzgerald, and Herm Winningham, who had something in common: they were the three position players acquired in the Carter trade.

The pitching staff proved to be the team’s saving grace, however, and Cook’s biggest reclamation projects were the catalysts. One of those bargain-basement finds was, pound for pound, the most entertaining player in franchise history.