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 (32 page)

The only people happier than the players and umpires to go home that night were the broadcasters. “I could have kissed Rick Dempsey,” said Trupiano, who handled play-by-play for all 22 innings.

At least Trup had broadcast partner Bobby Winkles with him. With Vin Scully and Don Drysdale away on other business, Dodgers play-by-play man Ross Porter called the entire 22-inning game by himself, the longest solo broadcast in major league history. “My wife, Lin, who was with me on the trip, sat next to
me in the booth,” Porter recounted 25 years later. “The game was scoreless for 15 innings. Lin asked me if she could get me a drink. I said no because there was no time to get to the restroom and back, if necessary.”

As for the Expos, they never got any closer to first place after that game, somehow ending the season with just a .500 record following a September collapse. But hey, maybe we should have seen this coming, given the bad omen they’d received a few weeks earlier. The day after that glorious July night in which they got the retractable roof they’d been craving for 20 years to finally work, high winds prevented workers from closing it. When heavy rain followed and delayed the game for two hours, fans responded by running to the ticket office to ask for their money back. The retractable roof never worked properly for the rest of the Expos’ existence.

Langston left at the end of the year, adding a cruel epilogue to a crueller season. Most people around the team—the players, the writers, Dombrowski, and especially Bronfman—stand by the trade, given the information available at the time. The one notable critic was Claude Brochu. Sure, the Expos president regretted parting with Randy Johnson, who went on to become a certain Hall of Famer. But to Brochu, the enduring lesson was that the cash-strapped Expos couldn’t afford to take big risks.

“John McHale had said to me, ‘When you get a chance to go for the brass ring, go for it,’ ” Brochu told me in a 2012 interview in Montreal. “I did it then. But after that year, I said, ‘Nah, nah, nah. I’m not doing this again.’ It’s too risky for us.”

That obsession with risk avoidance was about to become
the
story of the Expos. As much as the Expos had come to be known as a powerhouse of scouting and player development, their inability to pay for talent or even keep the players they had would become an equally enduring legacy.

F
or 20 years, Charles Bronfman loved nothing better than to spend an evening at the ballpark. But one night in September 1989, things changed. Bronfman and his wife, Andy, had plans to join minority owner and long-time friend Hugh Hallward and his wife, Martha, at the Big O for a game. By that point, the Expos were all but eliminated from the NL East race, having blown a division lead that lasted for much of the summer. Still, Bronfman had been to countless games with nothing on the line, lived through plenty of disappointing seasons, and still shown up. Not this time. Just as they were about to leave for the ballpark, Charles called Hallward.

“I said, ‘I know we’re supposed to go to the game, but there’s this nice Italian restaurant I’ve been hearing about,’ ” recalled Bronfman. “ ‘Do you want to go there?’ So we went to the restaurant and sat down. I looked Hugh in the eye and said, ‘Hugh, do you know what this means?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I know what it means.’ So we raised a glass, and said, ‘Okay, we’re for sale.’ ”

Bronfman didn’t think his team would fetch a big sale price: this was years before franchise values took off, before massive national TV deals became the norm, and before a low-revenue team like the Expos could count on revenue sharing to make the club more financially viable. He figured he might be able to pull in $50 million; team president and Bronfman confidant Claude Brochu figured maybe $75 million. Bronfman was skeptical—both of the number and the idea that someone in Quebec would pay that price and keep the team in
la belle province
. But Bronfman liked Brochu’s optimism and trusted his judgment. The Expos owner handed Brochu the task of finding a buyer.

Though Bronfman had made up his mind months before, he didn’t actually announce his intention to sell the team until January 1990. American prospective buyers immediately began formulating their plans, and in August, a front-page story in the
Montreal Gazette
dropped a bombshell: a group of Miami investors had offered $135 million to move the Expos to South Florida. That figure threw everyone for a loop. Maybe Bronfman and Brochu had underestimated the growth potential for both the team and the sport? The good news for local fans was that Commissioner Fay Vincent threw his support behind Montreal, saying he didn’t want the team to move. Still, finding a well-heeled local group that would pay up like the group in Miami was another story.

Before asking Brochu to start looking, Bronfman had approached Paul Desmarais, head of Power Corporation of Canada and one of the country’s richest people, about becoming his partner and a minority Expos owner. Desmarais declined. Brochu’s own early attempts to find investors also went nowhere.

“At the beginning, nobody on the private side wanted to touch this thing,” Brochu said. “Baseball had labour problems, bad PR, salaries were out of control, spoiled players, drugs, all this stuff.
They all said, ‘Geez, we don’t want any of this.’ So we needed to find another way to get the ball rolling.”

To help his search, Brochu teamed up with Jacques Ménard, president of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce and head of Burns Fry, a company that specialized in mergers, acquisitions, and company financing. Both men agreed that getting blessings (and money) from various levels of government would be the best way to rope Canadian companies into the cause.

First, Brochu and Ménard approached Montreal mayor Jean Doré to gauge the city’s interest. If the province gets on board, the mayor said, the city would too—so they went to Quebec premier Robert Bourassa. Though the premier wouldn’t authorize direct subsidies, he green-lit the Société de développement industriel (an investment arm of the provincial government) to join the cause. Between the city and the province, Brochu and Ménard had secured a combined $33 million investment. This was a vital step in the process, especially north of the border.

“In the United States, governments play no role in the sale of a professional baseball team,” Brochu wrote in his book,
My Turn at Bat
. “In Canada, particularly in Quebec, the situation is different. In the United States, the wealth is often long-standing and in the hands of individuals and private companies, while in Quebec—with a few exceptions—wealth is recent and institutional.”

With those public-sector funds secure, Brochu and Ménard could circle back to the private sector for the rest. Again, they hit a brick wall. Desmarais told Brochu and Ménard that he knew nothing about baseball and “preferred hockey anyway.” Jacques Francoeur of Unimédia said he was too old to get involved. Pharmacy magnate Jean Coutu found the $5 million buy-in for each investor too high. Pierre Péladeau, head of media conglomerate Quebecor, didn’t see the ball club’s profit potential. Bertin Nadeau, president of grocery store chain Provigo, wanted to “let
others have the opportunity.” Raymond Malenfant, who’d made a fortune in the hotel business, said “no Quebecker had the financial wherewithal to buy the Expos, except Charles Bronfman.”

Even Bronfman’s friend and co-owner Hallward didn’t have much faith. He told his friends in the business community not to get involved since the Canadian dollar was only going to get weaker, making the team’s problem of Canadian-dollar revenue and American-dollar expenditures even worse. He would prove to be right. If anything, he’d undersold the downside. The Canadian dollar didn’t merely drop to 80 cents U.S.: it would plummet to
63 cents
in the early aughts—a freefall that would hurt the Expos’ ability to do business. All the same, it wasn’t what Brochu and Ménard wanted to hear in the middle of their buyer recruitment drive.

By July 1990, Brochu and Ménard still hadn’t reeled in any major private-sector investors, so in order to speed up the process, they announced a September 1 deadline. Then they harangued two existing team sponsors, Labatt and Petro-Canada, into re-upping their sponsorship deals at higher rates (Labatt for five years and $35 million; Petro-Canada for four years and $16 million). Finally, the business community snapped into action. Canadian Pacific was in. So too were Quebec-based Desjardins Group (the largest association of credit unions in North America) and investment firm Nesbitt Burns. Brochu himself bought in: Bronfman had promised him a $500,000 sales commission for brokering the deal, but instead, Brochu asked for and got two $1 million loans from Bronfman (one of those interest-free), enabling him to take a $2 million stake in the team his soon-to-be former boss was selling.

Even with these and other commitments, the tally (combined with government contributions) didn’t add up to the $100 million target price. So the next target became an investor willing to
put up a chunk of cash while keeping the team in Montreal and remaining just a minority partner.

A New York art dealer expressed interest. Brochu and Ménard held several meetings with him. An avid baseball fan, he owned the Triple-A Oklahoma City team and dreamed of one day owning a major league club. Turned out he was a tough and stubborn negotiator, and wasn’t interested in any arrangement other than his assuming controlling interest in the team. The two sides broke off talks, but it would not be the last time the Expos crossed paths with Jeffrey Loria.

Brochu and Ménard circled back to investors in Quebec, and as the list of committed minority partners grew, so too did the hope that this would work. Ultimately they’d be backed by some of the biggest and most respected businesses in Quebec—13 in all.

On November 29, 1990, the deal was done. The Expos had been saved, and would stay in Montreal.

Even so, the actions of a few partners foreshadowed future boardroom rancour. While Brochu and Ménard courted more buyers, two of those already on board—Claude Blanchet of the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Quebec (the largest labour-backed investment fund in Canada) and Guy Langlois of Provigo—had tried to negotiate on the future consortium’s behalf. They met privately with various existing Expos partners, including the Olympic Installations Board, in an effort to trim the Expos’ operating costs and generate more revenue. Blanchet also complained to the media about Bronfman’s total asking price—conveniently ignoring the much larger offer from the Miami group that had been turned down to keep the Expos in Montreal. Both groups would eventually fall into line, ponying up the $5 million investments and withdrawing their complaints. But partners taking team-related negotiations into their own hands—with one of them venting to reporters before a deal was even done—didn’t bode well.

Another red flag came from Raymond Cyr of Bell Canada, a telecommunications and media juggernaut needed more for its clout than its $5 million investment (chump change for an entity that size). Brochu and Ménard had approached Cyr multiple times, only to walk away with nothing to show for it. This time, however, Cyr said yes. Brochu recounted the scene in
My Turn at Bat
:

“Cigar in his mouth, an amused look on his face, [Cyr] joked, ‘Listen. I’m prepared to make a
donation
. Five million. But on one condition: that you never bother me about it again! Understood?
Never
.’ ”

As Brochu told it, everyone in the room burst out laughing. But Cyr’s point lingered in the air like the blanket of smoke wafting from his cigar.
Never again
. No matter what happened to player salaries, no matter what kind of financial challenges the group might face in the coming years, under no circumstances could Brochu come back and ask for more money. Though the other partners didn’t say so as explicitly, they would end up taking the same stance. Brochu had to hope that either revenue streams would soar or that the cost of running a baseball team would remain totally static after November 29, 1990. Because come hell or high water, few of Brochu’s partners were going to chip in one additional penny to bail out the Expos.

Like every Expos squad but one before it, the 1990 team didn’t win anything. That year’s ball club did hold one special distinction, though: Delino DeShields, Marquis Grissom, and Larry Walker all were rookies. They laid the foundation for what would become the best team in franchise history.

A first-round pick out of Delaware’s Seaford High School three years earlier, DeShields raced through the minor leagues, literally and figuratively. Nicknamed “Bop,” he wasn’t known for his pop, slugging just .379 during that time. He didn’t hit for a high average
either, batting just .252. But in two-and-a-half seasons on the farm, he swiped 142 bases and showed an excellent batting eye.

DeShields again turned on the jets in his rookie season. Appearing in 129 games, DeShields stole 42 bases, hitting .289 with a .375 on-base percentage while leading off for most of the year. His major league debut came on Opening Day in St. Louis, and it was a gem: four hits, two runs scored, three double plays turned—and yes, a stolen base. Fans like me loved the guy right away, so when the Expos returned to Montreal for their first homestand, my buddies and I came prepared. Terminally bored in high-school art class, we put our time to good use by making a gigantic sign. It was a simple message for our new favourite second baseman: Delino DeShields—DeRookie of DeYear.

Bop didn’t quite win DeAward, but he did finish second behind Braves outfielder David Justice. He also made a big impression, not only on Expos fans but also on the rest of the league. DeShields credits his minor league coaches and instructors—a competitive advantage that the Expos enjoyed for most of their existence—for his ability to hit the ground running as a 21-year-old rookie.

“Extra groundballs and batting practice, all of that is a given,” DeShields told me in 2012. “What accelerated my growth with the Expos were the guys instructing me. Jerry Manuel was in our organization as a coordinator; not only was he a good teacher, he also connected with kids. I played for [long-time major league superutilityman] Alan Bannister, who also understood what it took to be a big leaguer, and taught me how to get there.”