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 (39 page)

A different hero seemed to emerge every night. Larry Walker was unstoppable, hitting .322/.394/.587, ranking among the league leaders in multiple offensive categories, and like Andre Dawson and Ellis Valentine before him, making life hell for opponents with his rocket arm. Marquis Grissom ranked third in the league in stolen bases, and ran down every flyball and line drive hit within a 30-minute Metro ride from his glove. Sean Berry, the starting third baseman who took most of his at-bats in the seven- or eight-hole in ’94, hit .278/.347/.453 and stole 14 bases without getting caught. At age 22, Wil Cordero led all NL shortstops in batting average, slugging average, and home runs. Moises Alou was a force of nature, batting .339/.397/.592 and finishing third in MVP voting.

Even the reserves got into the act. On June 3, sparsely used veteran first baseman Randy Milligan cracked a two-run, pinch-hit
homer in the top of the eighth at Wrigley Field, erasing a 1–0 deficit and carrying Montreal to a 3–1 win. Two days later, utility infielder Freddie Benavides knocked in the go-ahead run in the 13
^th
inning against the Cubs, completing the series sweep. Lenny Webster, the right-handed-hitting catcher acquired to platoon with Fletcher, played brilliantly all year long, hitting a robust .273/.370/.448 with a stack of big hits.

“They had everything,” said Bud Black, who competed against the Expos as a member of the Giants’ pitching staff from 1991 to 1994, then later became a big-league manager. “They had young players who were performing. Speed and power. They were well managed and played hard. The athleticism, the energy that those guys played with was something that I really remember.”

The Expos’ second matchup against the Braves came in late June. Montreal had gone 16–7 for the month leading into the three-game set at home, staying within striking distance of Atlanta at just 2½ games out. Attendance had started modestly in ’94, but began to pick up as the wins multiplied. By the time the Braves arrived, everyone in town had to have a ticket. Nearly 132,000 fans hit the stadium for the those three games, a huge number for any Big O series, but a borderline fire safety violation for a Monday-to-Wednesday set. School was out—always a major factor for an attendance base that skewed young—and everyone understood the magnitude of this series. Even the normally affable Youppi! got into the act, pulling out a giant foam tomahawk and spending most of the series mocking the Braves and their ridiculous tomahawk-chop war cry.

“I remember the headline in
Le Journal de Montréal
before that series: ‘Aux Barricades, les Gens!’—‘To the barricades, everybody!’ ” said Jeff Blair, who along with his
Montreal Gazette
colleagues provided plenty of breathless coverage that week themselves. “The
attitude was, ‘We’re going to storm Olympic Stadium and support the boys.’ I think that is a Montreal thing, to be something of a latch-on sports crowd … unless it’s hockey. Montreal’s an events city, it’s a sexy city, it’s a fast-paced city. It likes the big show. And, in the atmosphere of Olympic Stadium, I always found—maybe it was the slamming of the seats even when it was empty, or the horns, or the chickens on the scoreboard—but I always found the noise per capita so high. The place was loud when no one showed up. When it was full, it was unbelievably loud.”

Getting the Game 1 assignment for the Braves was their 170-pound destroyer of worlds, Greg Maddux. To be the best, the Expos would have to beat the best. But shockingly, they got to Maddux right away, cashing the game’s first run on a Grissom double and a Frazier single. Then, sorcery. Again and again, the Expos threatened to add to their lead, only to have Maddux conjure up a spell to escape the jam. After that first run, loading the bases with two outs yielded nothing. Neither did the two-out double in the second, the leadoff double in the third, or the leadoff single in the fourth.

The crowd of 45,291 was noisy, but also getting increasingly anxious. As the Braves scored in the top of the sixth on the old double-steal-of-home-and-second play to tie the game at 1–1, a nervous murmur sliced through the boisterous atmosphere. Then, when the Expos got Cordero to third to start the bottom of the sixth, only for Maddux to Houdini his way out of that one too, many in attendance were ready to smash their fists into a brick wall.

Going to games in that era, however, I always felt that the Expos’ most memorable rallies happened in the seventh. This isn’t surprising: though front-line starting pitchers had long been expected to go nine innings, or come really close, by 1994 the combination of deeper, more potent lineups, friendlier hitters’
parks, and tighter strike zones forced starters to exert maximum effort on just about every pitch. (Those who extol the virtues of old-time pitchers and believe that pitch-count monitoring is for wimps are often guilty of selection bias, choosing to remember Nolan Ryan and forget the thousands of promising young pitchers who’ve broken down from overuse.) That tougher sledding for starters in the ’90s, combined with a greater awareness of the value of relief pitchers, made the seventh inning a dangerous time for managers, who had to decide whether to pull tiring starters or let them work out of their own jams. Though the Expos didn’t necessarily score a disproportionate number of their runs in the seventh inning (after adjusting for league norms), the Gary Carter double and the Curtis Pride double—two of the decade’s biggest highlights—both happened after the stretch. And on this night against the Braves, the Expos would get another unforgettable seventh-inning moment.

Grissom, who would have a monstrous four-hit game, led off with a single—then stole second,
and
third. Frazier walked, then quickly stole second himself. Two batters later, the bases were loaded with one out. Cordero then lined out to left, scoring Grissom and giving the Expos a 2–1 lead. The resulting ovation was probably one of the five biggest ever for a Big O sacrifice fly. But that wasn’t the inning’s roof-raiser—not by a long shot.

The next man up was Cliff Floyd. The Expos’ first-round pick in the 1991 draft, Floyd was a 6-foot-5, 220-pound specimen, the number-one prospect in the game according to
Baseball America
. He had Ellis Valentine’s tools, without the drama. Because the Expos already had the game’s best young outfield in Moises Alou, Grissom, and Walker, Floyd became the primary first baseman in ’94, despite being a 21-year-old rookie who was far more comfortable playing the outfield. He’d flashed some terrific minor league numbers while playing as one of the youngest players at
every stop, but was now struggling as a near-full-time player in the big leagues—understandable for someone that inexperienced. Coming into that night’s game, Floyd was hitting .277 with just 16 walks and two home runs in 238 plate appearances, making him one of the weakest threats in the Expos’ loaded lineup. Facing Maddux with two outs and two on, with so much riding on the outcome of the game, seemed a terrible mismatch.

Floyd worked the count to 2–2. Then Atlanta catcher Javy Lopez put down the sign for a changeup. This was Maddux’s heartbreaker, indistinguishable from a fastball out of his hand, then dying a quick death right before the batter tries to swing. This particular changeup was especially nasty, dropping all the way to Floyd’s ankles: almost certainly, a big swing and a miss was about to happen.

Instead, Cliff Floyd smashed it to smithereens. Braves right fielder David Justice just turned and watched, the ball taking off like a rocket, landing in the right-field bleachers, and turning 45,291 brains to mush.

“I remember exactly where I was when that happened,” recalled Alex Anthopoulos, a native Montrealer and diehard Expos fan who later went to work in the Expos’ front office, and eventually became GM of the Blue Jays. “In Cape Cod at a friend’s place, trying and trying until we finally found a radio. All of ’94 was just so great. I never had as much passion for any team as I did for that team.”

The players remember that game, and that series—in which the Expos took two out of three—as a turning point for the season.

“Later that night, we heard that Maddux tore up the locker room, just broke everything,” Floyd told me over brunch in 2012, grinning at the memory. “I just thought, ‘Now we have them right where we want them.’ ”

The big wins kept piling up. With a stroke of
Zelig
-like luck, I kept ending up at the ballpark for them. The Carter, Pride, and
Reggie Sanders games were all in Montreal, so it made sense that I’d be there for all of them. Yet somehow I got to see another pivotal Expos moment, 3,000 miles from home.

Immediately after the Braves series, the Expos flew to the West Coast for an 11-game road trip to close out the first half of the season. By the time they reached the final stop of the trip, a four-game series in San Diego, they still stood a game and a half behind Atlanta. Then the annihilation began. In Game 1, the reliable Ken Hill came through again, twirling a five-hit shutout that was over by the top of the first—a three-run homer by Fletcher giving the Expos all they’d need en route to a 7–0 win. Game 2 was an even bigger clobbering: Montreal took a
9–0
lead after just three innings, then rolled to a 14–0 wipeout led by Kirk Rueter, Jeff Shaw, and a balanced attack that saw every starter bang out at least one hit. The Padres briefly made Game 3 interesting, keeping the score tied 1–1 until the sixth. Then Walker cranked a two-run homer, more than enough for Montreal’s underrated number-five starter, Butch Henry, to secure a 5–1 win. The Expos were now tied for first place, with a chance to pass the mighty Braves for the first time.

The series finale came on a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon. Jeff Fassero took the hill against Joey Hamilton, the Padres rookie in the midst of a terrific first season. Through his first nine starts in the big leagues, Hamilton had allowed only 14 earned runs, working out to a 1.94 ERA. Nobody could hit the guy. But the Expos didn’t just hit him. They pulverized him.

When Moises Alou cranked a long home run to left in the first to open the scoring, I cheered silently in my seat, trying not to antagonize the perfectly nice Padres fans all around us. When San Diego countered with two runs in the bottom of the inning, I stewed. When Grissom blooped a double to right to cash Berry and tie the game in the top of the second, I gave a little fist
pump. But later that inning, I wouldn’t be able to hold it in any longer. A Frazier single and a Walker walk loaded the bases for Cordero, who from May 30 to July 9 (the third game of the Padres series) had hit .368/.416/.664, with 10 homers and 15 doubles in 152 at-bats. He’d already homered, doubled, and reached base six times in the series. You’d say this was the last guy Hamilton wanted to face in that spot, but half the lineup was on a multi-week stretch in which they’d put up video game numbers. Hoping to get ahead in the count, Hamilton slung a fastball. Cordero crushed it, a high shot down the left-field line that carried well over the wall. Grand slam.

I lost it—popping out of my seat, belting out a 20-second, un-Canadian “WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”, jumping up and down, and nearly knocking over the old lady next to me. But who could restrain themselves at a time like this, after so many years of frustration? Montreal preserved that lead the rest of the way, with Alou tacking on a second homer in the ninth, clinching an 8–2 win. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Braves fell at home to the Cardinals 6–1. The Expos went into the All-Star break right where we’d dreamed they’d be at the start of the season: all alone atop the National League East.

The time for trepidation was over. Players, fans, media—everyone was convinced this was going to be the Expos’ year, that nobody was going to catch them, not even the Braves.

Darrin Fletcher:
“At the start of games, we just seemed to get a two- or three-run lead in the first three innings all the time. We had Walker-Grissom-Alou, a freight train of hitters coming up in that lineup. Then we had Wetteland and Rojas, who made it almost impossible for teams to come back on us. Five guys made the All-Star Team, and we should have had more. We just flipped it to the on switch all year long.”

Larry Walker:
“Most of my career, you’d go to the park that night, and hope you were going to win it. In ’94, we pretty much knew we were going to win it. Losing wasn’t part of the equation. After the break, we played the Braves and beat ’em again. I remember leaving Atlanta, and we were just laughing. Like, ‘This is our competition?!’ ”

Rondell White:
“After one of those games in Atlanta, we were in the showers, and someone yelled out: ‘The Braves are hamburger, when are we going to eat some steak too?!’ ”

Cliff Floyd:
“We were a one-heartbeat type team. We stood up for one another. Our energy level was high. There was no thinking that we were going to lose. We knew we were going to win every night. We knew no one could beat us.”

Nobody did. Not in the All-Star Game, when Alou belted a game-winning double in the bottom of the 10th to win it for the National League. Not on August 1, when Grissom launched a walk-off, inside-the-park home run to beat the Cardinals. (Google “Marquis Grissom walk-off inside-the-park home run.” I’ll wait.) And not from July 18 through August 11, a 23-game stretch in which the Expos lost a grand total of three times.

Only one thing could derail the second playoff berth in Expos history, and a shot at their first World Series ever.

Money.

By 1994, Major League Baseball’s owners couldn’t agree on how to share it, or even
if
they should share it. Teams with the weakest revenue streams were finding it harder and harder to survive financially. The richest teams had no interest in sharing with the poorest ones—not unless they got a major concession: a salary cap that would restrict players’ earning ability, and put
more of that money into owners’ pockets instead. If players would bear the cost of keeping poorer teams afloat, the richer teams would sign off. If not, the owners would simply unilaterally impose their changes.

On June 14, Richard Ravitch, chief negotiator for the owners, unveiled their proposal. The payroll cap, as expected, was the deal’s biggest feature. But the plan included multiple other features designed to tamp down salaries and transfer more money to owners. Salary arbitration, the system that allowed players to negotiate for higher pay after three seasons of service time (or two-plus seasons, in limited instances), would be eliminated. Players would be allowed to file for free agency after four years, instead of the existing rule requiring six years of service time. But free agency itself would become restricted, with teams claiming the right to match other clubs’ top offers on players who became free agents after five or six years—thus erasing the existing system in which players had free rein to shop their services as they saw fit. As a sop in exchange for these concessions, owners said they’d guarantee that players receive 50 percent of league revenue. One problem: that would be a steep drop from the 58 percent that players were projected to get from the estimated $1.8 billion in MLB revenue for the ’94 season.