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 (42 page)

Five players from that Harrisburg team—White, Andrews (the starting third baseman who’d replaced Sean Berry), Floyd, Kirk Rueter, and hard-throwing Venezuelan right-hander Ugueth Urbina—played key roles on the ’96 Expos, with White now installed as the everyday centre fielder, Rueter back in the rotation, and Floyd relegated to part-time duty after injury cost him much of the ’95 season. The holdovers from the ’94 team included Moises Alou, Fletcher, and Lansing in the lineup, Martinez and Fassero in the rotation, and Rojas in the bullpen, now in the closer role vacated by Wetteland. Several new additions made the team much better, much faster than you’d have expected after the disastrous ’95 campaign.

Mark Grudzielanek took over at shortstop in ’96, after the Expos traded Wil Cordero to Boston. An 11
^th
-round pick who never projected as a big prospect, Grudzielanek played well,
hitting .306, scoring 99 runs, and making the All-Star Team. On the pitching side, the 22-year-old Urbina split time between the rotation and bullpen, and did a decent job in the process, striking out nearly a batter an inning. The hunch my friends and I once had about Rheal Cormier proved to be right as well—we were just four years too early. The Expos got Cormier from the Red Sox in the Cordero trade, and the Acadian lefty gave them 27 respectable starts.

Three other newcomers quickly became fan favourites as well. The Expos acquired David Segui on June 8, 1995, in a one-for-one trade that sent pitching prospect Reid Cornelius to the Mets. Cornelius never panned out in New York, but Segui did in Montreal, immediately. Already having a strong season for the Mets at the time of the swap, Segui mashed the ball for the Expos, hitting .331 in 58 games.

As lousy as Montreal was in ’95, Segui was a rare bright spot. His 59
^th
game as an Expo came at Shea Stadium. The Maple Ridge Boys were there, on the first edition of what would become an annual Expos road trip tradition. With the first baseman returning to New York to play his old team, we couldn’t resist the chance to act like jerks.

In the top of the first, the Expos put runners on first and second with one out, bringing Segui to the plate to face Jason Isringhausen. Despite his high batting average, Segui was clearly playing over his head, and wasn’t a particularly great hitter for that era, possessing only moderate power at a time when first basemen were launching 35–40 homers a year seemingly at will. We didn’t care. We wanted to let the Mets fans have it.

As they announced Segui’s name on the loudspeaker, the four of us got up, and at the top of our lungs, in the middle of the crowded first-base-side box seats, belted out: “M-V-P! M-V-P!”

The first pitch from Isringhausen was a fastball right down Broadway. Thwack! Segui smoked it, a bomb to right field that cleared the wall with room to spare. Three-run homer. “M-V-P! M-V-P! M-V-P!!!!!” If you could have only seen the looks on the Mets fans’ faces as we chanted Segui all the way around the bases. After the game, a 3–1 Expos win, the four of us spilled out of the stadium. As the trademark post-game Shea Stadium song played
over the loudspeakers, we sang, horribly out of tune: “…  I want to be a part of it! New York, New Yooooork!” Unlike powerhouse teams like the Yankees and Red Sox, the Expos never got much support on the road. So we were only too happy to make asses of ourselves at Shea. Anything for the cause.

Another newcomer, Henry Rodriguez, made a much bigger impression in ’96. After coming over in the Roberto Kelly deal in May 1995, Rodriguez played just a handful of games for the rest of that season.

Then, in ’96, he went nuts. In 145 games, Rodriguez slammed 36 home runs and 42 doubles, and made his first (and only) All-Star Game. Glomming onto Rodriguez’s easy smile and prodigious power, fans began paying tribute to the team’s new left fielder. Every time he cracked a long ball,
les partisans
hurled Oh Henry! bars on the field—another goofy tradition you could only find at the Big O.

Then there was F. P. Santangelo. The Michigan native became a hero in Ottawa, which was great news for fans of the Lynx (the Expos-affiliated Triple-A franchise that launched in 1993), but not so much for Santangelo: if you hang around a Triple-A team long enough to get your number retired, as Santangelo did, that’s not a good sign for your chances in the big leagues. After three years at Triple-A, six in the minors all told, he wondered if he’d ever achieve his dream of playing in the Show.

Santangelo was finally offered a shot in the spring of ’95. With the strike lasting through the winter and into the spring, the owners planned to use replacement players to start the season.

“We went to home plate at the minor league complex in Lantana, Florida,” Santangelo told me in 2012. “Kevin Malone was speaking. All the A-ball teams, Double-A, Triple-A, all the coaches, everyone was there. He said, ‘I’ll make this easy on you guys. I made you do it, blame it on me. If you’ve got a problem
with that, you can leave right now.’ I was the only guy who put a bag over my shoulder and left. When I got to the majors I wanted it to be the happiest time of my life. Getting a hit off a scab truck driver wouldn’t do anything.”

Santangelo got lots of support for his stance from his former minor league manager, Felipe Alou. People noticed, including the
Montreal Gazette
’s writer Jeff Blair.

“People ask me, ‘What is the thing you remember about Felipe, one act or one thing that Felipe Alou did that you remember,’ ” said Blair. “What I’ll always remember is when they put the screws to Santangelo, when they wanted him to be a scab. This is a guy who had been in the minors for all of those years, he’s finally offered a chance, and he doesn’t know what to do. They’re basically telling him, ‘If you don’t come, if you don’t do this, you’re not coming back.’ So Felipe tells him: ‘If they get rid of you, they’ll have to get rid of me too.’ ”

They didn’t get rid of Santangelo—or Felipe. And on August 2, 1995, the 5-foot-10 spark plug of a superutilityman finally got his break, playing in his first major league game. This was partly Alou giving Santangelo a chance after what was now nearly seven seasons in the minors. But Santangelo would prove to be a better player than most expected. In 1996, despite never being handed a starting job, he appeared in 152 games in left field, centre field, and right field … and at second base, third base, and shortstop. He was one of the Expos’ most valuable players, hitting .277/.369/.407 and playing excellent defence. Doing everything he could to reach base, he became a hit-by-pitch machine, getting plunked 48 times between the 1997 and 1998 seasons—HBP numbers not seen since the early ’70s, when Ron Hunt broke the all-time single-season record by getting drilled 50 times. We loved Santangelo, and even gave him a dopey nickname: if garden-variety hustle players got praised for their intangibles, we lauded F. P. for his “Santangibles.”

This collection of players couldn’t match up with their ’94 predecessors, but against all odds, they became contenders. They got off to one of their fastest starts ever, winning 17 of their first 25 games, the last win a 21–9 whitewash of the Rockies at Coors Field that saw Grudzielanek, Segui, Fletcher, and Santangelo combine for 13 hits and 16 RBI. From April 5 through May 18, the Expos stood alone in first place in the NL East. The Braves wouldn’t let that situation last for long, riding a 19–6 month of May to reclaim first place. But Montreal wouldn’t fold, surging to a 47–33 record at the end of June, just three games behind Atlanta.

As July got under way, it was clear that the Expos had enough talent to hang in the race for a while. But they also had major weaknesses. Though Pedro and Fassero were in the midst of excellent seasons, the rest of the rotation was merely decent, with the number-five spot a revolving door of iffy options. The bullpen also lacked depth, with few reliable pitchers after Rojas thanks to post-1994 attrition. Given the excitement this underdog Expos team was starting to generate, and the brutal ending to Montreal’s last playoff push, making some upgrades before the July 31 trade deadline seemed like a no-brainer. With a chance to capture fans’ imagination and take a major step toward erasing the ill will of ’94, new general manager Jim Beattie scoured the league for potential upgrades, then acquired … Mark Leiter, a 33-year-old right-hander with a 5.19 ERA.

You couldn’t blame Beattie. Like every Expos GM in the post-Bronfman era, Beattie had his hands tied by ownership’s steadfast refusal to ever spend real money, or even to take a little risk when all the stars aligned in the team’s favour.

“We knew, if we were close, that we weren’t going to get any real help,” said Fletcher. “No chance.”

Though the Braves pulled away as the season wore on, the Expos still had a shot at the playoffs, thanks to the Wild Card system that
took effect in 1995 (after the intended first Wild Card year, 1994, ended prematurely). Montreal went down to the last weekend of the regular season with a chance to play into the postseason for the first time since 1981.

The attendance for the series opener (against the Braves; it
had
to be the damn Braves) was 33,133, nowhere near a full house, but at least a decent turnout given how badly burned many Expos fans felt after the strike. Atlanta pulled John Smoltz from the game after just five innings, and the Expos immediately jumped on the Braves bullpen, thanks to a two-run homer by Segui in the sixth. Unfortunately, neither Fassero nor Montreal’s bullpen had it that night, either, and the Expos fell 6–4. There was still an outside chance, however: if the Padres could lose their next two games, and Montreal won their next two, it would force a one-game playoff. With the Padres playing an afternoon game on the West Coast, players gathered around in the clubhouse to watch. But it was not to be. By the time the first pitch was thrown at 7:38 that night at the Big O, the outcome had been decided: the Expos were out, again. They wouldn’t have another winning season for the rest of the decade.

What followed the ’96 season was yet another player exodus. Montreal traded Jeff Fassero away for three players who weren’t nearly as good as Jeff Fassero. Cliff Floyd went to Miami in a deal that at least brought back a quality pitcher in Dustin Hermanson, but also proved to be a sell-low, as Floyd blossomed into a star with the Marlins. Meanwhile, Moises Alou and Mel Rojas left via free agency—the Expos couldn’t even keep their manager’s son and nephew.

The vicious cycle had to stop. No matter how productive the farm system might be, the Expos were going to keep coming up short if they had to ditch two or three of their best players every year. Though the league’s revamped revenue-sharing program had
helped kick a few million dollars Montreal’s way, that new money was just enough to keep the ship from sinking. Salaries were rising across baseball, and local revenue streams were a mess, with the team’s attendance continuing to lag near the bottom of the league, and TV and radio not offering much help. If the Expos were going to be saved, there was only way to do it: build a new ballpark.

Felipe Alou told me a story that crystallized the state of Expos baseball, and of Olympic Stadium, in the late ’90s.

“I have a friend from the Dominican Republic who’s a team owner there,” said Alou. “My friend is a very successful man in business and baseball, a very rich man. One year he came to Montreal to talk with me and to see the Expos’ operations. He came with some friends from the Dominican Republic and stayed at the hotel downtown, the Queen Elizabeth. He told me that he went around the city to see if he could buy an Expos hat. He couldn’t find a store downtown that would sell him one. Then, he and his two friends took a taxi to go to Olympic Stadium. When they arrived, the driver knew where Olympic Stadium was, but didn’t know where the entrance was.

“He told me that for the one week he was in town, he never saw one person with an Expos hat. The day he went to see a game the first time, we had 12,000 fans. He told me those 12,000 fans had to be the best fans in the world. When he arrived at the stadium—let’s say we were playing the Cincinnati Reds—he and his friends got out of the taxi and walked around the stadium, and there were no signs anywhere that said, ‘Tonight, the Expos play Cincinnati.’ How could they get even 12,000 fans, he wanted to know, if he couldn’t find a hat, he doesn’t see a store downtown that sells hats, and when he comes to the ballpark you can’t find the door, and there are no signs advertising the game? My friend said, ‘No wonder they don’t have fans here!’ I believe he was right.”

The erosion of the Expos’ fan base in the ’90s is a complicated issue that can’t be boiled down to just one factor. The fiasco of 1994 hurt. Losing star players to other teams, over and over, hurt a lot. The Expos were one of the winningest teams in baseball from 1992 to 1996, even counting the miserable ’95 season, but when they stopped winning largely because of players leaving, that gave fans more reason to stay away. By the later 1990s, the local press became a problem too. Some of the French press took anonymous tips handed to them by disgruntled local consortium members and blew them up into exposés of dysfunction between Claude Brochu and his partners. The English media criticized everything else, including the team turning into a cellar-dweller. A lot of the criticism was justified: the team
was
terrible and the discord inside the ownership group would play a significant role in future events, but the bottom line was that reading about the Expos became a daily exercise in negativity.