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 (3 page)

BOOK: 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
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For a while, the Autostade seemed the most likely candidate. Built by five car companies in preparation for Expo 67, the Autostade was an odd duck of a building, oval-shaped, with 19 distinct concrete grandstands spread around the field that could be taken apart and rebuilt to accommodate different events. But even with its flexibility and versatility, it was nearly impossible to imagine it being recast as a fully functional baseball stadium. City planners tried to make it work nonetheless. In phase one, they’d knock out seats in two sections to allow space for foul lines. They would then drastically expand the seating capacity, from about 25,000 after that initial reduction in seats to 37,000 upon completion. The planners believed the renovation could be done in a few months, in time for Opening Day 1969. And they believed it could be done affordably.

But the price grew in a hurry when talk turned to adding a roof in addition to the 12,000-seat expansion—a move some advocates felt was essential given that the Autostade was nearly brand new, and would be needed to host other sports and events after the Expos left. Worse, the Canadian Football League’s Montreal Alouettes held the stadium’s lease and demanded steep payment for the three years that the baseball team intended to stay. Not surprisingly, the city rejected the proposal.

Now scrambling to find
any
kind of half-decent plan, Drapeau ultimately turned his attention to Jarry Park. Located about three miles northeast of the downtown core, the large municipal park
sat in the middle of the Villeray neighbourhood, surrounded by duplexes and triplexes. If the Autostade offered a good-sized facility that was simply ill-suited for baseball in its present state, Jarry Park delivered even less: though the larger park did contain a true baseball diamond, that field wasn’t even big enough or in any way suitable for high-level minor league play, let alone the big leagues. With Montreal’s bid down to its last licks, Drapeau and company would need to convince Major League Baseball that a 3,000-seat amateur ballfield could be converted into a big league–quality stadium—with 10 times the capacity, better lighting, workable clubhouses, concessions, scoreboard, and everything else—in just eight months.

Drapeau was on the case, and the mayor invited National League president Warren Giles for a visit. He talked up the stadium’s location: less than a mile from the Metropolitan Expressway, walking distance from a commuter rail station. Giles appreciated all those features, but really, the league was
looking
for a reason to grant its approval. That late in the process, stripping the franchise from Montreal and shipping it somewhere else—even to a city with a usable stadium—would have been problematic for many reasons. In fact, the league’s supposed make-or-break deadline had largely been intended to turn up the heat on Montreal. Finally, it was Drapeau the charmer who sealed the deal, convincing Giles to accept Jarry Park, and the city, once and for all.

“Drapeau’s late grand slam saves ball club,” read Ted Blackman’s August 9, 1968 column in the
Montreal Gazette
. Bronfman’s reaction was equally to the point: “We’re going to play ball. Yes, we did it.”

One major step remained before the team could take the field, however: it needed a name. “Royals” emerged as an early favourite and a worthy nod to the city’s baseball history, but coincidentally, Kansas City’s expansion team had already adopted the name for the following season. Other proposed names included suggestions
in both English and French. “Voyageurs” had a certain ring to it. One of the leading English-language candidates would presage a pivotal event in franchise history decades later: “Nationals.”

In the end, however, the afterglow of the World’s Fair would become the inspiration for the decision, offering a team name that worked in both English and French. It was a nod to that era, to taking wildly ambitious ideas that lacked details or serious planning—potentially disastrous boondoggles—and turning them into huge wins. The club created from that ambition would see plenty of its own triumphs in the years that followed, and plenty of heartbreak too. But first, it was time to celebrate. The city of big dreams had done it again, and Montreal had a team to call its own.

CHAPTER ONE
Opening Day (1969)

C
harles Bronfman and the Expos’ board of directors hired their first employee on August 14, 1968, naming John McHale as the team’s president and CEO. This came just a few days after Jean Drapeau convinced Warren Giles and the National League to take a leap of faith on Montreal, and on Jarry Park. It also gave the newborn organization exactly eight months to get ready to play. They’d have six months to hire an office staff, hire a manager and coaches, build a scouting department, and get everything set for spring training. Oh, and they’d need actual players to fill an actual roster.

This was an ambitious timeline. No, wait. Not ambitious. Completely insane.

McHale was the man charged with overseeing this seemingly impossible set of tasks. Born and raised in Detroit, McHale signed with the Tigers as a first baseman in 1941. He made his big-league debut two years later, at age 21, but didn’t last long in the majors, appearing in only 64 games thinly spread over five seasons. His
playing days over, he stayed in baseball, eventually seizing the role of Detroit’s director of minor league operations. At 35, he was running the Tigers as general manager. In 1959, he took the same job with the Milwaukee Braves, where he presided over a roster that included Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews just entering their primes, and Warren Spahn still going strong at age 38. With the Braves coming off two straight trips to the World Series, and three of the game’s top players riding high, McHale had landed the second-most attractive job for a baseball operator at the time, trailing only the Yankees.

However, despite winning 83 games or more for eight straight years, the Braves would finish no better than second in that stretch, and wouldn’t see the post-season again for more than a decade. In those days there were no Wild Cards, and no divisions, either: only the two league champions made the playoffs, advancing straight to the World Series. Meanwhile, the Braves developed few impact players to complement Aaron, Matthews, and Spahn, save for up-and-coming catcher Joe Torre. But by the time Torre emerged as a top player, the Braves’ core had aged and the team was going nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except Atlanta, as apathy in Milwaukee drove the club to move after the 1965 season. The Braves had led the National League in attendance in each of their first six seasons in Milwaukee, while also winning two NL pennants and a World Series. To see the team skip town a few years later was a shock, and a big black mark against McHale’s tenure as GM. By 1966, McHale was gone, ousted from the Braves GM job and headed to the MLB offices to serve as an aide to Commissioner William Eckert.

McHale’s baseball legacy had once seemed destined to be written by those three future Hall of Famers in Milwaukee. Instead, he would make his biggest mark as the man presiding over the first major league team outside the United States. He was
also someone who learned from his mistakes. Though McHale would remain heavily involved in final decisions throughout his tenure with the Expos, he’d trust many of the day-to-day decisions on player acquisitions and roster building to someone else—his Chicago-born, Iowa-raised assistant from those Braves days, the man who would become the first general manager in Expos history.

When Jim Fanning grabbed the reins in Montreal, he had less than two months to prepare for one of the most important moments of the team’s first decade: the expansion draft. Each of the existing major league teams could protect 15 players, while the four expansion teams—the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the American League, the San Diego Padres and the Expos in the National League—would then be free to draft those players left unprotected. There are two schools of thought when planning an expansion draft: The first theory holds that fans want to immediately see a competitive and recognizable team, which makes drafting unprotected veterans the way to go, even when they’re a few years past their prime. The problem there is that while your team might be recognizable, there’s no guarantee that it will be competitive (see the pre-1969 Mets). The second school of thought posits that young talent is the way to go, that a few lean years can be worth it if you can poach a bunch of 22-year-olds and hope one or two of them become hidden gems.

The Expos’ strategy was … to show up, for starters. All the scrambling with stadium logistics and the early turmoil within the ownership group had set the franchise back several months, and the Expos were way behind their expansion cousins in every facet of the game. Fortunately, Fanning had served as the Braves’ de facto scouting director and farm director under McHale, helping him hone his eye for talent. McHale himself, despite some of his ill-advised decisions running the Braves, could still offer some useful feedback leading up to the expansion draft. But that was it.
As draft day approached, the Expos still employed a grand total of zero scouts.

“We just had to hire as many scouts as we could,” recalled Fanning in a 2011 phone interview. “That late in the season, it wasn’t easy to find really good scouts who were also available. You end up hiring guys who are about to retire, or maybe they already have. But we got lucky. We got Johnny Moore, a great scout from the Braves. We got Bobby Bragan, who’d managed with the Braves and other places, and had a good eye. Larry Doby, Eddie Lopat, this was a good group. This was the busiest time John and I ever had—we did well to find all of these guys.”

Once they’d hurriedly assembled a staff, McHale, Fanning, and company hashed out how the Expos would approach their first round of player acquisitions. They finally decided to take as many brand-name veterans as possible—but for craftier reasons than you’d think. McHale and Fanning figured people would flock to Jarry Park at first regardless of the names pencilled into the lineup. What the Expos really wanted was to land players with market value. Draft a bunch of players maybe a bit past their prime, shine ’em up, then trade ’em for players who might actually contribute to winning seasons down the road.

The McHale-Fanning strategy of drafting known commodities and flipping them for something better would pay off in a big way a few months later. Before that could happen, though, the Expos would have to handle basic necessities—like getting Jarry Park renovated in time for the team’s first home game.

Montreal is one of the coldest major cities in the Western Hemisphere. On top of that, the winter of 1968–69 was one of the coldest, snowiest, and longest that locals had seen in years. Turning a 3,000-seat amateur park with a couple of grandstands into a fully-equipped, 28,546-seat major league ballpark in eight months would be tough enough under ideal conditions. Ferocious blizzards and -20 degrees Celsius (-4°F) temperatures made the job damn near impossible.
The Associated Press
sent a reporter to assess the situation in mid-February 1969, two months before the first regular-season game was slated for Montreal. The reporter saw construction crews splitting the work between two shifts and toiling from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, yet they still had a long way to go. Work hadn’t yet started on the locker rooms, nor were there tunnels leading to the dugouts. There were non-weather-related setbacks, too, including a bizarre incident in which steel that was supposed to be used to build the stands got sent to the wrong place. That set everything back another three weeks. As
AP
described it: “ ‘We’ll be ready,’ insisted Lou Martin, Expos director of operations, as he looked Thursday over the snow-covered expanse that resembles a disaster area more than a future diamond.”

(Bobby Wine was offered to the Expos as compensation after Larry Jackson decided to retire rather than report to Montreal)

Reporting on March 29, 1969—just 16 days before the scheduled home opener
—AP
bagged another quote from Martin, this one less optimistic. “We must have eight to 10 days of good, warm weather in the next two weeks to allow our new field to dry out. It is extremely hard and could become unplayable if the frost doesn’t get out of it in a hurry.”

Just four days later, Martin offered an even gloomier outlook. “Frustrating, frustrating, frustrating. We had the field in excellent shape and the 10 tons of straw I had on the infield all winter left everything fine.” Fine, that is, until another snowstorm blasted the city. Martin’s crew had just finished clearing all the snow from the newly erected bleachers when another six inches floated down on April 2. Less than two weeks before the Expos’ grand coronation, no one knew if the team would play on a well-manicured field … or a vast, Arctic wasteland.

All of that would be left to Martin, and the crew of four hundred workers he assembled for that final, 12-day mad dash to the finish line. Meanwhile, McHale, Fanning, and the roster
they’d assembled flew to New York for Opening Day, ready to take on the Mets. The man picked to lead the Expos onto the field for the first time was one who could run a tight ship, an old-school manager dismissed by the Phillies a year earlier: Gene Mauch.

BOOK: 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
4.79Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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