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 (6 page)

Now leading by just one run, Mauch called on Carroll Sembera, a rail-thin Texan who hadn’t pitched a single major league game the year before and was so lightly regarded that he went unclaimed in the expansion draft and was instead taken in December’s Rule 5 draft—an annual clearinghouse for organizational rejects, or at least players who don’t fit. Sembera quickly poured gas on the fire, walking Amos Otis and giving up a single to Tommie Agee, putting the potential tying and winning runs on base.

That brought rookie right fielder Rod Gaspar to the plate. Looking back decades later, it seems crazy that the Mets won the 1969 World Series. Gaspar was one of several Opening Day starters who had little business starting for a championship team; he would hit just .228 with one home run that year. In the battle of resistible force versus moveable object, Sembera prevailed, striking out Gaspar to end the game. The Expos were undefeated.

For baseball-loving Montrealers, this was a big deal.

“I was in elementary school in Chambly, I’m 12 years old,” said Expos superfan Katie Hynes, cradling a pint while recounting one of her favourite baseball memories. “My principal—and every time I see him … he came to my dad’s funeral, and we still talk about this every time we see each other—he let us listen to the game on the school intercom!

“In those days, we wore funky hats, it was the ’60s. I remember, he made us stand up at our lockers. We were lining up at our lockers and he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Expos have just won their first game.’ And reflex action—every kid picked up their hat and threw it in the air. And it wasn’t rehearsed. It was a natural reaction. We were hugging each other. I could cry, you know?”

After that first road trip, the team flew to Montreal for another major event: the first home game for the team, the city, and the country.

Still, there was a problem. Teams of workers had toiled around the clock to clear away the early-spring snow while others laboured to coax the grass and dirt into playable shape. But Martin and his crew had run out of time to bolt thousands of permanent seats into place. So the night before the big game, everyone dropped what they were doing and rushed to set up folding chairs—six thousand of them, all told. Sensing the urgency of the deadline, even Fanning joined the effort. Let’s see Connie Mack do that.

The birth of the Expos in ’69 and that long-awaited home opener delivered a jolt of electricity to the city’s baseball-hungry fans. It also gave many people—the players, McHale, Fanning, Mauch—a golden opportunity to prove themselves, or in some cases re-prove themselves. Beyond the men swinging bats, throwing balls, and making decisions, it was a heady time for others too. Few more so than Dave Van Horne.

Born and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania, Van Horne established himself at an early age as a broadcaster, calling baseball, basketball, and football games right out of college in Virginia. When the Richmond Braves Triple-A franchise debuted in 1966, Van Horne was the one calling the games, a job he would hold for three years. At the end of the ’68 season, with the Braves done for the year and the four new MLB expansion clubs announced, Van Horne sent out two applications, one to Kansas City and one to Montreal. He had a slight connection with McHale, who’d been ousted as Atlanta’s GM midway through the 1966 season, shortly after Van Horne started doing games for Richmond. Still, as the calendar ticked over to 1969, Van Horne hadn’t heard anything, nor did the Expos have any idea who’d be broadcasting their games. With three hundred applications sitting in a drawer and only a few days to go until the start of spring training, McHale still hadn’t hired an English-language broadcast team.

Still, it wouldn’t be the 1969 Expos without a story of slapdash operations and last-minute stress. It was Lou Martin who would again step up to fix a potentially dicey situation. The man in charge of whipping Jarry Park into shape had McHale’s ear on other matters too. Martin had served as the Richmond Braves’ GM while McHale ran the big club. Hire the Van Horne kid, Martin advised. That was that. At 27 years old, Van Horne landed a gig calling baseball games for a brand-new team, in a city he’d never seen.

Van Horne would have just five days to develop a rapport with broadcast partner Russ Taylor before heading to New York for Opening Day. The broadcast went relatively smoothly anyway. Problem was, in the rush to simply produce a professional broadcast, no one had stopped to reflect on its historical nature … so no one bothered to tape the broadcast back home at the radio station.

When Taylor and Van Horne flew up to Montreal, they were better prepared. They were also blown away by the spectacle that unfolded.

“They had an Opening Day parade,” Van Horne recounted over coffee in Miami in January 2012. “You had a couple hundred thousand people out to see a team they’ve never seen and see players they’ve never heard of except for one or two guys. The park was jam-packed—well, ‘jam-packed’ meaning they got 28,000-plus people for the opener, as full as it could get. Lou always had the knack of bumping that up to 30,000 or 31,000, which may have counted the people standing on the snow bank beyond the right-field fence to watch the games.

“What I remember is based mostly on what Russ told me. Because I saw limos pulling up and people getting out dressed to the nines. I said, ‘Russ, this is like an event that’s caught on here. All the high rollers seem to be coming out.’ And he said, it’s all of Charles’ friends. The community would not dare turn its back on this enterprise that Charles is involved in, and he said he is greatly involved in the community here in Montreal. He never said the Jewish community. Everything that Charles was involved in in Montreal, from corporations to hospitals to museums, they all came out because it was Charles. Not that there weren’t some baseball fans amongst them. There were, of course. But most of them came because this was Charles’ baby.”

The pomp and circumstance at the parade mesmerized the players too.

“You thought you were at an inauguration,” McGinn told me in 2013. “There was confetti coming down, the parade went through the heart of downtown. We were all dressed in uniform. The whole thing felt like we’d just won the World Series. Most of the guys still talk about it.”

The first game at Jarry Park was an even bigger party.

“Drapeau was on a roll,” said legendary quipster Tim Burke, sitting on a bar patio on Bishop Street in downtown Montreal, recalling his years covering the Expos for the
Montreal Star
(and later the
Montreal Gazette
). “The day before was a blizzard. He must have waved a wand or something, it was such a glorious day. Everything kept building up after that first game in New York. They won, and you couldn’t believe how it all happened, McGinn hitting that famous home run, and then just hanging on for dear life. It was the most exciting thing you could imagine. Then they come home for that first game. It was such a scene, it felt like everybody all across North America was watching.”

The players themselves came together from all across North America. Simply being in Montreal was a new experience for everyone on the roster—at least until the team acquired its first Quebec-born player four months later.

“We had no idea about Montreal,” said Stoneman. “So somebody said, ‘Well, use the subway. You can get around real easy.’ I remember going out to the park with some of the other guys. We were all in what was then the Windsor Hotel down on Peel between Dorchester and Sainte-Catherine. It was a nice old hotel and you could get on the subway not far from there and we kind of figured out how to get out near the stadium. We made a mistake on our first trip out, got off at the wrong station. But it was a heck of a nice day, so we had a nice walk.

“The one thing I remember about the park was there was still a snow bank behind the right-field wall. Right between the pool and the outside fence was a big pile of snow. It was April, so the ground was thawing out. So, the field was really soft. I mean really soft. It was a bit rough. It was the first major league game played on that field and it was rougher than other major league parks. The ground was so soft that behind home plate, the catcher was John Bateman—I forget who the umpire was that day—but both of them ended up standing about two or three inches lower at the end of the game than they were at the start of the game, just sinking into the ground as the game went on.”

Quicksand field aside, the home opener was another wild game. In the bottom of the first, the Expos put two men on for Jones. Cardinals right-hander Nelson Briles delivered, and Jones launched a three-run homer. Funny thing about first impressions: Montreal’s fans were ready to embrace the home nine just for showing up to play—but when your first at-bat in front of the hometown faithful results in a three-run bomb? Well, that’s how legends are born. Fans would christen the left-field stands as “Jonesville,” and for the two-plus seasons that he remained an Expo, Mack Jones was simply the Mayor of Jonesville.

Montreal piled up three more runs, taking a 6–0 lead into the fourth. As they would do all year long, the Expos again reminded everyone how tough it is to collect enough top-quality starting pitching. The club’s rotation would finish with the highest ERA (4.34) and highest walk rate in the National League, and in the home opener foisted lefty Larry Jaster upon the unsuspecting crowd. It wasn’t pretty. After holding St. Louis scoreless for three innings, Jaster got creamed for seven runs in the fourth, the big blows coming on a Joe Torre home run and a grand slam by banjo-hitting Dal Maxvill, one of just six homers he’d hit in his 14-year career. Save some blame for the Expos’ defence, though: in one
of the worst defensive displays in major league history, Montreal committed
five
errors in that disastrous fourth inning.

The Expos tied the score in the bottom of the fourth, scoring a single run on a wild pitch but failing to tack on more, despite loading the bases with nobody out. Meanwhile, the Cardinals suddenly couldn’t buy a run. Taking over in the fourth, McGinn went on to allow just three hits and one walk over 5 1/3 innings, without giving up a single score.

Montreal still needed a hitting hero, though. With two outs and Laboy on second in the bottom of the seventh, the pitcher’s spot was due up. McGinn had already thrown 3 1/3 innings and done more than anyone could’ve reasonably hoped. Mauch the constant string-puller could now pinch-hit, then set up his bullpen to get the matchups he wanted. That is, if he had some actual viable options. Mauch’s bullpen consisted of the leftovers of leftovers, the pitchers not good enough to make a leaky rotation. There were no ace pinch-hitters waiting eagerly on the bench. Meanwhile, his southpaw reliever was mowing down every Cardinal in sight. The last time the Expos’ skipper faced a similar decision, he left McGinn in and got rewarded with the team’s first home run. What the hell, might as well roll the dice again.

Waslewski—the St. Louis pitcher who would get traded for Mudcat Grant a few weeks later—tried to sneak a fastball by his mound counterpart. Instead, McGinn slapped a single to left, scoring Laboy and providing what would turn out to be the winning run in an 8–7 victory. In a season in which they would win just 52 times, the Expos still managed to win the two most important contests of the year: their first game, and their first home game.

“You just couldn’t believe it—they won the friggin’ game,” said Burke. “The happening was so total that when we were driving home, out of the clear blue sky, we see all these kids with gloves
on. Driving from Jean-Talon all the way out to N.D.G., every kid was out playing baseball, throwing the ball around. It seemed like every single kid had an Expos hat on.”

Just eight games later, Expos fans would celebrate again, this time for the first real baseball milestone in the team’s existence.

The ball club flew to Philadelphia to get a first look at the Phillies. Starting for Montreal in the series opener was Stoneman, a 31
^st
-round pick in 1966 who had been a long shot just to make it to the Show. He was tiny for a pitcher of his era (or most other eras) at just five-foot-ten, 170 pounds. But his assortment of breaking pitches served him well in pro ball. He cracked the big leagues just a year after being drafted, debuting in July of ’67. Stoneman became a key reliever with a Cubs team that held a share of first place into late July. Things didn’t go nearly as well in ’68. He posted a 5.52 ERA, pitching himself out of favour in Chicago, and especially with legendary manager Leo Durocher. Stoneman had an excellent reason for his struggles, even if the Cubs didn’t care one way or another.