Authors: Jonah Keri
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 (8 page)
So he started taking French lessons: 25 half-hour sessions. Learning was slow and painful at first. Beat writers for French-language newspapers made things easier, asking questions in English, then writing their stories in French. Out on the street, it wasn’t so simple.
“I felt like a buffoon,” he said. “Eight-year-old kids would talk to me [in French], and I couldn’t answer.”
It got better as the weeks ticked by. Staub began to feel like he could converse in the city’s predominant language. He was the star attraction for the team’s winter caravan, making stops in Trois-Rivières, Chicoutimi, Rimouski, Val d’Or—all overwhelmingly French-speaking towns with far fewer bilingual residents than Montreal. Jean-Pierre Roy, the Montreal-born TV commentator for French-language Expos broadcasts, travelled with Staub and was expected to do the talking. But Staub found that he could understand what both Roy and the fans were saying. Better still,
thanks to his hard work, Staub was able to prepare two-minute speeches in French, then deliver those speeches to audiences.
As Staub’s confidence in
la langue locale
grew, so too did the number of opportunities to practise. He appeared on the
Pierre Lalonde Show
and answered questions in both French and English from the popular bilingual TV host. He guested on the iconic
Hockey Night in Canada
, answering questions during the first intermission in French, then the second intermission in English. People noticed.
“It was great; I got letters from all over the country,” he said. More than just the recognition, Staub was thrilled with the bonds he established with the city, and the province. “It was one of the best decisions of my entire life. It meant so much to me, to build that rapport between myself and the people of Montreal and Quebec. To this day, it still means a lot to me.”
Jacques Doucet and Claude Raymond took over as the French-language broadcast team for Expos games in 1972. In the days and weeks leading up to their first time on air, Carling O’Keefe—the title sponsor for the Telemedia network’s broadcasts—tried something different. The beer brewer organized a summit consisting of writers and broadcasters from all across Quebec. The goal? To establish a vocabulary of baseball terms
en français
.
“When the old Montreal Royals were on radio and TV, they had pretty good broadcasters in French,” said Doucet. “But a lot of terms were used in English. When I took over the job, I was really keen on using French as much as possible.”
After collecting ideas from that meeting, O’Keefe published a
little manual of baseball terms in French. Doucet and Raymond ran with it from there. They’d discuss ideas for new terms in cabs, on plane rides, sometimes on the air. For awhile, they struggled to describe the act of a pitcher (or catcher) picking a runner off base. So in the middle of a game, they asked their listeners for ideas. A professor from l’Université de Montréal suggested
“prendre quelqu’un à contre-pied”
—catching someone on the wrong foot.
“Jacques and me would say to ourselves, ‘Why say this, when we could say this?’ ” recalled Raymond. “We didn’t make it too complicated. When I was raised it was ‘ball,’ ‘strike,’ ‘home run,’ so we just put out words to say it in French. Sometimes we’d say it in English too, to make people understand that ‘home run’ was ‘
coup de circuit
.’ It was easy.”
Though the goal was to find the right French phrase for everything, that wasn’t always possible—or at least not always practical. Doucet and Raymond racked their brains to find the right way to describe a squeeze play. Finally, they realized that the squeeze is such a lightning-quick play, there isn’t time for some multi-word description. “Squeeze,” they decided, worked just as well in both languages.
It can be tough for broadcasters to properly gauge the impact they’ve had on their viewers and listeners, explained Doucet. You might get complimented at a restaurant here and there, but you’re not listening to yourself on your porch every night, not absorbing the impact of your own words. Really, you don’t have much time to consume any kind of baseball other than the games you’re covering, because you’re on the air from late February through the end of September (or later, in a playoff season) every year. But during the strike year in 1981, Doucet found himself with a hole in his schedule, right in the middle of the summer. So he went to see his nephew play.
“I sat in the stands, and I was so pleasantly surprised to hear fans use all those expressions, all that baseball lingo in French,” he beamed. “French to me is a beautiful language. If I’m doing something in French, I want to do it correctly.”
A lexicon of French baseball terms could fill an entire book. So here’s an abridged version, featuring some of the basics, plus some of the more delightful ones to roll off your tongue.
Arrêt-court:
shortstop
Balle:
ball
Balle cassante:
breaking ball
Balle courbe:
curveball
Balle glissante:
slider
Balle papillon:
knuckleball (“papillon” in French means butterfly—“butterfly ball” has my vote for coolest French baseball term)
Balle rapide:
fastball
But volé:
stolen base
Cercle d’attente:
on-deck circle
Champ centre:
centre field
Champ droit:
right field
Champ gauche:
left field
Changement de vitesse:
changeup
Coup à l’entre-champ:
Texas Leaguer (a bloop hit between the infield and outfield)
Coup de circuit:
home run
Coup sûr:
hit
Deuxième but:
second base
Double:
double
Double jeu:
double play
Fausse balle:
foul ball
Flèche:
line drive
Frappeur désigné:
designated hitter
Gant:
glove
Gėrant:
manager
Manche:
inning
Marbre:
mound
Mauvais lancer:
wild pitch
Piste d’avertissement:
warning track
Premier but:
first base
Prise:
strike
Releveur:
reliever
Receveur:
catcher
Retrait:
out
Retrait sur trois prises:
strikeout
Sauf:
safe
Sauvetage:
save
Série mondiale:
World Series
Simple:
single
Stade:
stadium
Triple:
triple
Troisième but:
third base
Victoire:
win
Vol au sol:
shoestring catch
Voltigeur:
outfielder
For newly minted Expos fans, watching Staub and friends play every night was a drug. Jarry Park was the delivery system.
La piscine de Willie
was just a small part of the ballpark’s charm. With old-fashioned wooden ballparks phased out of the game, Jarry was smaller than every other big-league stadium. It wasn’t just that it seated fewer than 30,000 fans. Its footprint was tiny. There was no upper deck. There was nothing but a low-slung fence circling the exterior of the park from the right-field foul pole all the way to dead centre. On a summer weekend you could watch Rusty Staub and Bob Bailey, then look across the way and see families everywhere, picnics, kids playing soccer—everything you’d expect from a July Sunday afternoon in Montreal.
The park’s cozy confines made for fine acoustics, which came in handy with Claude Mouton on the mic. The team’s first public-address announcer, Mouton showed uncommon flair, delighting fans by introducing players with wildly unorthodox pronunciations. In French, a word starting in
H
usually leaves the
H
silent; so when some native French speakers pronounce names in English, they might occasionally compensate by adding an
H
sound to the beginning of words with no
H
in them. As Ted Blackman explained in a column for the
Montreal Gazette
, Mouton would introduce Pirates outfielder/first baseman Al Oliver as “Hal Holiver.” In another
H
-related hiccup, the man occupying the left-most infield spot would be recognized as the “tird baseman.”
But Mouton saved his very best intro for one of the original Expos, John Boccabella. Marshalling a level of enthusiasm you
might use on a future Hall of Famer, Mouton’s greeting for the light-hitting, part-time catcher remains one of the most indelible memories for any old-time Expos fan. “
Le receveur
, the catcher,
numero neuf
, number nine … JOHHHNNNN BOCK-[extremely long pause]-a-BELLLLLL-a!!!”
Mouton needed the right musical accompaniment to amplify his enthusiastic cadence. One day during the 1968 Christmas holidays, future Expos director of operations Marc Cloutier strolled through Alexis Nihon Plaza. A slight, redheaded man had set up in the middle of the mall, entertaining passing shoppers on his Hammond organ. He made an impression: when the Expos’ initial choice to play at games failed to impress after the first month of the season, Cloutier called the mall organist and asked if he’d be interested in a new gig at Jarry Park. To that point, he’d played mostly private parties and weddings … and never seen a baseball game. But the job sounded fun, and it was steady work, so the organist accepted the offer. Just like that, the legend of Fern Lapierre was born.
Unaccustomed at first to the usual rituals of a stadium organist, Lapierre learned quickly. He played the old standards, leading cries of “Charge!” when the Expos mounted a rally. But there was more. With just a few bars, he would gently mock visiting managers when they strolled to the mound. He persuaded fans to pop out of their seats and dance in the aisles. A hospital cook named Claude Desjardins was so inspired by Lapierre’s notes that he became a legend himself, earning the nickname “The Dancer.” The Expos began marketing Lapierre as part of the attraction, urging fans to show up for games an hour early to hear him play. Other teams took notice, even in the American League. When A’s owner Charlie Finley heard the organist play, he proclaimed Lapierre the most valuable member of the Expos.
Fans got fired up to meet the players too, as the ballpark offered
a level of intimacy that larger and more functional stadiums of that era couldn’t. Originally, the clubhouse sat behind the stands, and it was tiny—so small that for the first few home games of 1969, players could touch the lockers on both sides of the room with outstretched arms. When the Expos moved the clubhouse farther down the line, players had to come out and walk past the fans. The walk took awhile, as players stopped to sign autographs. Whether you believe the Expos happened to find 25 nice guys to populate each of those early teams, or that they simply fielded a roster full of players just happy to be in the big leagues (probably a little of both), this was something you saw far less often at other parks.
For many, those quirky Jarry features—the PA man who revelled in rolling his l’s and r’s, the skilled organist, The Dancer, the intimate setting in which fans were practically on top of the action and conversed often with players—all added up to a great night out.
“Everybody was dancing, everybody was having fun,” said Raymond. “French people who didn’t speak English sat next to English people who didn’t speak French, and everybody had fun. It was like a party. You’d go to Jarry Park on a Friday, catch a doubleheader, listen to Fern Lapierre on the organ, and you were going to have a good time.”
In their first three years of existence, the Expos finished seventh, sixth, and eighth in National League attendance out of 12 teams, respectable results given that they played in the smallest ballpark in the league. As the honeymoon period wore off, though, attendance started to slip, dropping by 9 percent in 1972, seeing a brief uptick in ’73 as the team played better, followed by sharp drops over the next three seasons. Jarry Park may have had its charms, but it was a minor league facility, in good ways and bad.
The elements posed the biggest problem, and for more than just the pitchers. With the coldest climate of any major league city,
games in April, parts of May, and September were bound to be cold no matter what. But where future parks would be built with much higher exterior facades and various studies on wind patterns to guide construction, Jarry Park was tiny and poorly planned in that regard. No one addressed the gap between the left-field bleachers and the seats running down the third-base line. Cold winds whipped through that opening, and the two players who got the worst of it were often the second baseman and the shortstop.