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 (9 page)

“I remember clearly, seeing Bobby Wine and Gary Sutherland putting cotton in their right ears,” recalled Dave Van Horne. “The wind was so strong and so wicked and so cold and damp that they had cotton in there, because they were coming out of games with earaches, headaches, and colds. There was a lot to battle there.”

When it wasn’t cold, it was often blindingly sunny. For a few weeks every season, games would start right as the sun zapped the first baseman’s face with the brightness of a supernova. At first, the Expos tried to play through it. Then, you’d see Coco Laboy try to throw to first on one hop, since there was no way in hell Bailey would be able to see a ball coming at him on the fly. Not that bouncing did much good either: no stadium’s infield and outfield grass were kept in worse shape than Jarry Park’s. Eventually, everyone decided the best course of action was to delay games until the sun had set low enough to avoid burning the players’ retinas.

For all the problems Jarry Park gave players, it could be rough on fans too. If you sat right behind home plate, you had a terrific view; down the baselines, you had to contort yourself into a pretzel to follow the action. On those frigid days in April and September, the players could at least move around to keep warm; fans could only bundle up and hope for the best. The stadium also sounded like an aluminum factory, as the walkways clanged with every step. The aluminum seats were far worse. On hot days, they
were instruments of torture, soaking up the sun and broiling those parked on them.

“When they stopped the game because of the sun, that would embarrass me,” said Katie Hynes. “There are some people who praise Jarry Park. They’ll say, ‘Oohh, my god, the intimacy, blah blah blah.’ I am one of the few people who don’t romanticize about it. Mack Jones: that’s what I take away from Jarry Park. That’s it.”

Really, Jarry Park was both worthy and unworthy of nostalgia. It was a charming place to watch a game. It was, as famed sportswriter and author Roger Angell described it upon his first visit, “a handsome little field that much resembles a country fairground.” It was also poorly built, a slapdash stadium that was uncomfortable for fans and at times nearly untenable for players—meant to be a stopgap solution that would end up being needed for much longer, thanks to botched efforts by the city.

“There’s a French expression, ‘
belle/laide
,’ ” said Rory Costello, a baseball historian who’s written several Expos-related profiles for SABR’s Baseball BioProject. “It means
beautiful/ugly
. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t perfect, it was kind of funny looking, but it had a lot of charm, and in its own way, it was attractive.”

Playing with a patchwork roster in their first few years, the Expos held modest goals. In their second season, the objective was 70 in ’70, something they achieved with a 73-win season—21 more wins than the year before.

The team’s offence led the way, with Staub affirming his status as the Expos’ one true star, and veterans Bob Bailey, Ron Fairly, and Mack Jones adding ample punch. The pitching rotation, in theory, offered more potential for improvement, given that the top four starters were all 26 or younger. Carl Morton, a 26-year-old right-hander acquired in the bottom half of the expansion draft who’d tossed just a handful of innings the year before, had
a breakthrough season in 1970. A converted outfielder, Morton went 18-11 with a 3.60 ERA in the Expos’ second season, tossing 284 2/3 innings: the 10
^th
-highest total in the majors. For his efforts, Morton aced Cincinnati outfielder Bernie Carbo for National League Rookie of the Year honours. That year, unfortunately, would prove to be Morton’s best in Montreal. After disappointing ’71 and ’72 campaigns, the Expos dealt him to the Braves for a little right-hander named Pat Jarvis.

Following the trade, Jarvis lasted just 39 1/3 more innings in the big leagues himself. Meanwhile, Morton revitalized his career in Atlanta, posting a better-than-average 3.35 ERA from 1973 through 1975 and throwing more innings than future Hall of Famers Tom Seaver, Jim Palmer, or Don Sutton during that span. The Expos showed more patience with Morton’s rotation mate Steve Renko, reaping solid seasons from him in ’73 and ’74, followed by a lousy showing in ’75. The Expos then made another trade, flipping Renko (and Larry Biittner) to Cleveland for first baseman Andre Thornton. Thornton played just 69 games in Montreal, hit .191, got dealt at season’s end, then went on to post big power numbers with the Indians, making two All-Star teams.

Despite flashes of competence from a few players, the Expos wouldn’t be able to aim higher until they started producing top-flight players through their farm system. While they waited for a more permanent home to replace Jarry Park, the club also needed to find and develop talent that could have more enduring value.

To execute that strategy, the Expos needed only to emulate the man who helped mould Montreal’s previous professional baseball team into a powerhouse: Branch Rickey. Starting in 1921, Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals began buying up minor league teams with two goals in mind: reduce the cost of acquiring players, and implement system-wide standards and practices for coaching and instruction, so that the best young players could get the right training
before making it to the majors. Using that combination of quantity (more prospects and minor league teams and instructors to help those prospects develop than anyone else) and quality (innovative approaches to instruction that helped young players hone their skills), Rickey oversaw the development of hordes of Hall of Famers. Stan Musial, Johnny Mize, and Enos Slaughter led the pack of future Hall of Famers who came up through the Cardinals system, before Jackie Robinson and all those other Dodger greats hopped from Montreal to Brooklyn to Cooperstown.

Unfortunately, the Expos didn’t have a deep stable of farm teams and top prospects when they took the field for the first time in 1969. In fact, they didn’t even have their own Triple-A team. During the Expos’ first season, they actually shared their Triple-A club (the Vancouver Mounties) with their American League expansion counterparts, the Seattle Pilots. Meanwhile, they had no Double-A club at all. The Expos simply didn’t have enough players to fill a traditional farm system. Before they could start thinking about developing future stars, they needed to acquire the right infrastructure: the ballparks, the coaches, and the bodies on the field.

To protect the interests of the existing 20 teams, Major League Baseball ruled that the expansion Expos, Padres, Royals, and Pilots would be barred from picking in the first three rounds of the 1968 amateur draft. The original Montreal Screwjob thus saw the Expos—with a skeleton crew of a scouting staff that early into the team’s existence—forced to wait until the 81st overall selection to make their first-ever draft pick. Though late-round choices do sometimes work out, none did this time. Of the 15 players chosen by Montreal in the ’68 draft, not a single one ever played a game in the Show.

It was only with their first pick in the 1969 draft that the Expos landed a player who would actually play in the major leagues. With the 22nd overall selection, Montreal nabbed a six-foot-two
left-hander from Texas’s Deer Park High School, Balor Moore. On the surface, you could find some similarities between Moore and the prototypical Texas high-school phenom, Nolan Ryan: The two played high-school ball just 25 miles away from each other. They served in the Army Reserve together in the early ’70s, and would later play together with the Angels. Like Ryan, Moore cracked the big leagues at age 19, and like Ryan, Moore was a hard thrower with command problems early in his professional career. Legendary scout Red Murff must have liked that type—he signed both pitchers.

Moore’s pro debut was strong. In 21 starts spread across three levels of A-ball, he struck out 140 batters and walked just 52 over 146 innings, posting a sparkling 1.17 ERA. The next season, Moore struggled with his control. In 21 more starts, most of them in Triple-A, he walked a staggering 108 batters in 144 innings. Pitch-count tracking was notoriously unreliable back then, but anecdotal evidence—plus some back-of-the-napkin math—tell us that averaging seven innings a start while walking that many batters is bound to thrust a pitcher into a lot more stressful situations than is good for any 19-year-old.

A few pitchers can and do withstand heavy workloads and go on to long, healthy careers. Nolan Ryan fired 658 2/3 innings over the 1973 and 1974 seasons, striking out an unreal 750 batters and walking 364. Yet Ryan still went on to toss nearly four thousand more innings in his career, breezing into the Hall of Fame. But here’s the thing about pitchers’ ability to carry gigantic workloads: We remember freaks of nature like Ryan. We forget the thousands and thousands of arms shredded by overuse.

Moore actually fared well in the major leagues at first. In his first full season, in 1972, he flashed a slightly-better-than-average 3.47 ERA and struck out 161 batters in 147 2/3 innings. Only one other pitcher in all of baseball wielded a better strikeout rate that
year among pitchers with that many innings—Nolan Ryan. But Moore would be done in by a combination of things.

First, teams at the time believed pitchers could never get enough work in.

“It wasn’t uncommon for a starting pitcher to throw 30 innings in spring training,” Moore recalled. “Then you’ve got your workload for the regular season. Then it’s off to winter ball in Puerto Rico for a 60-game schedule, where you’ll start another 12 to 15 games. Then back to spring training to start all over again. If you were lucky, you’d get three weeks of rest all year.”

Teams also didn’t appreciate pitchers bringing up pain. This was the rub-some-dirt-on-it era, where managers and pitching coaches didn’t exercise enough caution when injuries occurred, and pitchers responded by trying to gut their way through everything. In 1973, Moore suffered an early-season ankle injury. Given insufficient time to heal, Moore’s ailing ankle messed up the timing and mechanics of his delivery, led to poor results, and put undue stress on his arm, leading to chronic pain. Today, Moore would’ve been diagnosed, treated, and sent for Tommy John surgery within a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, the procedure wasn’t invented until 1974.

Moore did eventually get the surgery. Next came a long and painful rehab. For a long time he couldn’t even crack 80 on the radar gun. A two-pitch pitcher with a blazing fastball when healthy, he eventually started throwing more off-speed stuff, hoping to reinvent himself. But Moore pitched poorly for the rest of his career before calling it quits in 1980, his enticing potential wasted.

The man charged with finding better, longer-lasting prospects when the Expos launched was Mel Didier. John McHale had given Didier his first scouting job with the Tigers in 1954. When the time came for the Expos to pick their first scouting director, McHale showed the same loyalty he had with Fanning and
many other former colleagues, tapping Didier for the job. In the years that followed, Didier would become known as one of the most resourceful men in baseball—and one of the most well-travelled. As this book went to press, Didier was 86 years old, still working in the Blue Jays system. “I don’t know of anyone who has been in more baseball parks throughout the world,” former Dodgers general manager Fred Claire told the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
.

Of course, lots of scouts travel. What truly set Didier apart was his desire to take chances, hatching schemes no other teams could’ve imagined. His shrewdest plan sought to exploit the United States’ embargo against Cuba. Canada had no such restrictions, so Didier flew to Havana, via Mexico. There, he gave a talk to a big group of baseball coaches about the Expos’ hopes to build a working agreement with Cuba that would allow the team to develop young Cuban prospects. He travelled around the main island, giving clinics to teenage players. He met with Fidel Castro, who seemed receptive to Didier’s ideas and was even smitten by the red-white-and-blue Expos cap he was presented. As Didier readied to travel back to Canada, he ran into a problem. Though he made his home in Montreal by this point, he was still a U.S. citizen, and thus faced up to 10 years in prison plus a major fine for his visit. Government officials told Didier he wouldn’t be allowed to go back through Mexico or anywhere else for six months. The only way out was a flight to Moscow that stopped in Madrid (where he would disembark)—and the only way to get on that plane was for Castro himself to grant approval. He got his approval, landed in Spain, then flew back to Montreal.

Despite that close call, Didier still had high hopes for an arrangement with Cuba. What if, he asked Castro, the Expos could sign the three best players from the Cuban national team? As Didier recounted in his book,
Podnuh Let Me Tell You a Story,
Castro liked certain elements of Didier’s plan but couldn’t sign off, since El Presidente had spent so much time and effort preaching against the evils of capitalism. The plan would’ve likely failed anyway, considering the reprimand Commissioner Bowie Kuhn levelled at Didier when he learned of the idea. Still, that was Didier’s modus operandi: whatever might make his teams better, he was going to try it.

Didier’s sense of adventure notwithstanding, the Expos still had to find better players somewhere. Unfortunately, the follow-up to the Balor Moore draft was only marginally better. With the third overall pick in 1970, the Expos selected Barry Foote, a high-school catcher from North Carolina. The team’s starting catcher at that point was still John Bateman, another Texan scouted and signed by Red Murff a long eight years earlier. By the summer of 1970, Bateman had turned 30, entering the decline phase of an already unspectacular career. Given his pedigree and what would soon become a screaming need behind the plate, the Expos were going to do everything humanly possible to make Foote into their franchise backstop.

Those efforts failed miserably. After a solid debut season in which he hit .262 with 11 homers and 23 doubles in 125 games, Foote’s power evaporated and his flirtations with the Mendoza Line began. Yet the Expos’ stake in Foote’s future prompted them to cling to their investment. Though they would eventually trade Foote to the Phillies in 1977, it wasn’t before shoving another catcher to the outfield, nearly derailing a Hall of Fame career before it ever got going.