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 (2 page)

Robinson’s stint in Montreal and the locals’ hospitality produced a halo effect for the city, one that lasted for decades. But as Robinson and later Dodger greats graduated to the big club, the Royals’ talent base started to slip, and with it the team’s attendance. By 1960, the Dodgers decided they could make do with two Triple-A teams instead of three. On September 7 of that year, the Royals played their final game, and that was that for high-level professional baseball in Montreal.

This didn’t sit well with Drapeau, or with Snyder. Not long after the last pair of spikes was lugged out of Delorimier Downs, the two men set to work trying to bring baseball back to the city. It was a venture that would span nearly the entire decade.

Snyder’s first major step was a meeting with MLB Commissioner Ford Frick. He and the city were too late to vie for an expansion team in 1962, when the New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s (later renamed the Astros) entered the league. But Snyder wanted to take the league’s temperature anyway, to see if another round of expansion might be coming and if Montreal could be a viable candidate. Frick told Snyder that if Montreal wanted a future expansion franchise, it would need a suitable stadium in which to host that team, something the city most certainly did not then have.

Still, what Snyder never heard in that meeting was “no.” For a city that would pull off several huge-scale projects in the ’60s—often with little more than political will and a few powerful allies at the start—“not no” meant “yes.” That optimism would soon grow, after Frick’s successor, William Eckert, said in 1966 that baseball
would
consider expansion at some point in the next few years. The league’s owners were happy to collect expansion fees from new franchises, but baseball also sought to grow its regional presence, especially with the NFL rapidly gaining in popularity. Expansion was going to happen, and Montreal was going to make its play.

When Major League Baseball’s owners convened in Mexico City in December 1967, Montreal made its official pitch for a team. Snyder touted Montreal as a cosmopolitan city and a growing economic power, with the population base and fan fervour to help a major league ball club flourish. Drapeau followed with his own spiel. One of the league representatives listening to the city’s pitch was John McHale, MLB’s deputy commissioner and someone who would later play an instrumental role in Montreal baseball history.

“I went to the first meeting when [Drapeau] addressed the chief executive and the owners of the NL clubs,” McHale recounted in Alain Usereau’s book,
The Expos in Their Prime: The Short-Lived
Glory of Montreal’s Team, 1977–1984
. “He was a very good salesman, he painted a beautiful picture of Montreal. Walter O’Malley had had teams there for Brooklyn and was impressed by the size of the city and they just came off Expo 67.… It all sounded very good. He also had said there were owners that would put up $10 million to buy the expansion franchise from the league and everybody left the meeting quite happy.”

The history and success of the Royals was a strong point in Montreal’s favour, giving the city a puncher’s chance against the National League’s other expansion candidates—Buffalo, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Milwaukee, San Diego, and Toronto. O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers and the man who’d presided over many of those Royals teams, hadn’t forgotten. In one of those happy and profitable coincidences that blessed Montreal for much of the ’60s, it was O’Malley who chaired the National League’s expansion committee, O’Malley whose voice would speak loudest while the league deliberated on which two teams would join for the 1969 season.

Still, a major league team in Canada—
French
Canada—was something else altogether, at least in the eyes of some observers at the time. When O’Malley stepped to the podium to announce the two newest members of the National League on May 27, 1968, San Diego was considered a lock, with Milwaukee, Dallas, and Buffalo the best bets for number two. San Diego did indeed get its franchise, and would sail from there to Opening Day 1969 more or less without a hitch. But the second choice was a surprise: Montreal. And things would not sail nearly as smoothly. If Expo 67 took hundreds of millions in cost overruns, obliterating the core group of people expected to be in charge, overcoming multiple protests, and building two islands from the muck to get done, getting a Major League Baseball team ready to play actual games in less than a year would take a damn miracle.

Montreal’s first gigantic problem was lining up an ownership group to finance and run the team. One of the most promising candidates was Charles Bronfman, who had gotten his first call from Snyder just a few weeks before the announcement in late May. Bronfman was heir to the Seagram’s distilling fortune, a 36-year-old executive with the money to make a big investment—and, as it would later turn out, the will to go out on his own and make a name for himself in something other than the liquor business. Though the timing was both sudden and late, Snyder’s initial request wasn’t beyond Bronfman’s means. Snyder wanted to build a team of 10 owners, each one kicking in $1 million. Would Bronfman be interested?

“I said, if there’s a covered stadium, I’m in,” Bronfman said in a 2011 interview at his New York office. “So my wife said to me, ‘What was that again?’ I said, ‘Well, Gerry Snyder wants a million-dollar commitment.’ She said, ‘A million dollars and you just say yes?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen anyway.’ And then, I heard really nothing else until one night, my wife and I are in bed, and on CJAD I hear the announcers say, ‘And now we hear the news about baseball in Montreal.’ I looked at her and said, ‘Oh shit, now we’re in the glue.’ ”

A week after the announcement, Snyder finally convened an owners meeting. Instead of 10 partners showing up, however, there were only six. Of the six, Bronfman figured only two had what he called “leadership ability”: himself and entrepreneur Jean-Louis Lévesque. Bronfman spoke first. “I said [to Lévesque], ‘Congratulations, you’re the chairman.’ And he said, ‘Whoa, what do you mean I’m the chairman?’ And I said, ‘You’re the chairman. We need a francophone to be the chairman, you’re the chairman.’ ”

A self-made man, Lévesque had forged his way up through the banking industry, eventually forming the company that would become Lévesque, Beaubien Inc., the largest French
Canadian–owned securities firm in the country. He sat on numerous prestigious boards, had the respect of the Montreal, Quebec, and Canadian business communities, was hailed for his philanthropy, and even made Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame years later for his accomplishments as a thoroughbred owner and breeder. “He was very well known, a very wealthy Montrealer,” said Bronfman. “He was quite a guy, and he was the right choice.” And yes, in a city that then (as now) was both bilingual but nonetheless French-speaking by a large majority, it didn’t hurt to have a surname like Lévesque at the top of the masthead.

But even with Bronfman and Lévesque seemingly on board, things were far from stable. In focusing again on big picture first and key details later, Snyder had thrust the future of baseball of Montreal into peril—with MLB at least partly to blame for not doing more due diligence and failing to realize the shaky nature of the city’s candidacy. The first communication between prospective owners not happening until after the bid had been approved, only six showing up instead of 10, repeatedly missing key organizational deadlines as the summer days ticked by … all of this would be enough to spook even a true believer. Industrialist Robert Irsay, initially expected to buy into the team’s ownership group, backed out, not to be heard from again in professional sports until he bought the Los Angeles Rams in 1972 (then swapping franchises to land the Baltimore Colts, whom he would move to Indianapolis in the middle of the night 12 years later). The bigger blow, however, came from Lévesque. The would-be face of Montreal’s new baseball franchise pulled out of the partnership on July 31, 1968, thanks somewhat to a conflict with local politician Lucien Saulnier (who was heavily involved with the baseball project) but more broadly because of the group’s collective inability to get anything done quickly.

The timing of Lévesque’s departure couldn’t have been worse. The group now had just 15 days to hand over $1,120,000 to the
National League as a deposit, or else a different city would get a big-league franchise for the following spring. Fortunately, even without Lévesque the group had more than enough funds to pay that first installment. The bigger problem, the one that no one could seem to solve, was the same concern Bronfman voiced to Snyder the first time the two men spoke about baseball in Montreal, and the same one Ford Frick had told Snyder to address six years earlier: Where the hell was the team going to play?

The idea of a domed stadium that would protect fans and players from Montreal’s harsh early-spring and early-fall weather was one that had floated through the minds of Snyder and Drapeau for years. As the city progressed in its bid for a team, that thought had intensified; when Montreal gained approval for a team, it blossomed. Drapeau was so confident that the city could pull it off, he wrote a letter to the National League promising that the future Montreal baseball franchise would open the 1971 season in a shiny new covered ballpark—no doubt about it. That letter, along with the tiny window the league now had to get San Diego’s expansion partner (
any
partner) on the field in eight months’ time, were the main reasons the NL stuck with Montreal, while reassuring anyone who asked that all would be well soon.

All was not well. Bronfman and his remaining partners weren’t going to fork over the hold money needed to keep the team alive, much less hire a team president or really do much of anything, until they could get a handle on the stadium situation.

“So I’m going back and forth between Drapeau and Saulnier,” said Bronfman. “Drapeau, who at one point tells me I’m his best friend in the world—which was sort of strange to me: I had never been to his house, he had never been to my house—and Saulnier, whose two favourite words were ‘definitely not.’ So one day, I said to Saulnier, ‘What about the covered stadium?’ He
said, ‘What covered stadium?’ I said, ‘Well, the mayor wrote a letter to the National League, saying that we would have a covered stadium in two years.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s nice. Show me where he’s authorized to write that letter by the city council or the executive committee.’

“I said, ‘What? He would write a letter without any authorization?’ He said, ‘Look. You can write a letter; I can write a letter; the guy who cleans the floor can write a letter. He wrote the letter. He was not authorized.’ I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ ”

With the August 15 deadline looming, the league breathing down Montreal’s neck, and Drapeau’s grand ballpark plan amounting to an apparently empty promise typed into a memo, Bronfman set to work writing a note of his own: his resignation from the partnership. He visited the mayor in person to deliver the news. Instead, he got a lecture himself.

“I was taught by my father never to make a rash decision,” Drapeau told Bronfman, attempting to guilt him into staying.

Bronfman’s decision was hardly rash, however. The mayor and his minions had offered nothing but words for months, and Bronfman saw no way to salvage the entire operation in a matter of days. But Drapeau asked for a little leeway. Give me 24 hours, he pleaded, and maybe something will happen. What the hell, figured Bronfman,
why not
? The next morning, Bronfman and his about-to-be-ex-partners met at his office to say their goodbyes. The phone rang. It was Drapeau. “I would like you to please come down to City Hall,” the mayor said. “Only you. Nobody else.”

Had Drapeau’s Hail Mary been answered? Or would this be just another smokescreen in a summer full of them? Bronfman headed over, if only as a courtesy. What he saw floored him. It was a spectacular colour drawing of a new stadium. Drapeau had called a group of city engineers and architects to his office right after the previous day’s meeting with Bronfman, and told them
to work around the clock until they had something they could present with pride. Still, a drawing alone—no matter how pretty—wasn’t going to solve everything. Drapeau doubled down, agreeing to team up with Bronfman to negotiate with Saulnier, the key city official who stood between the team and a stadium deal.

With Lévesque out of the picture, Bronfman partnered with prominent local businessmen Lorne Webster, Hugh Hallward, Paul and Charlemagne Beaudry, and Sydney Maislin to form the board of investors, with Bronfman serving as chairman and majority owner. With the city’s support, the partners were now reinvigorated and determined to bring baseball back to Montreal. As for Bronfman, this was his chance to do something for, as he said, his “city and province and country.” Getting the stadium assurance clinched his decision. (Bronfman would later learn that Drapeau had ulterior motives, that building a stadium was largely about winning the Olympics, maybe even wooing an NFL team to Montreal. But none of that mattered at that moment.)

“My mother had wanted me to do stuff for the symphony orchestra,” he said, “but I didn’t like symphony orchestras too well at that time. Or with the museums, but I didn’t like museums. All of a sudden, here was an opportunity to do what I’d always wanted to, in an area that I loved.”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to assuage the National League’s fears. While Bronfman and city leaders hashed everything out behind the scenes, rumours began swirling that the league would strip Montreal of its franchise, and send it instead to Buffalo. The reason was simple: Buffalo had a stadium that was ready to go in War Memorial Stadium, and Montreal did not. Even with a long-term stadium plan in place and a league-granted extension ’til 1972 to open it, Montreal still needed a temporary home for the team’s first three years (much longer, in fact, as it would turn out, though no one knew that at the time).

Delorimier Downs, the old home of the Royals, was briefly considered. But the 20,000-seat park lacked the capacity and the modern amenities needed to host major league games. It was located right in the middle of a densely populated residential area, parking was scarce, and a major renovation would be impossible. Also, by then the city had bought the property, with plans to convert the building into a school.