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 (24 page)

Rick Monday:
“The next year we go into Montreal, and Steve Yeager and I are going to dinner. We go in, we sit down, and we had ordered a beverage and we’re at a table looking at the menu and this man comes up to us and goes, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ This was the general manager of the place. A nice restaurant. And we said, ‘You’re open, right?’ This was a Sunday night, if I remember correctly. And he goes, ‘We don’t want any fights in here.’ I was like, ‘We’re not going to fight. We just got off a plane, we’re going to have dinner.’ And he goes, ‘Well, I’m not worried about you guys fighting, but there are six guys at this other table over here who want to kick your ass.’ There were other things too. I would get so many phone calls that I’d finally have to put a block on the phone at the hotel. Some of them were humorous, some of them were very dark humour, some of them were no humour.

“A few years go by—I’m retired and now a broadcaster. It was the last year the Expos were going to be in Montreal. My wife joins me on the road trip and we bring my stepdaughter with us: she’s a junior in high school at the time. So we’re spending the afternoon in the old town and taking in the sights and my wife, Barbara Lee, says, ‘Why don’t we take Ashley to the restaurant we went to last year?’ The restaurant has been there, I don’t know, it must be 100 years old. As we were walking to the restaurant, Barbara Lee says, ‘Why don’t you tell Ashley about 1981, and what happened the following year when they asked you to leave a restaurant?’ So I’m telling her the story. We open the door to the restaurant, and I was
saying, ‘You know they don’t like me in this town.’ We start to walk in, and this hostess runs toward us. ‘You can’t come in! You can’t come in!’ I turn to Ashley and say, ‘See?! They really don’t like me here.’ It turned out they had an electrical fire in the kitchen and that’s why we couldn’t come in. But at that moment it was like, ‘See?’ So we had a good laugh about that.

“Talking about all of this … you’re trying to get me shot in Montreal in case I ever return again, eh?”

Warren Cromartie:
“I’m a big fan of Rick Monday, ever since he pulled that flag up. Always liked his style. He was a student of the game. Every now and again I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about that son of a bitch. And every time I see him, I want to punch his fucking lights out.”

O
n July 13, 1982, a capacity crowd of 59,057 fans streamed into Olympic Stadium. Youppi!, the Expos’ giant, orange, unknown genetic material fuzzball of a mascot, came decked out for the occasion, sporting a tuxedo. With the festivities about to begin, public address announcer Richard Morency called out the familiar names, his voice booming through the cavernous stadium.

“
Le voltigeur de gauche
, the left fielder … Tim Raines!”

“
Le voltigeur de centre
, the centre fielder … Andre Dawson!”

“
Le receveur
, the catcher … Gary Carter!”

“
Et le lanceur partant
, the starting pitcher … Steve Rogers!”

This wasn’t just any game for the Expos, though. Sure, Raines, Dawson, Carter, and Rogers were all in the starting lineup. But on this day, they trotted onto the field not just as Montreal Expos, but also as National League All-Stars. As
starting
National League All-Stars. It didn’t quite stack up to the six Yankees who started the 1939 Midsummer Classic at Yankee Stadium. But still, four
players from the same team starting an All-Star Game played in their home stadium—in the post-expansion era? This had only happened one other time since 1969, when Dodgers fans elected four starters to the 1980 All-Star Game in L.A.

The Expos would have their fingerprints all over the game. Raines led off and stole a base. Carter knocked in the final run (in the sixth inning). Coming off the bench, the fifth Expos All-Star, Al Oliver, went 2 for 2 and scored a run. The winning pitcher was Rogers, the first pitcher to start an All-Star Game in his home park since Whitey Ford at Yankee Stadium way back in 1960. The ’82 All-Star Game, a 4–1 NL victory, marked a coronation for the Expos and their hyper-productive farm system, a tribute to their elite status among the National League’s best teams.

“It was a career highlight for me,” said Raines. “It was awesome to have the game in Montreal, to have so many of us make it by getting voted in. That was the thing that really made me feel proud, because the fans had a big part of that; even though we deserved it, the fans had a big part. You probably had a lot of fans all over [America] that didn’t give a crap about the Expos. They wanted to see their players there. But that one year, Canadian fans stepped up and became a really big part of the situation.”

No one at the stadium could know it then, but baseball in Montreal peaked that night at the Big O.

The Expos’ first strategic error had been bringing back their manager for the ’82 season. As John McHale explained when he hired Jim Fanning to replace Dick Williams in the middle of the 1981 pennant race, McHale wanted someone who knew the Expos’ culture and wouldn’t require a big adjustment period. But Fanning had a steep learning curve anyway; he was, after all, a scout and front-office guy who hadn’t worn a uniform in two decades. Furthermore, the excuse about maintaining continuity in the midst of the September stretch run no longer applied
once the season was over. The Expos could have chosen from any available managerial candidate. They could have gone outside the organization and poached an up-and-coming leader stuck as some organization’s third-base coach or Triple-A manager. They could have looked within their own organization and hired someone like Felipe Alou, who’d played a major role in the Expos’ player-development success, and had years of managerial and coaching success on his resumé.

Instead, they chose Gentleman Jim, the universally respected baseball man who was ill-suited to manage a major league team.

“The right move was to thank Jim, acknowledge the great fun everyone had in the playoffs, but also that he’s not a manager,” said Michael Farber. When the Expos announced they were re-upping Fanning, Farber’s first reaction was, “Big mistake. There’s McHale up there at the press conference. He says, ‘Today we’re pleased to announce—if it’s okay with you Mike—we’re bringing back Jim Fanning.’ ”

The mainstream press, however, didn’t much care who was managing the Expos heading into the ’82 season. Montreal was the overwhelming pick to win the NL East that year, regardless.
Sports Illustrated
said the Expos would win. So did
Inside Sports. Baseball Digest
added, “The Expos’ starting lineup may be the strongest in baseball.”
The Sporting News
polled its 12 National League correspondents; 10 of them favoured the Expos to win the East.

Bill James went even further. “Let’s face it, folks,” the statistical guru wrote, “the Expos are without a doubt the best team in baseball today.”

Finally there was Thomas Boswell, the esteemed author and
Washington Post
baseball writer. “The Montreal Expos will win the National League East this season,” Boswell predicted. “They will win it again in 1983. Some things are simply ordained. Just
as the Yankees and the Royals each made the playoffs five times from ’76 through ’81, so the Expos—who are by far the most misfortune-proof team in baseball—have already begun such a reign. Nothing stands between Montreal and greatness.”

There wasn’t much greatness to be found at the start of the year, though, as the Expos went just 12–12 through the first four weeks of the season. Meanwhile, another problem cropped up in the clubhouse as a rift emerged between Fanning and two of the team’s veterans, Rodney Scott and Bill Lee. On May 7 in Montreal, the Expos lost their third straight game. A few days earlier, they’d sent reserve second baseman Wallace Johnson down to the minors. That position was now in total disarray: Johnson had proved unable to handle the defensive rigours, veteran Frank Taveras was poorly suited for anything but bench duties, and Scott, the starter for the previous three seasons, had been relegated to part-time work. A reporter asked Fanning if he might now move Tim Raines back to second base—the position he played for much of his minor league career—with young Terry Francona taking over the left-field job.

“We haven’t got a timetable for it,” Fanning said, “but it’s fair to say that’s part of the plan.” The very next day, the Expos released Scott; a few hours later, Raines started at second base, Francona in left.

There were plenty of good reasons for booting Scott. A poor hitter even at his best, Scott’s speed had made him a huge favourite of Dick Williams—but he’d gotten progressively worse in each of his seasons with the Expos and finally earned his release after hitting just .200 in 1982 (albeit in just 25 at-bats). He was also one of the last remaining members of the hard-partying clique that had once included Ron LeFlore (gone after the 1980 season), Ellis Valentine (traded in 1981 for Jeff Reardon), and Rowland Office (released three days before Scott). After years of
ignoring and tolerating all manner of ill behaviour, McHale finally cut Scott loose.

This did not sit well with Lee, himself a known carouser and recreational drugs enthusiast. Thirty-five years old, nearing the end of his career, frustrated with Fanning from day one, and now enraged that his friend Scott had been turfed, Lee finally lost it. Wielding a bat and shouting obscenities, Lee lunged at Fanning, only to be stopped at the last second by Andre Dawson and Warren Cromartie. What happened next would be considered beyond the pale … for anyone except the Spaceman.

“I was in my uniform, the game was about to start, and I ran out of the ballpark,” recalled Lee. “I was screaming and I ran into Terry Mosher. We were out in the vestibule outside of Olympic Stadium. He says, ‘Come with me.’ He grabs me and takes me down to Brasserie 77 on Hochelaga Street. The people in that bar still remember the day I was there in my uniform. I had four beers and I shot pool, and he calmed me down and the game was on and we were in a bad position late in the game when they needed a reliever. So I went back to the ballpark, went into the bullpen, and started getting loose.”

Shockingly, Fanning did not use Lee in that night’s game, a 10–8 Expos loss.

The Spaceman had pitched well in two of his three full seasons in Montreal, and he’d become a favourite with fans and writers—one of the franchise’s all-time characters. But McHale had run out of patience with the eccentric left-hander. On May 9, Lee became the third Expo in five days to get released, with McHale tacking on a $5,000 fine on Lee’s way out the door. McHale and Fanning weren’t the only ones critical of Lee’s circus act.

“Bill Lee and me are friends,” said Woodie Fryman, quoted in
The Expos Inside Out
. “But we’re both question marks at this stage of our careers. You don’t do these things when you’re a question mark.”

Scott nabbed just 26 more at-bats in the big leagues, and Lee never pitched in the majors again. In purging LeFlore, Valentine, Office, Scott, and Lee over a span of a year and a half, McHale had also unloaded a group whose off-field offences ranged from smoking pot in uniform before games to, in some cases, all-night cocaine benders.

The rampant cocaine use, obviously, presented the much bigger problem. Expos brass didn’t just worry that the biggest users’ performances would suffer. The farther-reaching concern was that young, impressionable players on the roster would start developing coke habits of their own. Cocaine was becoming an epidemic across the major leagues, culminating in a series of high-profile drug trials three years later. Valentine’s career had already been ruined by coke and other vices. The Expos could ill afford to have another potential star throw away his career.

Then the Tim Raines bombshell dropped.

In December 1982, Raines revealed publicly for the first time that he’d been using cocaine. In a revealing interview with Michael Farber for the
Montreal Gazette
, Raines admitted he’d spent $40,000 on coke in the first nine months of that year alone. “He snorted cocaine in his car before games at the Olympic Stadium parking lot,” Farber wrote. “He snorted it after games in friends’ apartments. He snorted it in washrooms on team airplanes. On a few occasions, he snorted cocaine in the Expos’ clubhouse between innings.”

Raines’ $1,000-a-week habit hurt his numbers, which fell to .277/.353/.369 in 1982, down sharply from his .304/.391/.438 rookie campaign. He hit fewer home runs, struck out more often, and walked less often than he would in any other season as an everyday player.

“I could feel the effects,” Raines told Farber. “I wasn’t seeing good, and I wasn’t eating well. I was juggling the ball in the outfield. I was misreading pitches.”

Since no one knew about Raines’ habit at first, the Expos chalked up his lackluster performance to a prolonged slump, or maybe a sophomore jinx. But these weren’t just the usual struggles of a slumping player. One time, Fanning gave Raines the night off. When the skipper wanted his speedster to pinch-run late in the game, a teammate had to wake Raines up; he’d crashed hard from a post-cocaine letdown. Raines still stole 78 bases in ’82, with an 83 percent success rate, but he was thrown out more often in 1982 than in any of his other first seven seasons as a starter. Several times, Raines got thrown out at second, then took several seconds to realize what had happened and that he needed to return to the dugout.

Most infamously, Raines slid headfirst every time he tried to steal. That in itself wasn’t so conspicuous—plenty of other players did the same. But not many did so because they had a vial of coke in their back pocket. Thanks to his 5-foot-8, muscular frame, Raines had earned the nickname “Rock.” After Farber’s revelatory column, that nickname would take on a new, more damning meaning.

The good news was that Raines went into rehab, got clean, and kicked his destructive habit. Like Valentine before him, Raines had broken into the majors early, thrust into the starting lineup by his early 20s. Also like Valentine, Raines felt overwhelmed by the pressures of being a big leaguer and wished for a strong mentor. Unlike Valentine, Raines eventually found one.