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 (33 page)

Now a minor league manager himself, DeShields took those early coaching lessons to heart. “It’s about getting between kids’ ears,” he said. “That’s how you help good players become elite.”

One of the other kids, and DeShields’ running mate in both the minors and then the big leagues, was Marquis Grissom.

Grissom wasn’t quite as prolific a thief in the minors as DeShields, swiping 64 bags in 206 games. But he wielded a broader set of skills. Like DeShields, Grissom leveraged his quickness and instincts into excellent defence, in his case as a centre fielder. He also hit just a tick below .300 in the minors and cranked 70 extra-base hits in those 206 games. He was older than Bop, having come out of Florida A&M like Andre Dawson, but was still considered a top young talent, having been named the 17
^th
-best prospect by
Baseball America
before the start of the 1990 season.

Their teammate Larry Walker was cut from a different cloth. Walker grew up in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. He had raw talent as a baseball player, but he didn’t project as someone who would make the big leagues—much less become a star. As a kid, Walker hadn’t lived and died with baseball (instead playing more hockey), and he hadn’t mastered the subtleties of the game because he hadn’t played enough to do so. His motivation for signing with the Expos out of high school was pragmatic … and kind of hilarious.

“They offered me $1,500 U.S.—almost $2,000 Canadian! So that was pretty cool,” Walker said in a 2013 interview.

Initially, Walker didn’t understand the significance of signing, or the loneliness that would kick in when he left home for the first time to play in West Palm Beach, Florida. What he did understand was that his game needed lots of work. “At the beginning I sucked. The thought of actually playing in Montreal wasn’t there. I had to learn the game. I played more fast-pitch [softball] than I did baseball for a little while there [as a teenager]. Americans grow up with baseball in high school, but I was slower to pick it up. I had a long way to go. Base running, fielding—that for me was fairly simple. My approach to hitting was, ‘Guy throws the ball, I try to hit it. If I hit it, I run.’ But the hard part was hitting something with a wrinkle in it. I had never seen a forkball before. Sliders and curves killed me.”

Fortunately, Walker was supernaturally talented. DeShields remembered Walker dominating effortlessly at all kinds of games: golf, ping-pong, you name it. “Freaky hand-eye coordination,” said Bop.

Walker was also one of the most fun-loving Expos of all time. The man they called “Booger” never took baseball—or himself—too seriously. He used a wide array of jokester gear: red clown shoes in his locker, plus diapers and a ballerina outfit that he’d make teammates wear (even when it wasn’t officially hazing time). He was also a serial nap-taker. Any sliver of free time before the game, he jumped at the chance for some shut-eye, curling up on the floor in the corner of the clubhouse. He’d need someone to wake him for batting practice, or even the start of the game. When he woke, he was good to go—the type of hitter who could literally roll out of bed (or off the floor) and go 3 for 4.

Also, nothing could gross the guy out, whether he was belching out the entire alphabet, or performing various disgusting parlour tricks.

“I remember when we used to go to old Busch Stadium in St. Louis,” said Darrin Fletcher, who joined the Expos after a trade with Philadelphia in December 1991. “There used to be a hot tub in the visitors’ locker room. Larry would get in after the game and coax a few players into a bet: how long could he hold his breath under water. Younger players would say 45 seconds, tops. The veterans, we knew, so we’d put money on it. It’d be three, four minutes every time. Larry would duck his head under the water, then put his mouth on one of the jets that had an air pump, and breathe the air. Thinking of all the players who’d been in that hot tub after games, and I’m guessing how rarely they cleaned it … there’s no way I would try it, let’s put it that way. Didn’t bother him one bit.”

My idiot buddies and I loved Walker from the start. In another art class project, we made a giant sign honouring Walker’s
hometown of Maple Ridge (and sending up the old country band the Oak Ridge Boys), declaring ourselves the Maple Ridge Boys. Though sneaking over to better seats remained our go- to move, we found ourselves staying put in the right-field bleachers more and more often, flashing our sign. A man of the people, Walker turned to the crowd and acknowledged us on multiple occasions. One night we weaseled our way down to the front row of the bleachers, sign in hand. During a pitching change, rather than going to talk with his fellow outfielders, Walker chatted with us for the next couple of minutes while the new pitcher warmed up. Small talk mostly: about the season, his fellow Maple Ridge native
(and Boston Bruins sniper/Montreal Canadiens rival) Cam Neely, little stuff like that. If the pitching change had lasted long enough, he probably would have climbed into the seats and thrown down some poutine with us.

DeShields, Grissom, and Walker gave the team a boost in 1990, but they were by no means the whole story. On the mound, Dennis Martinez provided a bigger spark, firing 226 innings with a sparkling 2.95 ERA. In fact, the pitching staff as a whole was sharp that year. This was a big surprise, given the off-season losses of Mark Langston, Bryn Smith, and Pascual Perez to free agency. But strong contributions from reclamation project Oil Can Boyd (2.93 ERA), 1989 pickup Zane Smith (3.23 ERA), and an effective relief corps helped the Expos lead the National League in earned run average. One of those relievers won a special place in our hearts.

Every year, teams leave a certain number of players off their 40-man roster, making them eligible for other teams. The Rule 5 draft is the clearinghouse—the bastard stepchild of baseball drafts—where those unwanted players get chosen. It takes place every year at the end of the winter meetings, an afterthought to cap all the big trades and free-agent signings that went down over the previous four days. If a team is lucky, it might get a decent spare part out of the draft. More often, the acquired players never contribute, in many cases getting returned to their original teams for half their original measly cost.

But in very rare cases, a superior player emerges. The best Rule 5 pickup of all time is legendary Pirates slugger, Hall of Famer, and one-time Montreal Royal Roberto Clemente. Two-time Cy Young winner Johan Santana also emerged from Rule 5, as did future quality players like Darrell Evans, Bobby Bonilla, Jose Bautista, and Shane Victorino.

Then there was Bill Sampen. A fringe right-hander in the Pirates system, Sampen was acquired by the Expos as a Rule 5er
after the 1989 season, a long-shot hedge against that winter’s multiple pitching losses. Sampen made the team out of spring training in 1990, slotting in as a long man out of the bullpen. What followed was a surprisingly effective campaign as Sampen soaked up 90 1/3 innings while posting a 2.99 ERA (strip out the four emergency spot starts he made that year and it drops to 2.59). His defining trait that year, though, was an uncanny knack for vulturing wins. Sampen won 12 games that year, an uncommonly high total for a reliever—and just
one
of the 12 came during those four spot starts. He was a nice little find for a Rule 5 pick.

And we were obsessed with him. Call it the work of hyperactive teenage minds, or just something to do during a long summer in the city. But no player on the 1990 Expos captured our imagination like Bill Sampen did. In fact, we were so smitten that we came up with a song, to the tune of “Mr. Sandman,” that we sang every time a starting pitcher got in trouble that season.

The 1990 season ended up going better than expected, with the Expos winning 85 games. But they still drew fewer than 17,000 fans a game, the second-worst attendance in 14 seasons at the Big O. A run of four straight decent-to-pretty-good seasons wasn’t cutting it in Montreal.

Attendance woes be damned, all eyes were on the future. In August, with his team out of the race, Dombrowski pulled a kind of reverse Langston, flipping Zane Smith to the first-place Pirates for three prospects. While things worked out for the Pirates, as Smith’s new club made the postseason (unlike Langston’s Expos), Montreal got the best return of the two trades—headed by Moises Alou.

The son of Felipe Alou, Moises was wiry-strong like his dad. He had an unusual pigeon-toed stance without the big weight shift typical of power hitters, and attacked the ball instead with sinewy wrists and lightning-quick reaction time. He also eschewed batting gloves; in a notorious regimen to toughen up his hands, he
urinated
on them. Though he hadn’t put up big minor league numbers, the Expos saw Moises as a five-tool talent who could improve with experience. But he also drew accolades for his
makeup
—the catch-all baseball term that defines a player’s character and his ability to not only make the big leagues but also to thrive in them.

“Moises was one of the toughest players I’ve ever seen,” Felipe Alou told me in 2013, referring partly to a gruesome leg injury his son would suffer in 1993. “He was a fearless individual, especially at the plate.”

Take a father’s pride with a grain of salt if you like, but Dombrowski and others saw the same character traits—one of the reasons they targeted him in that trade with the Pirates. Still, nobody predicted that Moises Alou would become a full-blown star, or that the other fruits of the deal would pay major dividends later on. After muddling along for several years with cast-off players and whatever remained of the early-’80s nucleus, things were starting to change. The Expos finally had something cooking.

It was just going to take awhile to see results. In 1991, the Expos lost more games and drew fewer fans than in any other season
since 1976, their last at Jarry Park. They also bid goodbye to three huge links to the ’80s, as the team’s remodelling continued.

After limping to a 20–29 record, the Expos fired Buck Rodgers, ending his career in Montreal after six-plus seasons and 1,199 games. A rift had developed earlier between the team’s general manager and its manager, and you could understand why: the Expos went from first place during much of the previous summer to a .500 record by season’s end, despite Dombrowski’s in-season trades for Langston, Zane Smith, veteran left-hander John Candelaria, and veteran pinch-hitter Jim Dwyer.

“He wanted to fire Buck after ’89,” said Mitch Melnick, the long-time local radio host. “He’d done everything he could, he got Langston, and it didn’t work out. So he wanted to fire Buck, and Charles [Bronfman] told him, ‘Listen, we’ve all made mistakes this year, including you. So don’t rush. You can’t fire him now. We got too close.’ So, once Charles sold the team, it was obvious that Dombrowski was going to fire him. Aside from what happened in ’89, Dombrowski didn’t like Buck’s methods. He wanted him at the ballpark more often, and that wasn’t Buck’s style.”

It certainly wasn’t. Like many Expos before him, Rodgers was a
bon vivant
, preferring to pound beers and tell stories during his downtime rather than spend day and night hunkered down in his office. This didn’t sit well with Dombrowski, who jettisoned Rodgers in favour of the more strait-laced Tom Runnells.

When a team fires a manager in the middle of the season, its options are limited, and promoting one of the coaches (as the Expos did with Runnells) makes sense. Like Rodgers, Runnells had led the Indianapolis Indians to an American Association title. But in hiring him, the Expos had somehow again bypassed Felipe Alou—for a
fifth
time. It wouldn’t take long for the Expos to realize that they should have hired Alou in the first (or fifth) place.

The wasted opportunity was magnified when Dombrowski himself stepped down as GM just three months after making the change. A year after Miami investors had tried to poach the Expos, a different Miami group led by Wayne Huizenga landed an expansion franchise for South Florida. The opportunity to build a new franchise from scratch was a tough offer for Dombrowski to turn down. He still might’ve stayed in Montreal, but for one gnawing concern.

“Between the language, the taxes, and everything else, they always had a hard time attracting other organizations’ best talent via free agency,” Dombrowski said. “But they could always combat that by being aggressive in scouting and player development. Near the end of my time in Montreal, we had that regime change, and with it came a change of philosophies. The new group wanted to cut back in expenditures, even in scouting and player development. I knew that would hurt in the long run, and I knew I didn’t want to see that happen.”

Rodgers was gone; now so was Dombrowski. But the biggest departure had to be Tim Raines. Like Carter and Dawson, Rock was more than a ballplayer to the people of Montreal. He was an icon who stamped lifelong impressions on kids growing up in the ’80s. He connected with the community in a way that transcended what he did on the field.