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 (41 page)

The nail in the coffin, however, was Larry Walker. Here was an elite player—a
Canadian
—who loved playing in Montreal. At 28 years old, Walker was just coming into his own, posting his best season in ’94 and finishing 11
^th
in MVP voting that year. If anything, he was underrated in some circles, playing away from the media spotlight in Montreal and putting up his best numbers during a season that got washed away. Baseball’s cognoscenti, though? They knew
exactly
how good Walker was, and how great he would become.

“Tony La Russa still uses Walker as a comparison when he’s talking about players—‘This guy reminds me of Walker,’ ” said Jeff Blair. “Charlie Manuel would always use him as a comparison. Jim Fanning said he’s the best instinctive ballplayer he’d ever seen.”

Unlike Hill, Wetteland, and Grissom, Walker was a free agent, meaning the Expos couldn’t trade him. What they could do was offer him arbitration. Normally, a player of Walker’s calibre would turn down the offer, preferring to sign a lucrative, long-term deal rather than reach a one-year agreement; the point of the arbitration offer would be to get compensatory draft picks when Walker left, thus acquiring potential building blocks for the future. The
problem—incredibly—was that Walker wanted to stay. He wanted nothing more than to get another crack at competing in ’95, with the same killer ’94 teammates around him. Under normal circumstances, this would be a boon to the team offering arbitration, the chance to retain a great player without committing the massive sums of money that a star testing the free-agent market for the first time would normally command. But rather than embrace the idea of Walker coming back relatively cheaply, Brochu feared it: “relatively cheaply” was still too expensive for the consortium. The Expos didn’t offer Walker arbitration, meaning they’d forfeited the valuable draft picks that would come if another team signed him. The day after the arbitration deadline, the Rockies inked the Maple Ridge Boy to a four-year, $22.5 million contract.

While Expos fans wailed in protest of the team’s fire sale, Brochu shrugged it all off. He naively believed that he could build another team that would be as good as the ’94 Expos.

“I said look, ‘People are going to hate us, but they’ll forget. They won’t be mad at us forever. They’ll come back.’ I had confidence that we had that ability, that we’d rebuild, but this time with more money [from revenue sharing].”

Though Brochu believed he was taking the long view, his was really a short-sighted glimpse of the situation. Had the Expos opted to retain Hill, Wetteland, Grissom, and Walker, they would’ve gone into the ’95 season as favourites to win it all. Some fed-up fans would’ve stayed away regardless, but others who might have been on the fence after the strike would’ve returned to the ballpark—eager to see a great group of players make the postseason run they’d been denied a year earlier. That would have meant a softer landing with regard to both ticket sales and ticket prices. A playoff berth would have helped rebuild the Expos’ tattered brand far more quickly than Brochu’s plan. And with more young talent knocking on the door—Rondell White already up
in the majors, and a new batch of prospects rising quickly—they could’ve kept on winning.

Even if things didn’t go as well, if the Expos didn’t win as expected or fan support didn’t return as hoped, Brochu could’ve ordered Malone to trade away the team’s best players later in the year. That way, the GM would have had plenty of time to size up the trade market, solicit offers from multiple suitors, and acquire the kind of young talent that could form the foundation for the next winning ball club in Montreal (exactly as Brochu hoped). There might have been some near-term financial losses, sure. But if the ultimate goal was to ensure the team’s long-term success, landing something better than Tony Tarasco and a handful of magic beans would’ve been the way to go.

“I ran into Claude Brochu at a ’94 reunion,” said Cliff Floyd. “He brought up everything that happened. You just look at him, and you go, ‘You could’ve had a dynasty. You could have hung your hat on this team for all time.’ ”

That’s just not how Brochu operated. To him, the cautious move was always the correct one.

“The difficulty I had with Claude Brochu is that the entertainment of sports means doing everything you can to try to win,” said Mark Routtenberg, former president of Guess Canada and a minority partner with a small stake in the team. “What’s going to happen on the field, you don’t know. You never know. It’s still worth the gamble—if you lose, it’s okay with the fans, because at least you tried. But if the fans feel you’re never trying to get there, that there’s no entertainment value, then they’re going to stop supporting you.”

To nobody’s surprise, the Expos stunk in ’95. With payroll slashed 35 percent, Montreal limped to a 66–78 record, finishing dead last in the NL East. Attendance tumbled 26 percent compared to ’94 levels, shrivelling up as the year went on and
bottoming out on September 11, when just 9,715 fans saw Pedro Martinez toss a four-hit shutout at the Mets. After all the promise of 1992, all the excitement of 1993, and all the domination in 1994, 1995 was a total disaster.

Watching what the four departed stars did for other teams only made everything more depressing. After starting the season in St. Louis, Hill got dealt to Cleveland later in July. He pitched reasonably well down the stretch, then churned out one of the biggest starts in Indians history: seven innings of shutout ball that tied the American League Championship Series at 2–2, and set Cleveland up for a trip to the World Series two games later. The winning pitcher in the clinching Game 6? Old friend Dennis Martinez, who at age 41 fired seven shutout innings of his own to beat the Mariners and his former Expos teammate Randy Johnson. Meanwhile, Wetteland went from being one of the best closers in the National League to taking his place among the American League’s elite with the Yankees. With Wetteland’s help, the Yanks returned to the playoffs themselves for the first time in 14 years—and won the World Series a year after that, with Wetteland saving all four victories and being named World Series MVP. Finally, all Walker did in ’95 was hit .306/.381/.607, launch 36 homers, and lead the Rockies to their first-ever playoff berth, in just their third season of existence.

None of those arcs hurt quite as much as Grissom’s, though. When Malone announced that Grissom was up for bid, the two teams that showed the most interest were the Marlins and the Braves. Malone ultimately chose Atlanta, walking just a couple hundred yards across the West Palm Beach complex that the Expos and Braves shared to hammer out a deal.

“It definitely makes them a much better club,” Malone said after the trade was made. “I think this basically will bring a world championship to the Braves at some point.”

Not some point—that very year. Grissom didn’t hit all that well during the ’95 regular season. But he was an absolute terror in the playoffs. First, he hit .524 with three home runs in a four-game League Division Series win over Walker’s Rockies. When the Braves made it to the World Series against Hill’s Indians, Grissom starred again, hitting .360 in the six-game series. With two outs in the ninth inning of Game 6 and the Braves leading 1–0, Atlanta closer Mark Wohlers threw a fastball on the outside corner. Indians second baseman Carlos Baerga cracked a flyball to left-centre. The ball drifted, drifted, then finally landed … in Grissom’s glove.

The Braves would go on to torment the Expos (and the rest of the National League East) for another decade, winning 11 straight NL East crowns, 14 division titles in 15 years all told. Expos fans couldn’t help but wonder if that could have been
them
celebrating every year—if 1994’s best team in baseball could have become a dynasty—had Brochu convinced the team’s cheapskate owners to spend a few damn dollars, or taken a leap of faith that short-term financial pain would lead to long-term success. If instead of seeing their favourite players sprinkled around the league, making World Series–clinching catches, those stars could’ve stayed in Montreal and brought a championship to
la belle province
.

My self-imposed divorce from baseball didn’t last long. My girlfriend, Angèle, bought me a 1959 Felipe Alou rookie card as a birthday present, just a few days after the ’94 season was cancelled. The gift reminded me that I loved baseball and its history, that one season didn’t mean everything in the grand scheme of things, and that the game would move on. As of this book’s spring 2014 publication, she and I have been married for 16 years. In the end, I was with the Expos for the long haul as well: it’s just that the same couldn’t be said about the players.

Some earlier-era players hung around longer. Gary Carter and Andre Dawson spent parts of 11 seasons in Montreal, Tim Raines 12, Tim Wallach and Steve Rogers 13—with Rogers playing his entire career as an Expo. By the ’90s, though, the life cycles had begun to shrink. Walker and Grissom were Expos for six seasons, Wetteland and Hill just three. Even front-office people started to leave more quickly. Dave Dombrowski had become baseball’s youngest general manager when he came to Montreal in 1987, only to leave for Miami four years later. Dan Duquette spent four seasons as farm director, two-plus as GM, then left for that dream job in his home state of Massachusetts with the Red Sox. Kevin Malone took over as scouting director in ’91, but would leave his GM job in ’95 after becoming disillusioned by that season’s fire sale.

All these players and decision makers had studied at baseball’s signature academy for young talent, then gone out into the world to pursue bigger opportunities. As Michael Farber put it, they’d all graduated from Expos University.

“We’d lose players to other teams, and it got to the point where we were
always
underdogs,” said Darrin Fletcher, who stuck around for six seasons, longer than most Expos players in the ’90s (he wanted to get his master’s degree before leaving). “We were the beneficiary of low expectations, that we had low-risk, high-reward type teams. We didn’t have any pressure. Felipe fostered that. As players, we felt we were fighting against not just the rest of the league, but even against our own organization, since they were constantly purging our roster. That motivated us. We used it to our advantage.”

Motivation is great. Talent is better. Only three of the starting eight from 1994’s lineup were still everyday players for Montreal in ’96. To fill the many holes created by players leaving via trades and free agency (not to mention the departing coaches and frontoffice staff), the Expos turned to their perennially productive minor league system.