Remember the Expos

The game of baseball has sort of waned among my sports of interest the last few years, but, as with the start of any sports season, it's tough not to feel a shade of giddiness.

This year brings that giddiness to a new city — Washington, DC — and the righteousness of that appointment almost makes one forget that we did indeed take away the giddiness from another city.

Of course, the Quebecois have no one to blame but themselves for that, no arguments there. But though there may have been far fewer Expos fans than there were for other teams, the pain of losing them is just as hard for the devoted.

The Expos were actually my favorite National League team, and I wrote for a time for an Expos-devoted website. I sometimes felt like I loved them because no one else did. People had such contempt for the Expos, guilty of nothing themselves (teams like the Yankees and Lakers, on the other hand, are deserving of our contempt). I remember seeing them when they would play the Braves on TBS as a kid, and asking my mom what the "Jb" on their cap stood for, not recognizing it as an M.

Seems hard to believe now, but there was a time that the Expos did quite well. Gary Carter, Tim Wallach, Rusty Staub, and Andre Dawson are names not unfamiliar to the Baseball pantheon-keepers, and they even had Pete Rose for a couple of years. They actually were among National League attendance leaders for a large part of their existence, and although it seems unfathomable now, on one glorious day they were tied for the NL wildcard lead in early September in — are you ready for this? — 2003!

Montreal is never going to have a Major League team again, one must assume, so it is appropriate to say goodbye.

The Expos were born in 1969 and only had to wait two weeks for their first no-hitter, courtesy of Bill Stoneman. He struck again in 1972 with no-no No. 2. His record overall? 54-85.

Rose got hit No. 4,000 wearing a Expos uniform, and the team boasted, in my opinion, the greatest mascot in all of sports, Youppi. You can see him here, seemingly opening a pack of cigarettes.

A little over a month ago, the minions that occupy what is left, administratively speaking, of the Expos offices in Olympic Stadium, put the right of Youppi up for sale. ESPN reports the Montreal Canadiens are interested. At least he will live on.

But the rest of the team will live on only in spirit. A third no-hitter was achieved in 1981 by Charlie Lea, who started and won the All-Star Game for the National League that year. The Expos made the playoffs and bowed out in the fifth and deciding (the series were best-of-five back then) game to the Dodgers, 2-1, thanks to a ninth-inning homer given up by Steve Rogers to Rick Monday. The Expos fans refer to the date the game was played on as Blue Monday.

They wouldn't make many waves again until 1994, when they broke out of the gate 74-40, sported the best record in baseball and were six games clear of the Atlanta Braves when the players' strike washed out the balance of the season. If they could've parlayed that season into a World Series appearance, they still might be playing in Montreal today.

When the strike began, they were in the midst of a 20-3 streak, and they were doing it with the second-lowest payroll in baseball. Larry Walker and Pedro Martinez were among the stars on that team. Three years earlier, they brought up a young prospect named Randy Johnson, the year Dennis Martinez would throw no-hitter No. 4 for the organization, this one a perfect game. Two days earlier, Mark Gardner had thrown nine hitless innings, but given up a hit in the 10th. Pedro Martinez would do the same a couple years later. That's six nine-inning no-hitters in 35 years of baseball.

Olympic stadium, their home for the majority of their existence, had a reputation from day one as being one of the worst in baseball. Unlike Fenway, it apparently wasn't built for the long haul. Anybody remember a cement beam collapsing there in 1991, forcing them to play the rest of the season on the road?

Perhaps it was the baseball Gods heralding the arrival of Claude Broach, who had just bought the team and would run it into the ground. He in turn, sold the team to Jeff Loria, who accelerated the process of selling off most Expos with any talent and keeping the payroll ridiculously low.

Back to more positive remembrances, can you write an obituary on the Expos without mentioning their greatest player ever? The best position player in the game, in my view? I'm speaking, of course, about the last great Expo, Vladimir Guerrero.

The arm. The superhuman outfield assists. The bat speed. The homers. He had five 30-homer seasons for the Expos, something no one else in team history did more than once.

Baseball and Montreal was always an odd pairing, so it's fitting that their franchise player would be a Dominican with a Russian name. And a brother named Wilton.

There's still baseball to be played in Montreal, but it'll be done by the Stingers of Concordia University, and their municipal opponents. Au Renoir, Les Expos, and where have you gone, Floyd You mans?