Dispatches From the Sporting Life

by Mordecai Richler

  I don’t know what ever became of Red Durrett. Roland Gladu, who got to start twenty-one games with the old Boston Braves, failed to sign the major league skies with his ability. Robinson died in 1972, and six years later a plaque to his memory was installed in the Big Owe. Jean-Pierre Roy now does the French-language broadcasts for the Expos, and a greying, rotund Duke Snider is also back, doing the colour commentary for the games on CBC-TV.

  City councillor Gerry Snyder must be acknowledged as the trigger for major league baseball in Montreal. In December 1967 he put his case to NL President Warren Giles. Sure, Giles said, he would be happy to receive an expansion bid from Montreal, but it would have to be sweetened by a list of backers willing to plunk $10 million U.S. on the table and a guarantee of a domed stadium. Snyder hoped the Autostade, a prefabricated concrete stadium built for Expo, would do temporarily, if it was expanded to accommodate 37,500 fans. But the highly unpopular Autostade wasn’t on the subway line, and the parking situation there was nightmarish. Furthermore, the Autostade was right next to an abattoir, which would not be so life-enhancing on a steamy summer afternoon. Nevertheless, the indefatigable Snyder began to pursue backers, all of whom were willing to listen but not pledge. All except Charles Bronfman, whose father did so much to slake the thirst of Americans during Prohibition, the rock on which Mr. Sam founded one of the largest family fortunes in North America. Charles immediately promised he would come in for $1 million. Then Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who had once played semi-pro ball and remained an ardent fan, undertook to write his friend Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, to solicit support.

  There were, as I mentioned earlier, other contenders for the two expansion spots. But Walter O’Malley, one member of the three-man expansion committee, remembered with considerable warmth how much money he had made with the Montreal Royals. Another committee member, Judge Julius Hoffheinz of Houston, had enjoyed himself at Expo. The third member, John Galbraith of Pittsburgh, also liked Montreal’s bid. So at a meeting in the Excelsior Hotel in Chicago in April 1968, it was ordained that San Diego would have one franchise and Montreal the other. Back in Snyder’s hotel room, Dick Young of the New York Daily News suggested, “Call ’em the Expos.”

  Call ‘em whatever you like, but where was the $10 million and where were they going to play ball?

  Snyder had promised the National League a domed stadium for the club by 1971, but the city, looking at the estimated cost—between $35 and $45 million—said no. It also said no to tarting up the Autostade for about $7 million. Everybody despaired but Mayor Drapeau. As potential investors faded, he got Bronfman to come in for another $4 million, some say much more, and he drove NL president Giles out to Jarry Park, then a three-thousand-seat junior baseball stadium. The public address announcer let it out that Giles was in the park, and he was given a standing ovation. He left the park with tears in his eyes. “For years right until he died,” Snyder has said, “he told me every time we met that this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him in his life—total strangers giving him a standing ovation.”

  The federal government, though not moved to tears, came through with a huge tax write-off for multimillionaire Bronfman and the other investors, among them club president John McHale, and on August 14 a dry-eyed Giles returned to Montreal, endorsed the plans for a Jarry Park expanded to accommodate thirty thousand fans, and accepted a $1.1 million down payment on the franchise.

  The Expos were born. October 14, 1968, was declared Baseball Day, and the plebs, ten thousand strong, filled the Place des Nations to greet visiting NL dignitaries. Les Grands Ballets Canadiens offered a choreographed version of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” Warren Giles beamed. Mayor Drapeau, outspoken as always, came right out and declared Montreal to be the greatest city in the world. Later in the day, at the Windsor Hotel, the NL owners got down to the real business. The draft. The rendering, on consideration of $10 million, of thirty bodies to each expansion team, thirty players who, hereafter (unless traded before opening day), would be flesh-and-blood Expos. “It’s only a day after [Canadian] Thanksgiving,” a sportswriter said, “and we’re being offered all the turkey.” Not so, another ventured, scrutinizing the list of command-generation players on offer from the league. “We could end up with the all-star team of 1954.”

  Come morning, Expos were more than a name. We had a team. At once fledgling Expos and senior citizens of baseball. Among them, such reputable performers as Maury Wills, Manny Mota, Don Clendenon, Mack Jones, Larry Jaster, and Larry Jackson. “We’ve got to build for the day these guys retire,” GM Jim Fanning said—prophetically, as it turned out, for the next day thirty-seven-year-old pitcher Larry Jackson, the team’s only established starter, announced his retirement, and the Expos, yet to be rained out on a Sunday, were more than $300,000 out of pocket.

  The other players procured at the NL-sponsored bazaar were either young and unknown quantities or too-well-known nonentities. Considering they were largely fire-sale goods, the management was touchingly defensive. “The Expos hope,” the official guide said, “Bob Bailey has matured enough to live up to the expectations the Pittsburgh Pirates had for him, when they outbid most of the other major league clubs for his services in 1961.” They did not emphasize unduly that for the last two years he had been punishing the ball, as sportswriters say, at a regular.227 clip. A highly esteemed baseball expert, the guide informed us, had said only three years ago of Don Bosch, another Expo acquisition, that “in the field, he can be favourably compared with none other than Willy Mays!” At the plate, alas, he could be compared but to you and me, his average being a far from lusty.171. We were also told that Jim “Mudcat” Grant, who was later to be traded to St. Louis, had won twenty-one games for Minnesota in 1965. However, another look at the record revealed he had won only five in 1967 and six in 1968. This, the guide suggested, is the year Don Shaw, who pitched all of twelve innings with the Mets the year before, might be coming into his own, and, who knew, “a change of scenery might be all the doctor ordered” for Bill Stoneman, who had won none and lost two in the minors in 1968.

  Who knew, indeed? Stoneman went on to pitch two no-hitters for the Expos, and even before the season opened I had learned to respect John McHale’s sagacity. At the Expos’ training camp in Florida, a state where, surely, to be bilingual was to be fluent in English and Yiddish, the management saw to it that all announcements were made in English and French, thereby charming the locals. A month later, New York sportswriters were to delight in outfielders who were also voltigeurs, a shortstop introduced as an arrêt-court, and pitchers as lanceurs.

  McHale & Co. also engineered a dazzling trade, surrendering one reputable and two fringe players to Houston for Rusty Staub, a twenty-four-year-old allstar outfielder. “The best ballplayer an expansion team ever had,” wrote Larry Merchant in the New York Post.

  Meanwhile, back in Montreal, we read of such springtime coups still deep in a severe and seemingly endless winter. Many doubted that Jarry Park—the stands still without seats, the field encrusted in ice and snow—would be ready or fit to play on come the April 14 opener. I, for one, anticipated disaster. Something to cherish, like the year Oxford sank in the boat race, or the autumn the Grey Cup game had to be called because of fog, the players unable to find each other or the football.

  The Expos trotted onto the field for their first major league game out of town. They opened at Shea Stadium, in New York, on April 8, and before forty-five thousand outraged fans defeated the Mets with rare panache. The ubiquitous Mayor Drapeau threw out the opening ball, and amiable Charles Bronfman sat with his heart thumping as his team, well ahead going into the ninth, wobbled, finally squeaking by, 11–10. Rusty Staub, as advertised, hit a homer. So did rookie Coco Laboy. Larry Merchant wrote in the New York Post: “Shed a tear for the Royal Canadian Mounties. Wear a black patch for the separatists of Quebec. A moment of silence please for the seal hunters on Hudson Bay. Send a word of condolence to the Indians…. Apologize
to George Chuvalo…. The Montreal Expos are their team and never will they know the joys and agonies of the Amazin’ Mets.”

  For the victors after the game, for team management and well-wishers, dinner in a private dining room at Toots Shor. Broadway. The Big Time. Mayor Drapeau shook any hand proffered and reached for many that weren’t. Gerry Snyder scooted from table to table, grinning, never forgetting a name. Charles Bronfman sat quietly at his table. A rich young Montreal celebrant, the owner of a large laundry chain, turned to me, his face glowing, and said, “We will be able to tell our grandchildren we were here.”

  So, I imagine, did men good and true speak to each other at Agincourt, Waterloo, Normandy, and Iwo Jima. Anyway, the headline on the front page of the next morning’s Montreal Gazette read:

  Look who’s in first place!

  EXPOS TAKE OPENER

  Ted Blackman’s exuberant story began, “And 100 years later an upstart team from Canada showed the Americans how their game of baseball is really played.” Never mind that our upstart team from Canada was composed of Americans, too. Glory days are hard come by and chauvinism is ill-becoming. Blackman’s story continued: “Well, not quite, but the Montreal Expos certainly avenged those Fenian Raids yesterday when they invaded the national pastime of the United States and swiped their centennial spotlight with an 11–10 victory over the Mets in the historic 1969 National League inaugural.”

  A week later, after the Expos had won one more and lost four on the road, the team came home, so to speak, heralded by a poem from pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant, which began,

  Life is like a game of baseball,

  and you play it every day.

  It isn’t just the breaks you get,

  but the kind of game you play.

  Workers toiled through the night at Jarry Park, hammering in seats and struggling with the soggy field, and, come morning, the sun shone brightly and the temperature soared, settling into a rare summer’s day. “EVERYONE BUT EVERYONE WAS OUT THERE, MY DEAR,” a Star reporter wrote of the team brunch that preceded the game. “The Versailles Room at the Windsor Hotel,” the reporter went on to say, “was simply filled to brimming with people who matter….” Among them, the fellow who was in charge of Montreal’s Public Water Works, the first dignitary to be introduced. We applauded. We also applauded Quebec premier Jean Jacques Bertrand and, naturally, Mayor Drapeau. We ate an unspeakable chicken à la king without complaining and bolstered ourselves with Bloody Marys against the mighty St. Louis Cards, who even then awaited the sacrificial Expos at Jarry Park.

  Then, in a park filled to capacity, we watched the Expos beat the Cards 8–7, Mack Jones driving in three runs with a homer and becoming an instant hero. Positioned in the choice seats on the first-base line, I recognized many of the plump faces there. Among them were some of the nervy kids who used to skip school with me on weekday afternoons to sit in the left-field bleachers of Delormier Downs, cheering on the Royals and earning nickels fetching hot dogs for strangers. Gone were the AZA wind-breakers, the bubble gum, the scuffed running shoes, the pale wintry faces. These men came bronzed to the ballpark from their Florida condominiums. Now they wore foulards and navy blue blazers with brass buttons, they carried Hudson’s Bay blankets in plastic cases for their bejewelled wives and sucked on Monte Cristos, mindful not to spill ashes on their Gucci loafers. Above all, they radiated pleasure in their own accomplishments and the occasion. And why not? This was an event and they were there, inside looking out at last, right on the first-base line. Look at me. “Give it some soul, Mack!” one of them shouted.

  I asked the portly man in front of me to remove his hat, a snappy little fedora. “I can’t,” he protested. “Sinus. Took pills this morning. The sun. I can’t.”

  Jim “Mudcat” Grant’s opening-day poem concluded:

  This game will not be easy,

  there’ll be struggle, there’ll be strife,

  To make the winning runs,

  for it’s played on the field of life.

  So stand behind your team, son,

  there’ll be many who’ll applaud.

  Remember you’re the player,

  and the umpire there is God.

  Eleven years passed, managers had come and gone, the Expos abandoning delightful Jarry Park for the chilly Big Owe, before the team won more games than they lost, finishing 95–65; they also carried their divisional title dream into the final game of the season, before they succumbed to Steve Carlton and the Phillies. Over the years the Expos had been caught in some foolish, even demented, trades, but they also put together one of the best organizations in baseball. A farm system that produced Steve Rogers, Scott Sanderson, David Palmer, Bill Gullickson, Tim Wallach, Gary Carter, Tim Raines, Terry Francona, André Dawson, and Ellis Valentine. Ellis, alas, was adjudged not a good citizen. A boy playing a boys’ game.

  Going into the 1980 season, in the most curious addendum to a contract this side of a third-grade report—Addendum No. 4—Ellis, in the absence of a lollipop, was to be paid a $2,000 monthly bonus if he fulfilled the following conditions:

  general excellence of offensive and defensive play;

  general effort and practice effort;

  co-operation with management and field leadership;

  good physical condition;

  good citizenship.

  In April, May, July, and August, Ellis was good hit, field, and hygiene, winning untold brownies and the $2,000 per, but in June the bad boy went and fractured his cheekbone and his bonus was withheld until the last month of the season, when management decided not to award it, because he had been found wanting in “practice effort” and “good citizenship.” Seemingly, if Ellis so much as sneezed or suffered a tummy tumble, he withdrew from the field, saying he would not play unless he could give his best. Furthermore, on September 22, he had to be threatened with suspension unless he returned to Montreal pronto for the examination of a wrist he’d injured in St. Louis. “We didn’t give a hoot about the money,” said Valentine’s agent. “All Ellis wanted was a thank-you from the club. Instead he had to sit through some ninety-minute meetings about why he didn’t deserve the bonus. That hurt him.”

  Still grieving in October, Ellis asked to be traded, a demand he was to repeat in spring training and after. Finally, in 1981, even as Ellis was ailing again, he was sent to the Mets for reliever Jeff Reardon, a minor league outfielder, and a player to be named later. “I love him,” John McHale said, “and I hope he does well.”

  Valentine was exuberant. “That’s great,” he said. “I hope Shea Stadium will help my legs. Maybe McHale is trying to make me happy by trading me to a place where there is natural grass.”

  To which Gazette columnist Ted Blackman responded the following morning that he thought Ellis had been playing on grass all along.

  When we acquired a franchise of our own in 1969, our cherished Montreal in the majors at last, we congratulated each other, because seemingly things had changed, we were in the biggies now. Increasingly, the engaging Expos brought us joy, a much-needed distraction, pulling in the town’s largest and most good-natured crowds. Such was their appeal, in fact, that they attracted some 1,534,564 fans in 1981, the notorious split season when, with only the third-best divisional record overall, the Expos sneaked into the playoffs and damn near the World Series, finally undone by Fernando Valenzuela and a ninth-inning homer by Rick Monday, a hit that still resounds here as tragically as Bobby Thomson’s historic blow against the old Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Possibly, deep down in the adolescent Expo psyche, players too young to have seen the legendary Triple A Royals still consider themselves the Dodgers’ number-one sons. Management may suffer from the same affliction. After all, it was only after the Expos let reliever Mike Marshall go that he went on to win fifteen, and save twenty-one, games for the Dodgers, winning them a pennant and himself a Cy Young award. Manny Mota, the original Expo draft choice, and the first to be traded, went on to play ten very productive years with the same Dodgers. R
on Fairly, in all the years he played here, reportedly drove manager Gene Mauch wild telling him again and again what a grand organization he had sprung from. While Mauch himself, I’m told, always yearned to manage one team more than any other: yes, the Dodgers. After all this time, still Montreal baseball’s Big Daddy. Obviously, the Expos’ most urgent need is for a pitcher called Oedipus Rex.

  Meanwhile, two other problems remain. The signing of free agents. And holding on to players developed by the organization after their talent has matured.

  John McHale insists that the Expos have no trouble competing for free agents, the players adore it in Montreal, but though he offered Reggie Jackson $1 million more than the Yankees, Reggie understandably opted for New York, where his chocolate bar would sell considerably better than 1981’s Cro-bar named after outfielder-first baseman Warren Cromartie. Don Sutton also balked at playing for his good neighbour to the north.

  “Do the players like it here?” I asked pitcher Bill Lee.

  “I like it here and I want to stay, but most of the players dislike it intensely. There’s the weather problem and the culture shock. The wives don’t want to learn French. And then there’s the tax situation.”

  At the gate, the Expos take in Canadian dollars, worth roughly 81 cents American, but they fork out U.S. funds at the pay window, and are also obliged to compensate players for any losses they suffer on double taxation. All the same, the players don’t like the headache. Even more to the point, they feel neglected out on the tundra. Until they become contenders, they are seldom seen on the Game of the Week, and unless their relatives in Florida or California catch them on American TV, they have no idea how well their boys are doing in Canada.

  The problem of holding on to draft choices who have been developed within the organization, becoming stars, could become prohibitively expensive. Take Gary Carter, for instance, an Orange County boy, long coveted by the Dodgers. Before he condescended to sign a new contract with the Expos for a rumoured $15 million, spread over seven years, he told me, “When I play out there in California all the papers do interviews now. Even my old local paper—the one I used to deliver.”