As would be the case from then on, the Expos bungled the broadcasting deal. There would be no 55 games to broadcast. The Expos were trying to put together another national television deal and couldn’t come together on the terms. They were then trying to handle it all themselves – Produce the games, sell the advertising and buy the time on the air, keep it in house and reap the benefits.
There would be no reaping.
Still, I couldn’t possibly be upset, 40 games would be 40 more than I had ever worked before and with the talent starting to arrive there would always be the possibility that late season games would be added to the television schedule.
Every game on television put yours truly on the radio with my very first real life broadcast partner – Bobby Winkles. A genuine baseball article, Bobby had been a big league manager and a U.S. college legend. He had coached some of the best at Arizona State, including Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson plus Sal Bando and Rick Monday.
The problem for the Expos in getting games on television had everything to do with the Toronto Blue Jays and a former MLB Commissioner. An agreement had been struck years before, limiting the Expos to a small finite amount of games into the country’s most populated region. Previously of course, the entire country belonged to the Expos until the Blue Jays
came around. Now the Blue Jays owned Southern Ontario. It was something that Americans couldn’t grasp.
All sports networks and by extension local baseball broadcasts in the U.S. are regional. But in Canada, it’s a national broadcast, and if you limit the amount of games that can be seen
in the number one market, there is no way to run regional coverage elsewhere. If you cut out a major portion of the population then you cut out sponsors and advertising that won’t deliver the message to their target audience. If there were only 40 games that would be allowed in the richest and most populated area of the country than there would be 40 games, period. Montreal as a franchise was unique in so many ways and the biggest for me was the limited English population. It made broadcasting just to Montreal in that language cost prohibitive.
The new all-sports television station was based in Toronto. TSN to some in the country means Toronto Sports Network instead of THE Sports network. The French all-sports television, RDS, picked up many more games of course. Could the Expos have put something together with a local English television station? Yes, but that was limited to the two big Canadian networks, CTV and CBC. But, once again, most of their programming was national and the local production costs would be quite high. So, for the new play by play guy, 40 games it would be and 40 games would be fine. But 40 games it would not always be. Down the line, 40 would become 25 games.
The 1991 season was not a good one for the Expos but it was a blast for me. As it turned out, I got to work many more than the allotted 40 games. Ken Singleton had worked so well with Dave Van Horne on television that they would now work together the entire season, with Ken moving into the radio booth full time except for those 40 games on TV. But Ken was unable to work the radio games until May. Bobby Winkles would work the road games with Dave and I got to work the ones at home.
Opening day was an unbelievable thrill. The kid from the schoolyard sitting in Dave’s chair.
(Come on, who am I really and what the hell am I doing up here – And why did I have to get a cold and a sore throat on opening day???) I never got sick (I would miss one day of work in 25 years) but I got through it anyway. Then came the first of many thrill rides to come.
Despite having attended perhaps as many as a thousand major league baseball games, I had never seen a no-hitter. It was something my dad had over me and he never failed to mention it every time we got into the late innings of another potential no-hitter that came up short. There had been several one-hitters over the years that came oh so close and I had
missed both no-hitters that had been pitched in Montreal. Bill Stoneman in the early years and Charlie Lea in the second game of a doubleheader in the early 80s. That was it, until May 23rd when Tommy Greene turned the trick against the Expos in an afternoon game at Olympic Stadium. I had the good fortune of working the game with Dave. Yes, Dave’s the one who got to to call the final outs and the no-hitter was tossed by an opponent. But still, while Greene was the guest on the Phillies’ post-game show, I was able to talk to his catcher on our post-game show. He’d later become a mainstay on some of the best Expos teams ever – Darrin Fletcher.
My imagination started to run away on me, what a thrill it would be to call one of those. What are the chances however for someone who would work as few games as I would? Oh well, it was a fun day nonetheless. But not for Expos manager Buck Rodgers. The loss was his team’s second in a row on the way to five straight and a stretch of 10 losses in 11 games. Sitting at 20-29 on June 3rd, as the Expos prepared for a road trip starting in Houston, Rodgers was fired by GM Dave Dombrowski.
Tom Runnells was named the new manager and it didn’t take long for the Runnells era to show it’s direction. One of the first orders of business for the new man was naming Barry Jones his
full time closer. It was not a problem in Runnells’ first game as Jones put away the easy save with a 4-1 lead. By the end of the series on Sunday, the Expos were on the verge of a sweep after scoring three runs in the ninth inning to snap a 5-5 tie. But the Astros then lit up Jones like a pinball machine with the same speed as one of those balls shooting out from bumper to bumper. Five hits and four runs while Jones retired but one and it was game over. A week later the team ran off a seven game win streak, moving to within two games of .500
The first real threat of Montreal losing it’s baseball team ended that week. Owner Charles Bronfman had put the team up for sale and there had been many off season rumours of the team heading elsewhere. One had a prospective owner offering in the neighbourhood of 150 million dollars to buy and move the franchise to Miami. But on June 14, a press conference was held in Montreal to announce Claude Brochu as the head of a consortium of local businessman who had purchased the club. Brochu mortgaged his house, took a loan from his boss and took over the franchise. His consortium included some of Quebec’s leading businessmen. As a group they had been successful in many fields of endeavour. This could only bode well for the future of this franchise. The scare was over. Bronfman had taken a much lesser price tag to keep the team in my home town. At least for now, my future was safe.
Starting on June 23, the Expos lost 11 games in a row, then won 7 of 8, only to follow it up with just 4 wins in their next 23 games. Inside of that final losing run there was an unforgettable series in Los Angeles. It started on a Friday night with Mark Gardner on the mound. The young right-hander, rolling a 12 to 6 curveball off a table, had the Dodgers
eating out of his hand. The innings peeled away until he reached the 9th without allowing a hit. When Gardner took care of the Dodgers in the ninth, the announcer didn’t get to scream “Mark Gardner has pitched a no-hitter !!!” Instead he sadly remarked, “We’ll be back with the 10th inning in a moment, with the score Expos nothing, Dodgers nothing.”
The Dodgers would finish the game with more hits and Gardner didn’t retire another hitter. Lenny Harris bounced a high chopper over the mound, out of the reach of a helpless Gardner to start the inning. The no-hitter was gone and soon enough Gardner would be too, as would the shutout and the game. Eddie Murray singled, knocking Gardner out and Darryl Strawberry singled off Jeff Fassero to win it 1-0. So much for calling a no-hitter. Oddly enough Mark Gardner would finish his career with exactly 99 victories. Even though he pitched nine no-hit innings there wasn’t an official no-hitter pitched that Friday night in L.A. How long would it take to get another such opportunity, if ever again ? I was as down as I’d been following any loss by any team I had ever covered or cheered for in my life. A night on the town with the Gazette’s Jeff Blair helped only mildly. My mood didn’t change much the next day and sadly neither did the Expos’ offense as they were shutout again, this time 7-0. If I’m not mistaken another night out in Los Angeles is what followed.
The next day, July 28th, Dennis Martinez pitched the 13th perfect game in major
league history. The announcer got to scream. His teammates didn’t make it easy however.
By the 6th inning the Expos still hadn’t scored a run in the entire series and Dodgers starter
Mike Morgan had a no-hitter of his own. Finally, in the 7th inning the Expos scored two runs and the game ended when pinch hitter Chris Gwynn flied out to Marquis Grissom in centre field. I had tears in my eyes as the ball dropped into Grissom’s glove. I was barely able to keep my emotions from overflowing as I was pretty much broadcasting the final innings straight to my dad and almost lost it. With post-game duties out of the way, I called him.
“I thought you were going to have a heart attack” he told me. I thought so too. Could anything sum up the ’90-91 Expos better than pitching two no-hitters and still finding a way to drop the series two out of three?
It looked like things were picking up, you could see some of the youngsters starting
to take charge. On the morning of Friday, September 13, after calling the team’s latest win the night before, giving the Expos 11 wins in 13 games, I took a flight home to Montreal.
The Expos went on to Chicago and were scheduled to come home Sunday night. But They would not return as scheduled. When I arrived I was told that a huge beam had fallen off Olympic Stadium. Certainly, I thought, this must be a joke. Sadly, the only joke was Olympic Stadium. The place with a roof that couldn’t be opened in a heavy wind now had another embarrassment to deal with.
I went home, washed my clothes, re-packed and headed back out on the road. I was the only one in the traveling party to see the city of Montreal again before the end of the season. The Expos played their final 26 games away from home, something they certainly were not prepared to do. Amazingly they won as many as they lost the rest of the way with a schedule that took them to: New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. New York, Philadelphia and Chicago again. St Louis, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Pittsburgh. The 1991 season was finally over with Expos finishing at 71-90.
The 1992 season saw the Expos field a team of players that would make noise in the
major leagues for years to come. Wil Cordero, Delino Deshields, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Mark Gardner, John Vander Wal and Mel Rojas all climbed the ladder through the organization. Dennis Martinez, Darren Fletcher, Ken Hill, John Wetteland and Moises Alou
were picked up in shrewd trades. Jeff Fassero was smartly picked up from St. Louis as a six year minor league free agent. And there was more talent on the way as Rondell White, Cliff Floyd and Mike Lansing arrived while Sean Berry was yet another smart acquisition. But in the
history of the Expos there was no better trade than the one involving Zane Smith. When all was said and done, Smith and outfielder Dave Martinez would net them Wetteland and Alou.
Baseball trades were no longer about what a player could do for you but more about
how much it would cost for him to do it. The younger the player, the cheaper he would be and the Expos were building an outstanding, CHEAP unit. Not only would Alou and Wetteland provide them with top notch performances, they would do so at an affordable price. Zane Smith brought the Expos Alou along with two youngsters, third baseman Willie Greene and southpaw reliever Scott Ruskin. Greene and Ruskin, along with Martinez, were shipped to Cincinnati for Wetteland. The Expos, with Dan Duquette as GM (after Dombrowksi fled to the expansion Florida Marlins) and on the advice of coach Kevin Kennedy, engineered a three team trade with the Dodgers and Reds. Kennedy had been with the Dodgers and assured the Expos that Wetteland would be a prime major league closer. He was right. Cincinnati served as a weigh station for Wetteland, a Cincinnati Red for a few days on paper only.
The ’92 Expos did have some veterans though. Gary Carter had returned for a last hurrah and Rick Cerone was his back-up. Plus, there was Spike Owen, Tom Foley, Tim Wallach, Ivan Calderon and Dennis Martinez.
It didn’t take long for young manager Tommy Runnells to turn this group against him. Spring training started with the manager arriving as ‘General’ Runnells. Riding in with a big splash onto the field in army fatigues as the new boss, supposedly ready to whip the boys into shape.
It was the first big step of turning them against him and Runnels would barely make it a month and a half into the season.
The game on April 30th in San Diego had dropped their record to 9-14. As the players showered and dressed, two buses awaited as usual through the tunnel and out into the Jack Murphy stadium parking lot. But nobody left as the pictures on the clubhouse television showed a horrific, surreal scene from somewhere else. It was a not so far away city ablaze. The Rodney King riots had engulfed Los Angeles and I thought, “We’re not really going there, are we?” And yet that’s where the buses and this traveling road show was supposed to be going. But, no, as it turned out, we were not going there. Instead, the buses took us back to our San Diego hotel where everyone would have the rest of the week off.
The Expos have been in some strange places in strange times. They were in Denver during the Columbine killings and in New York following the attacks on 9/11.
There’s nothing like a weekend off in San Diego while things are still warming up back home. A stay at the Marriott off the Harbour. The hotel was about a half mile walk from the best outdoor mall that I know of, the sensational Horton Plaza. The top floor had some outdoor cafe restaurants and one in particular that I always looked forward to. I could always taste the Boston Seafood Company when the plane landed in San Diego. I usually had the seafood lasagna or maybe a crab sandwich.
Saturday morning I got up, read the papers, went for a walk and settled in with
some lunch at Horton Plaza with my face firmly tucked in the sports page of the San Diego Union. I was startled to look up and find myself surrounded by Expos on all sides. To my left shortstop Spike Owen, to my right second baseman Tom Foley and across the table was back-up catcher Rick Cerone.
“He’s nuts,” one of them was saying while the other two nodded.
“Who’s nuts?” I asked.
“General Runnells” was the reply, almost in unison.
The Expos were scheduled to fly out of San Diego Monday around noon. They would however be busy before that flight took off. The “general” had scheduled an early morning practice for a team that hadn’t played in several days. For many of these guys, though not all, early morning meant arriving back at the hotel and getting some sleep. Day games were bad enough, but an early morning practice? If Runnells was slowly losing his troops before, he had completely lost them by now. Monday morning came and there were few smiling faces after the crack of dawn in the visiting clubhouse at Jack Murphy stadium. Outfielder Ivan Calderon stood half dressed with his arms folded:
“I not practice,” he said.
I don’t believe they stopped playing for Runnells on that date but you can be sure they stopped listening. You can also be sure that upper management got an earful about how this clearly was not going to work. It’s interesting to note that the team actually won eight of their next 14 game, or the last 14 games managed by Tommy Runnells in the major leagues. With the team at 17-20, and after a total of 149 games, not even a full big league season, Runnells was fired.
Felipe Alou, who had managed a lifetime of minor league games and who had pretty much
given up hope that his day or the day of almost any Hispanic managing in the big leagues would ever come, was hired, at age 57, as the new manager of the Expos. It took a little time, but his team would start to roll, like a snowball into an avalanche. Stoppable only by Major League Baseball itself and a consortium of eyes on the bottom line with no baseball vision at all.
A full third of a season later they had managed to arrive at the .500 mark overall. They were
29-26 under Alou, a moderate improvement but not in the league of what was to come. There were three separate win streaks of five games or better, the latest was six in a row, pushing them to 46-33 since what went down in San Diego. By September 4, they were in a division race, sitting just three games back of the Pittsburgh Pirates. They say you need to learn how to lose before learning how to win, that you learn from your disappointments. This team didn’t so much cave in as the Pirates pulled away with a huge September. It was however, another late season letdown for Expo fans. But this time there was great optimism of what was to be after an 87-75 finish.
My goodness, these kids were just scratching the surface. Forty five players would appear in an Expos uniform the following season. Only Dennis Martinez and back up infielder Randy Ready were over the age of 30. Spike Owen, Tom Foley and Rick Cerone were no longer physically around but surely a huge part of the transformation. There was no doubt that Felipe Alou was just what the doctor ordered, but it wasn’t the doctor, but those aforementioned veterans who had hurried the process along. The youngsters were for real and they were everywhere. A new five year cycle was underway. Certainly there was finally a winner in there somewhere.
Felipe Alou may not have managed in the major leagues previously and may not have spoken English as his first language but he sure seemed to know how to handle the media. He came in with a firm grasp of exactly what he wanted to do in that area. Felipe’s words were always measured. Nothing was ever said for no reason, and you didn’t want to fall on the wrong side of his line.
I mentioned the Jeff Juden story in the last chapter. Felipe would do everything to make sure his authority and judgment was rarely questioned. During his first spring training he made his point, one he was hoping he wouldn’t have to make it too many times again, this time through me. He may have already known that I probably wouldn’t bother to stick my nose into his business too often after that, but this exercise wasn’t about me. It was about all of the others in his office that day who may have thought it was a good idea to question him. Smart man that Felipe. In all my years covering sports, I have never observed another with such a keen
understanding of manipulation.
To be continued
