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Montreal Expos
Scouting Report
By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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Wave good-bye
The betting is Perez will soon be joining other costly
former Expos on the money train out of
Montreal.
(Al Tielemans)
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Actual
slogan in the Expos' we-need-a-new-ballpark campaign: Imagine the
show. Actual quote from Montreal general manager Jim
Beattie: "We're not trying to win." Imagine
that.
Forget the National League East. What the Expos are trying
to capture is the public's interest, not to mention some of
its cash. If by July the club has sold close to its goal of
at least 12,000 personal seat licenses for a new ballpark,
Montreal
expects in 2001 to be playing in a
downtown, 35,000-seat bandbox and
to have a payroll in the range
of $35 million—at least triple
its meager 1998 total of
$10 million. If the Expos do not sell enough PSLs by midsummer
(only 4,000 had been purchased by mid-March) the team will
be put up for sale and probably
moved.
Le Parc
Idéal, as the
brochures promoting the stadium gush, would cost $176 million,
with $56 million coming from PSLs and $28 million from
naming rights. Government and private funds would provide
the rest. Because the stadium would be built across from
the Molson
Centre, the two-year-old home of the Montreal Canadiens,
the Expos believe a rival brewery, Labatt's, would be a
natural sponsor. Then they could call the place Labatt
Rack, and could taxi relievers to the mound in a
Labattmobile.
"Montreal is a city of festivals all summer long:
music, jazz, art, theater,"
Beattie says. "It's a late-night city. People go out
to eat at 10 o'clock. We see baseball fitting perfectly in
that 7-to-10 window when people can walk over to the
ballpark
and see the
Expos."
The club has commissioned a smorgasbord of ballpark
renderings to use as sales tools—balsa architectural
models,
computer-enhanced photos and artists' sketches—a campaign
that will cost
$1 million-plus, more than Montreal will pay all but two of
its players, lefthander Carlos Perez and outfielder Rondell
White.
Forgive those in uniform, however, if they can't imagine
such a rosy future. In its 30th year, this team has yet to
win its first full-season title. Dismayed by another
off-season of watching management cast off his best (read:
expensive) players,
manager Felipe Alou played hard-to-get with the media all winter,
reasoning that that was better than answering the same old
questions. Shortstop Mark
Grudzielanek opted for openness, unimpressed by Beattie's claim
that "we're already going down the path to
having a competitive team ready for
2001."
"I don't want to wait around for 2001 for a winning
team," the 27-year-old Grudzielanek says. "The
next three to five years should be my best, and I feel I
have a lot to contribute to a championship team. I can't
believe this franchise calls itself a
major league organization with a payroll of $10 million—and
we're supposed to play teams with $50 million
payrolls?"
Grudzielanek is one of only 10 players from last year's
Opening Day roster still in the organization. The 36-man
spring training squad—which includes no one whose big
league career predates the Clinton Administration—has
spent fewer days in the majors
(26 years, 28 days) than the Baltimore DH platoon of Harold
Baines and Joe
Carter.
In what has become an annual ritual, Montreal is grooming a
group of young talents, including sensational rightfielder
Vladimir Guerrero, 22, second baseman Orlando Cabrera, 23
and
righthander Carl Pavano, 22, who was obtained in the trade that
sent
National League Cy Young Award winner Pedro Martinez to the
Red Sox. One American
League scout called Pavano "the best pitching prospect in all
the minor leagues" last
season.
"When I traded Pedro, my goal was to find the best
young starting pitcher with less than one year of major
league service," Beattie says. "[Indians
righthander] Jaret Wright wasn't available. He pitched too
well in the
postseason."
Guerrero, Cabrera and Pavano, however, face the same
uncertain future as did every other Expos star from Larry
Walker to John Wetteland to Martinez: Where will they be
after five years of big league service? White is the only
Montreal player under
contract beyond this year. Beattie intends to sign his top young
players to long-term deals—that's the early '90s Cleveland
blueprint that Milwaukee and Pittsburgh also have
adopted—but without the green light for the ballpark,
"we're doing it not quite as
aggressively as the others."
Uh\!huh.
Grudzielanak would seem to be one of those building blocks.
He was an All-Star in 1996 and tied a league record last
year for doubles by a shortstop (54). Yet his take on
committing to a future in Montreal suggests the Expos have
as much selling to do
in their own clubhouse as outside of it. Says Grudzielanek,
"It's stupid for me to say I want to be here. I want
to
win.
—by Tom Verducci
Scouting Report | By the Numbers | Players To Watch | Projected Roster
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