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The Expos' last stand For one member of the glory years, end too painful to watchPosted: Thursday July 25, 2002 12:01 PMUpdated: Friday July 26, 2002 1:11 PM
By John Donovan, CNNSI.com He was 19 when he first walked onto the field at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. For Tim Raines, it was baseball heaven. He was in another country, playing America's pastime, in front of a bunch of fans who didn't speak his language and who never would place baseball anywhere close to hockey in their collective sports consciousness. It was different, for sure. They played two different anthems before every single game. "For 11 years, I thought that was the way it was supposed to be," Raines says. "When I went to Chicago, it was like 'You mean we're not going to play two national anthems?'" But the Expos were big league. And that made Raines a big leaguer. Twenty-three years later, Raines watches from across the field as his old slice of heaven crumbles. The Expos, once maybe the most colorful franchise in baseball, are doomed. They'll play a few dozen more games in front of a few thousand more fans, and then they'll sink into baseball history, a victim of the game's screwed-up economic system and the indifference of Montreal's fed-up baseball fans. It's a sad, sobering ending, especially bittersweet because of the Expos' spirited first-half play this season. But it's coming, as sure as the frustration etched across the face of Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame slugger who has served as manager of this final version of the Expos. What went wrong? Twenty years ago, in 1982 and '83, the Expos drew 2.3 million fans to Olympic Stadium, or about 28,000 a game. Before that, back in 1969, when the Expos came into being, they were a novelty, the first major league team outside of the United States. Rusty Staub was in right field on Opening Day that season, Maury Wills was at short and the immortal Coco Laboy at third. They played in an old stadium in the corner of Jarry Park near downtown for eight years until, at the beginning of the 1977 season, they moved into a stadium built for the 1976 Olympic Games.
By that time, catcher Gary Carter was a star, Andre Dawson was beginning an 11-year run in the outfield, Tony Perez had left Cincinnati's Big Red Machine for a couple of years at first and right-hander Steve Rogers was established as the Expos' workhorse. Two years later, in 1979, that 19-year-old outfielder from Florida came to Montreal where he became a seven-time All-Star, won the batting crown in 1986 with a .334 batting average -- and fell for a clean, friendly, intoxicating city. "It was very, very exotic, especially when you were that young," says Raines, 42, who is still playing, this season with the Florida Marlins. "It was nice being able to go to a city and it being different." And Montreal was different, with its large French-speaking population and its colorful red-white-and-blue uniforms. It was an American baseball outpost in the heart of a hockey hotbed, where fans saw baseball players more as a curiosity than as true sports stars. In Raines' first year, the Expos won more games than they lost for the first time in their 10 years of existence, though their 95 wins still weren't enough to win the National League East (Pittsburgh went 98-64 that season). Montreal drew 2 million fans for the first time that year. The Expos drew more than 2 million again in '80 when they won 90 games but, once again, failed to make the postseason.
Montreal wasn't exactly the center of the baseball world. But the city was definitely on the map. Then reality intruded. After the 1984 season, the popular Carter was traded to the New York Mets. Dawson left for the Chicago Cubs two years later and, after the '90 season, Raines was traded to the Chicago White Sox. It became a disturbing pattern for the Expos over the years, losing their best talent (Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Andres Galarraga and a young fireballing right-hander named Pedro Martinez, to name a few) through trades or free agency. Montreal's fans began to lose interest in a team that constantly changed. In '94, the team was first in the NL East when a players' strike wiped out the final six weeks of the season, as well as the playoffs and World Series. Soon after, the team started ridding itself of its highest-paid players. The Expos' owners pushed, hard, for a new stadium -- Olympic Stadium was decrepit by baseball standards; its retractable roof never worked -- but Montreal's citizens pushed back. No stadium deal ever was reached. More players left. More fans followed. In 1997, the Expos drew almost 1.5 million. The next season, fewer than 1 million showed up. It was the first time in more than two decades that the Expos didn't attract a million fans in a non-strike season. And now this. Baseball officials insist the franchise will be eliminated after the season. "There is no future," Robinson says. "I feel for the fans more than anything," says Raines. "I think the fans just got fed up with having good teams and then losing all their good players. Montreal fans were so used to winning, with the Canadiens there. Then there was this whole series of things that just kind of turned the fans away. "And then the strike [of '94] … that was the beginning of the end." It's easy now to look at all the empty seats in the old stadium and think that eliminating the Expos is not such a bad idea after all. But it wasn't that long ago that there was magic in Olympic Stadium. Last season, more than a decade after he left the Expos, Raines returned to the team where he began his baseball life. He walked onto the field at the home opener against the Mets, after battling with the disease lupus, and received a stirring ovation from an Olympic Stadium crowd of 45,183. "That," Raines says, "was the kind of electricity that town can bring." The next night, in a stadium where Dawson and Raines roamed, where Warren Cromartie and Tim Wallach and Pete Rose once played, where Dennis "El Presidente" Martinez twirled his magic, only 15,317 showed up. It has been a long 33-plus years. It will be a long second half. And then the Montreal Expos, the first big-league team outside of the U.S., will be big league no longer.
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