Break Up The Expos

One month into the season the Montreal Expos, a bunch of young, hungry overachievers, have the look of a playoff contender instead of a club that was picked by most prognosticators to finish last in the National League East. "We don't have big names, any $5 million guys," says Montreal outfielder Henry Rodriguez, who at week's end was leading the league in RBIs, with 27. "We're guys who are finally getting a chance and showing that we can play."

Through Sunday, Les Expos had won nine out of their last 10 and, at 17-8, had the best record in baseball. They had gotten solid hitting (a .306 team average, best in the league) and terrific defense, anchored by the brilliant double-play combo of second baseman Mike Lansing and shortstop Mark Grudzielanek, who were also hitting .388 and .361, respectively.

The man making all this work was Felipe Alou, the team's unflappable manager, who never complained when the '94 Expos, with the best record in baseball that year, were torn apart to cut the payroll to its current level of $15.4 million, lowest in the game. Instead, he has gotten the most out of the players he has been left with.

A case in point is Rodriguez, 28, who was born in the Dominican Republic, grew up playing basketball and did not take up baseball until he was 14. By the time he was 17, though, he was good enough to be signed by the Dodgers. But after watching him progress through their organization, the Dodgers decided Rodriguez would be, at best, a platoon player—even though he hit four homers in one spring training game in 1995. "The Dodgers put a tag on him," says teammate Pedro Martinez, another former Dodger. "It's hard to get rid of that tag." Yet Rodriguez still cried the day he was traded to the Expos in May 1995. "I loved the Dodgers," he says. "I never wanted to leave." Now he's thrilled to be in Montreal.

Last winter he lifted weights and gained 10 pounds—"It's all muscle," he says—up to 215. It showed on April 8, when he clubbed a 468-foot home run against the Cardinals. Rodriguez, who started the season platooning with Sherman Obando, had flashed that kind of power before, but it wasn't until April 20, when Alou made him the No. 3 hitter in the lineup and gave him a chance to play every day, that he proved he could hit big league pitching on a regular basis.

Grudzielanek, 25, is another player who has benefited from Alou's confidence. When the manager moved sore-armed Wil Cordero (since traded to the Red Sox) to the outfield last August and made Grudzielanek his shortstop, the Expos' infield play improved dramatically. Like Rodriguez, Grudzielanek displayed an early interest in basketball; he was all-state in high school in El Paso and was offered a basketball scholarship at UTEP, but he turned it down.

The most distressing thing about the Expos' improvement is that most fans in Montreal haven't taken notice. The Expos drew barely more than 10,000 per game during a recent 8-2 home stand. But there is hope for this small-market franchise: It turned a small profit of $40,000 in 1995, and with a $4 million payment expected this year from baseball's new revenue-sharing plan, which is awaiting final approval, there is talk that next season's payroll may rise as high as $25 million. There is even talk that ace lefthander Jeff Fassero, who will make $2.8 million this year and was rumored to be the next veteran shipped out, won't be traded after all. "If we keep winning," he says, "they're not going to get rid of me."

Strike Talk

Fans love high-scoring games, but when they occur every night, it's like watching slo-pitch softball. The quality of pitching and defense in the Twins' 24-11 win over the Tigers on April 24 was so bad that Minnesota manager Tom Kelly apologized to the fans for "that so-called exhibition of major league baseball." That game came five days after the Rangers had beaten the Orioles, 26-7. From 1955 to '77, not a single team scored 24 runs in a game, yet it has happened three times since last August, when the Cubs scored 26 in Colorado. And if all that weren't enough, on Sunday Montreal beat Colorado 21-9, Cleveland crushed Toronto 17-3, and Milwaukee topped Seattle 16-9. "After you've thrown a couple of touchdowns, the fans start to ask, 'What is this?' " says Angels pitcher Chuck Finley. "And it'll be worse when the weather gets hot."

Pitching has been horribly diluted by expansion, hitters are bigger and stronger than ever, and the new ballparks mostly favor the hitters. The only way to help pitchers—and they desperately need help—is to enlarge the strike zone, or at least call the strike zone as it's defined. "Call a strike from the armpits to the bottom of the knees," says Brewers reliever Mike Fetters. "That's what it says in the rule book."