Scott Carson

Stats man Scott Carson is now in his 17th season as "third man in the booth" during Blue Jays telecasts.

Andre Dawson.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since a Major League Baseball game has been played outside of Toronto in Canada.

From 1969 through the end of the 2004 season, the Montreal Expos, for a lot of baseball fans in this vast and varied country, were the team to cheer for. Some of my earliest baseball memories can easily be recalled. All I have to do is hear the dulcet tones of Dave Van Horne and it can take me back to a simpler time, before the Internet, before reality TV, heck even before Tiger Woods stopped playing his game "one hole at a time."

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Expos lately.

It was brought on just before Christmas as I was flying to do a Vancouver Canucks game for Sportsnet Pacific in Nashville and a guy sitting across from me was wearing an old-school, multi-coloured Expos hat that was so beat up I swear he swiped it off Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee’s head.

That same hat will be what appears on Andre Dawson’s plaque when he’s inducted into the hallowed Hall of Fame July 25th. Coupled with the fact that Van Horne and long-time French play-by-play man Jacques Doucet are on the final ballot for the Ford C. Frick award, given annually to excellence in baseball broadcasting, it means that the ghost of this once-proud franchise will be resurrected, at least on the final weekend in July.

I’ll admit that I was never a huge fan of the Expos growing up.

I was a Detroit Tigers fan with the Cincinnati Reds being the team that I cheered for in the National League. Not that I didn’t watch Expos’ games, though. Back in the day, before the Blue Jays took flight in 1977, the Expos provided one of just two opportunities (also the NBC Saturday afternoon Game of the Week) for a young baseball fan to get his weekly fix.

Every Wednesday night on the CBC, the sounds of Van Horne and his long-time analyst Duke Snider could be heard echoing through my childhood home in West Hill, Ontario. I was reminded of just how engrained the sound of Van Horne’s voice was in my personal psyche a couple of years back when I was in Florida for an interleague series against the Marlins and on an off day, was driving north to Fort Lauderdale with Van Horne calling the game on the radio. I could close my eyes and see the old living room on Darlingside Drive, with our first colour TV in the corner by the front window.

Quite simply, it was very soothing to think back to those days.

Later in my professional life, as my career as a TV statistician was just beginning, I did my first game in the booth in Cincinnati of July 1990 for TSN, sitting alongside Van Horne and Ken Singleton. They say you never forget your first and that is very true in this case. I remember the day was extremely hot and I was wearing a hideous lime green shirt that didn’t exactly hide the fact that I was sweating profusely, partly because of the oppressive heat but mostly because I didn’t know what I was doing.

The Expos lost that day and the only saving grace on that whirlwind day was that I rode up the elevator to the press box with my childhood hero Johnny Bench.

It’s sad that the Expos franchise was allowed to die on the vine those six years ago. When you think back to all the greats that made their professional names in Montreal, from Rusty Staub to Bill Stoneman to Tim Raines to Pedro Martinez and on, the Expos were once one of the top developmental teams in all of professional sports. And not just on the field, but the Expos also developed some top notch front office talent with the likes of Tigers’ president Dave Dombrowski, Mets’ general manager Omar Minaya and Blue Jays’ rookie G.M. Alex Anthopoulos all having cut their teeth with the Expos.

No franchise was hit harder by the work stoppage in 1994 than Les Expos which, ultimately, hastened their departure for Washington a decade later. They were sitting six games atop the N.L. East standings on August 11th when the players decided to strike, wiping out the ’94 post-season. After that, financing for an open-air ballpark in Montreal fell through, leading to a steady decrease in attendance.

It’s sad to remember that during their final homestand in Montreal, three of the nine games were witnessed by less than 4,000 fans. I guess the people, as they say, had spoken.

Yet here we are in 2010 and the Montreal Expos are going to get some major publicity this summer. And when Andre Dawson gets his day in the sun, in that quiet little hamlet in upper New York State, Canadian baseball fans can rejoice and reminisce once again about Canada’s first Major League baseball team.

And if Dave Van Horne or Jacques Doucet are also feted that day, I might even have to pull out that old red, white and blue hat that I have stashed away in my office closet.

That wouldn’t be a bad thing, eh?