This story originally appeared in the July 28, 2014 issue of Sportsnet Magazine
Before the dream, it’s wise to give stark reality its due. Before envisioning Bryce Harper as the new “Kid,” some inconvenient truths must be acknowledged.
Even if commissioner Bud Selig wanted the Montreal Expos to stay, Major League Baseball couldn’t survive in the city without a new stadium. Most likely, that stadium would have required considerable public funding. Most definitely, it would have required a committed owner willing to put up with a weak Canadian dollar. Did either the group of local businessmen who bought the Expos from Charles Bronfman or, later, Jeffrey Loria have the necessary combination of financial clout and political will to do this? Not a chance in hell, as was revealed when the Quebec government killed Claude Brochu’s “Parc Labatt Park” dream in 1998. Would Bronfman’s son, Stephen, the reluctant patron saint of the dreamers, have been able to do so? We’ll never know.
But what fun is reality? Reality doesn’t fill 81 afternoons and evenings with baseball. Reality doesn’t allow for the possibility of a late-season wild-card chase in a sport where some of the traditional big spenders no longer call the shots; for the possibility of Stephen Strasburg standing on the mound on a cool fall evening just across from the Bell Centre, peering into the catcher’s glove, his breath visible, as Ryan Zimmerman buries his chin into his turtleneck to stay warm at third base. Reality doesn’t allow for the sound of bat on ball and the cheers of a crowd against the backdrop of a steamy summer’s night, the mountain visible from seats down the right-field line. Hell, play 15 innings and Crescent Street’s still good to go for a couple of hours.
A common sense of on-field vigour makes it tempting to draw a direct line from the potential of the Expos’ “Team of the ’80s”—including that franchise-defining pitch from Steve Rogers to Rick Monday—to the trendy Nationals of recent seasons. But the Nationals’ soul-sucking moment (a blown 6–0 lead to the St. Louis Cardinals in the fifth and deciding game of the 2012 National League Division Series) differs from “Blue Monday.” If Monday’s home run was shocking in its finality, the Nationals’ 9–7 loss to the Cardinals was more death by a thousand paper cuts—or, more precisely, a couple of walks and two-run singles off closer Drew Storen. Et voilà: 4 1/2 decades and counting and still no World Series.
There is temptation to see in Harper’s megawatt personality and game hints of Gary Carter’s. Le Kid Redux? The Expos, after all, made their bones by drafting and developing multi-talented outfielders. The lineage runs from Andre Dawson and Tim Raines to Larry Walker and Vladimir Guerrero, so Harper would be a worthy inheritor. But here’s another inconvenient truth: Both Harper and Strasburg are represented by agent Scott Boras, and it stands to reason that the “premium” agents place on star players when it comes to having them sign in Canada—the added dollars or contractual years to which even NHL teams are now subject—would have been in play. True, a drafted player has limited options in baseball but, make no mistake, Boras wouldn’t cut a Montreal franchise any slack. (He also represents Jayson Werth, whose seven-year, $126-million free-agent deal was taken as a sign that MLB’s new Washington franchise was open for business. Tough to see that deal signed with a Montreal team.)
Livan Hernandez, the last link to the final Montreal team, left the franchise in 2011. So, the most visible remaining connection is Nationals television analyst F.P. Santangelo, as well as the Expos’ retired numbers at Nationals Ballpark. In truth—shh!—a case can be made that the Marlins under Loria have more Expos DNA. In addition to the owner and his stepson, David Samson, no less than 10 front office and uniformed personnel remain from the last season of Loria’s Expos ownership. The voice of the Expos, Hall of Famer Dave Van Horne, calls the Marlins’ games. GM Larry Beinfest and special assistant Jim Fleming have lost their jobs, but it was Fleming in particular—who cut his teeth under Gary Hughes, the godfather of the Expos’ scouting department that produced Delino DeShields and Marquis Grissom among others—who helped inculcate the Marlins’ shrewd ability to identify young talent both within and outside the organization.
Whether a Montreal team would have tried to win on the cheap like the Marlins—who have focused on Latin America in a way the Expos did as well—or been able to spend like the Nationals is, of course, an unknown. Factor in that Nationals owner Ted Lerner is worth $4.7 billion and is in his late 80s, though, and there is an urgency to his ownership much like that of Mike Illitch’s with the Detroit Tigers: Mortality, the great motivator.
The experience of the Toronto Blue Jays would suggest an approach closer to the former than the latter, though taking place in a National League East Division that has been an easier nut to crack than the American League East. So we’re maybe talking a combination of Bryce Harper with a little Ryan Zimmerman and maybe Jose Fernandez and Josh Beckett thrown in. In other words, of drafting smartly and striking when the window of opportunity arises. Could Russell Martin have ended up playing just a short walk from his condo in Vieux-Montréal? Could Alex Anthopoulos have worked his way up from Jim Beattie’s errand runner to become GM of the Expos? What we are talking about is trying to make hay as a member of baseball’s mushy middle class, of not always being a threat to go deep, but at least getting to step up to the plate. It is the chance to dream the way we used to dream—to dream of Nos Amours.
Jeff Blair is a Sportsnet columnist and host of The Jeff Blair Show on Sportsnet 590 The Fan. He covered the Expos for Montreal’s Gazette from 1989 to 1997 and for The Globe and Mail.