Our Team

For anyone who grew up in Montreal between 1968 and 1994, as I was lucky enough to do, or at least for any anglophone, to use the term that replaced “English Montrealer” in the course of that time, Terry Mosher’s Aislin’s Montreal Expos: A Cartoonist’s Love Affair is almost too painfully resonant to read. Here, from the hand and memory of the artist who (under his daughter’s name, Aislin) chronicled the time and the team for the Montreal Gazette, are all the images of an era. It was one that started very badly, with the October Crisis, then took (from the anglophone point of view) a wrong turn with the referendum that made it plain that independence might not be a long way off. But it ended in the fortunate way of Montreal, with political things more or less in place and in many ways much improved and with a kind of cultural renaissance that, for the most part, continues to this day. What is now called and valued as the Plateau was then still the student ghetto, while the wide area around Jarry Park, today filled with cafés and tech start‑ups, was a bleaker and more unvariegated place, to an outsider’s eye anyway. (I say “outsider” because, of course, to a Michel Tremblay it was as filled with incestuous energies and comic extravagance as Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans.)

The Expos voyage announced that era, as the demonstrable excellence of the Canadiens in the Jean Béliveau era announced the Quiet Revolution. (If we can play hockey that well, why are we hiding our excellence behind an altar?) The bulwark of anglophone insularity was already breaking. I recall my friend Eliot Rubinoff, whom I had dragooned from Northmount High into skipping (the Canadian verb; in the United States, they’d say “cutting”) class on the very first Expos opening day, catching himself and carefully articulating, to a Québécois alongside us in the bleachers, “Avez‑vous un crayon?” (He wanted to keep score.) Eliot asked for, and got, a pencil. It was a quiet revolution of its own.

The vibe of Mosher’s book is not melancholy at all but joyous in its way, even as it delineates a story that’s in many ways sad. The team failed. The city altered. And it turns out the beloved cartoonist and author, a fixture of the Gazette in those years, had to go into rehab after too much partying with too many players. But the memory remains, at least, clean and pleasurable. Whereas other erstwhile teams — the Vancouver Grizzlies, the first Winnipeg Jets, the Seattle Pilots, the original Alouettes — leave messy memories, the Expos come to mind as a sharp if woefully lost ray of sunlight. It was a good ride, with an unhappy ending, which is the most you can say about just about anything human.

As Mosher narrates it, the decision to send a team to Montreal was a bit antic on the part of Major League Baseball, as well as an after-effect of the triumph of Expo 67. That festival is also still golden in memory, though most historians wrongly, or too exclusively, credit it to Jean Drapeau, who used that built‑up credit to eventually create the disaster of the Olympic Stadium. (This is commonplace civics: in New York City, Rudy Giuliani inherited the revival of Times Square and then took credit for it, credit he is still largely, and wrongly, given.) Still, it was the long-serving mayor who helped bring the Expos, with money from the Bronfmans, to town.

Originally, the Expos were supposed to play in the Autostade, an oddly interrupted — the stands had huge spaces between them — motorsports stadium left over from the world’s fair. I have, or had, a weird affection for the Autostade, since it marked the outer edge of the Île de la Cité, to which my family had moved to live in Moshe Safdie’s Habitat, another, more glorious leftover from Expo. I learned to ride a bike circling around the abandoned pavilions — the Labyrinth, a site that showed advanced films, and various other structures — where I experienced an odd and enchanting feeling, with the St. Lawrence, one of the few rivers to earn the epithet “mighty,” not far away.

The Autostade, as I could have told the team’s management, was clearly unsuitable for baseball, while Delorimier Stadium, home of the old Montreal Royals field, was still standing but too antiquated to host a Major League club. The brilliant idea to rehab a small municipal field, Jarry Park Stadium, out in the east end was a more or less last-minute inspiration. When it opened, on a chilly but sunny April day in 1969, it was embraced by baseball fans as one of the best places in the big leagues to watch a game. (This was long before the craze for retro parks that began with Camden Yards in Baltimore.)

For the next decade, I never missed a home opener. Indeed, I can still recite the names of that first starting lineup against the Cardinals. Shut your eyes, no cheating: first base, Donn Clendenon; second base, Maury Wills . . . No! First base, Bob Bailey; second base, Gary Sutherland . . . Shortstop, Maury Wills; third base, Coco Laboy; catcher, John Bateman; centre field, Don Bosch; right field, Rusty Staub; left field, Mack Jones. (Not bad, and I say this as one who, in middle age, uses a mnemonic to remember the number of his locker at a New York City shvitz, based on the Canadiens’ uniforms of the ’70s: 11 is best remembered as Yvon Lambert, 12 as Yvan Cournoyer, 14 as Mario Tremblay, and so on.)

The Expos were witness to a complicated moment in a complicated way, since the players and managers were completely innocent of the provincial quarrels they were plumped into, being Americans who had come here, one secretly suspects, faute de mieux and eager to go play in big-league American towns. Faute de mieux . . . Using the French reminds me that there was a long period when the insularity of North American language politics was never more evident, as sportswriters and broadcasters would come north to chortle at the existence of French terms for familiar positions: arrêt‑court for shortstop, voltigeur de gauche for left fielder, and the like. All those funny names! Can you imagine! It made one proud to be at least a semi-bilingual Montrealer.

The history of the Expos, told before, is here told again. The comic start. The slow-growing excellence of the team in the ’70s. And how it ended with as good a lineup, offensively anyway, as any in baseball, anchored by not one nor two but three bona fide Hall of Famers: the uniquely able do‑it‑all catcher Gary Carter, the matchlessly graceful centre fielder Andre Dawson, and the “explosive” second baseman Tim Raines, a hero of the new on‑base percentage appreciation society. Yet they never quite scaled the mountain, losing to a Los Angeles team in 1981 on “Blue Monday,” when the Dodgers’ Rick Monday hit an improbable homer and the Expos failed again to reach the World Series.

After that team was disassembled by free agency and dumb trades — Carter went to the Mets for nothing much at all and then led them to their legendary 1986 championship — another first-rate team got put together. “They had the best record in baseball in 1994”— Expos fans know these words by heart, and can and will recite them as plaintively as any prayer — when the strike ended the season without a World Series. After that, the team fell apart through bad management and worse ownership and left for the American capital.

The fall of the Expos is often blamed as well on the limitations of Montreal’s Olympic Stadium — designed Olympianly by a French architect, without baseball in mind. Although there is some justice in this argument, it is wildly overstated. The Big O was a fine place to watch nine innings on a summer night, if the team was strong and the weather nice. It would have had to be replaced by a modern (that is, retro) ballpark eventually, but it was no worse than Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia or Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, other big round concrete stadiums of the big round concrete period.

Mosher recounts this familiar tale, but his major preoccupation is the culture that surrounded the team itself. The inebriation problem on the Expos was perhaps predictable, although, ounce for ounce, the classic Yankees lineups probably had an even larger problem, given that both Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle were hard-core alcoholics and substance abusers on a gargantuan scale, a truth covered up by sportswriters of old, many of whom shared the same drugs. When the culture changed, they got wrong-footed.

A large part of the Expos story in the ’80s — and implicitly, perhaps, the hidden reason for their puzzling failure to get over the hump — seems to reside in the truly awesome extent of the partying. It is pitiful to see great careers gone wrong — though, of course, we moralistic commentators conceivably had our own great careers gone wrong in other ways. It is always easier to stand in judgment on athletes, since the Dwight Goodens and the Ellis Valentines, figures of immense talent and at best uneven or precocious accomplishment, are easier to condescend to and shake one’s head over than their equivalent in literature: those first novelists who never quite land a second or third successful book, of whom there are many. (Some of them, to be sure, are substance abuse victims, too.) One of the things athletes are there to do is give us someone to be judgmental about. This happens in ways both pleasurable — who’s the GOAT? — and puritanical. If only Valentine had done otherwise! That Mosher — whose cartoons of the referendum period (“O.K. Everybody take a Valium!”) are still well remembered — succumbed to the same virus of addiction reminds us that the fault lies in ourselves as much as in our stars.

Could the Expos have survived? The story seems to be one of inadequate or incompetent capitalization more than of simple small-market blues, but I suppose in a sense they’re the same thing. The Expos story can’t be told as social history, anyway, without an ironic glance at the parallel growth and departure of the Quebec Nordiques — ironic because in this case it was the Montreal Canadiens who played the role of the New York Yankees while the Quebec City team was, so to speak, the Expos, too undercapitalized a club in too small a town to survive. Quebec City in the National Hockey League, like Montreal in Major League Baseball, clearly had the requisite passion and local enthusiasm but not, it seems, the infrastructure of exploitation in the media that was also necessary.

For a moment or two a few years ago, it appeared that the dream of bringing the Expos back was not quite the fantasy it might have seemed. The ’80s star Warren Cromartie fronted a mission — financed by whom, exactly, it wasn’t clear — to build a new ballpark near the Bell Centre and perhaps bring the Tampa Bay Rays away from Florida and to us. Our ravished, wintry hearts — to borrow a phrase the great sportswriter Roger Angell coined to depict Expos fans — were briefly warmed and then went cold again. A transplant now seems no more likely than a revived Nordiques.

Baseball gets to be an absurdly bigger business every day. Sure, people said that even when salaries were, shockingly, around four or five hundred thousand dollars. But now the average is genuinely unbelievable: around five million dollars, with the price of a star annually around fifty or sixty. That’s a lot for a small town to finance. Only this year, the Bronfmans were still presenting themselves as optimistic about bringing baseball back. But it is hard to credit their hopes. Few small towns can compete anymore; given its increasingly monolingual market and population, Montreal certainly can’t. Indeed, I have the impression — perhaps wrongly, though it’s reinforced by this lovely book — that the imprint of the Expos is left more strongly on anglophone Montrealers, including those of us in exile, than on francophone ones. On Amazon, there does seem to be a two-volume French memoir of the Expos years available . . . but that is all. On the English side, there are so many books, including one devoted solely to Blue Monday, written by Danny Gallagher.

So keen was my love of baseball and of the Expos that my very first piece to appear in The New Yorker, the great event of my professional life, was about . . . the Expos. But my own appetite for the game has much diminished, in part because of the Expos’ passing, no doubt, but also in part because of a genuine devaluation in recent years, in which baseball has become another example: in everything from tic‑tac‑toe to computer chess, a well-solved pastime is a dull one.

The analytics revolution begun by Bill James in those same 1980s has overtaken and transformed the game so that all of the classic one‑run or one‑out strategies that we delighted to watch Raines and Dawson execute — the suicide squeeze, the stolen base, the hit and run, the well-executed bunt — have been shown to be inefficiencies, completely irrelevant to the art of winning. Baseball is now won by hitting home runs and by never wasting outs, and so the game has become a confrontation between a hard-throwing pitcher and a hard-swinging batter: strikeouts go up, home runs go up, stolen bases disappear. (The “track team” of those days past — the speed punch of Ron LeFlore, Rodney Scott, and Andre Dawson — was, in retrospect, an illusion, which may help explain why the Expos lost so often in games they should have won.) At the same time, pitch counts have become so omnipresent that a seven-inning pitcher — remember him? — is now an iron man, while platooning left and right has never been so fierce, nor so exhausting to watch, as pitchers shuttle on and off the mound like tugboat captains in a busy harbour. And so we get the more one-dimensional modern game that’s robbed of inefficiencies as well as entertainment — robbed of the vital experience of possibility seized and improvisational intelligence modelled that is at the heart of our love of spectator sports.

While I no longer have sufficient passion for the sport, I still have a passion for my passion, which is perhaps all that nostalgia is: a passion for a spent passion. Raines and Carter and Dawson, heroes of my youth, are in the Hall of Fame in their Expos caps, even if Dawson has petitioned to have his replaced by a Cubs cap (not an entirely unreasonable request as he had his most celebrated seasons, if not his best ones, in the more easily stirred media air of Chicago). The last time I was in Montreal — to lecture at McGill and to go to a hockey game with my son, blessedly a Habs fan almost as intense as his father — I was stunned to discover that Crescent Street was dominated by a twenty-one-storey mural of Leonard Cohen. The echt anglophone Jewish Montreal troubadour’s stumbling French and foreign reputation — a god elsewhere, to locals he was a puzzling local boy minstrel — are now forgotten, while the warm heart and slightly mixed-up mysticism he offered are welcome in Quebec culture. (The Baha’i faith back then was uniquely popular in Quebec, and I suspect it still is.) Nick Auf der Maur Alley, named after another Gazette legend of the time, is there as well, right off Crescent.

Where, as the French poet didn’t quite ask, are the ’Spos d’antan? In our heads, and on them. You know us in exile by our tricoloured caps.