"You're outta there!!" by Apollo

A quieter, more pensive column today for the passing of the enigma that was the Montreal Expos. Today, as has been reported by several media outlets, the Expos are due to play their final home game before Major League Baseball sends them to Washington, D.C. next season. Now, given the recent history of management and administration in the Bud Selig era, anything is possible and the Expos could very well spend yet another vagabond season in Montreal before shipping out to some other destination, but all indications and reports are that Major League Baseball has secured a group of investors who will purchase the Expos for somewhere in the $300 million USD range, charge the taxpayers of Washington an even higher tax rate to build an even more expensive stadium to house the new renamed club and "America's Game" will continue. Appropriate then, that we take a small moment to reminisce on a ball club that both Wongoz and I have a fond affection for.

It's probably useless and futile to go over all the "could have been's" and "should have been's" in the Expos saga. Suffice it to say that it is highly unlikely such a debacle as the Expos' past few seasons have been would have occurred in any American city, in any other professional sport, or have been as under reported as this one was. As the proverbial and literal "wards of baseball" the Expos saw fan support predictably drop into the low thousands over the last three years, with a significant portion of their "home games" played in San Juan, Puerto Rico. While the end of pro baseball in Montreal is only becoming official now, the city of Montreal essentially gave up on this team years ago when it was patently obvious that baseball had abandoned them.

Contrary to popular belief, Montreal is a passionate sports town beyond simply hockey. I suppose we'll see just how passionate they are with no NHL games this year. The Expos were Canada's first major league baseball franchise, appearing on the map several years before the Toronto Blue Jays. Over the years, the franchise developed a reputation for developing young players, scouting exceptionally well, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean where the future stars of baseball were discovered, and having a plethora of talent that kept coming up from the minors. Every season the Expos seemed to be loaded with young players who would one day be stars. All of this talent culminated in 1994 when Montreal boasted the best record in baseball, featuring a lineup that included current Boston Red Sox superstar Pedro Martinez as well as Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Mark Grudzielanek, Marquis Grissom and Kirk Rueter, all of whom are still in the majors. I remember going to games that season, when the Expos gave the Atlanta Braves all they could handle, the same Atlanta Braves who have gone on to win every National League East pennant since that year.

Back then, fans showed up. They showed up in droves. They showed up to a decaying antiquated embarrassment of a stadium that was built in 1976 and was hardly adequate for baseball. The Expos were so consistently good up to that point that there was talk, even among American media, that the Blue Jays and Expos could conceivably meet in an All-Canadian World Series. Then the collective bargaining nightmare hit and baseball never recovered in Montreal. The star players were all shipped out in the following years in order to trim payroll. Ownership was never consistent nor supportive, and once the vaunted development system was purged, the Expos became a joke. Despite the tease of a new throwback downtown stadium, the shocking superstardom of Vladimir Guerrero and the lukewarm pennant run which brought Bartolo Colon in for a brief stint, Expos fans and indeed Montrealers have known for about six years that baseball had already died in the city. So it is that on their last day, few are actually sad, and the promise of Washington is what's on the minds of most media and baseball fans, who long ago either forgot about the Expos, or never really cared about them in the first place.

Recently, in an interview reflecting on what could have been, Pedro Martinez, the only Cy Young award winner in Expos history, passionately said that Montreal was the best city he had ever played in. The Red Sox ace said he would have taken far less money to stay in Montreal than he eventually received in Boston. He even went so far as to say that if the 1994 Expos had stayed together, they would have surely challenged the New York Yankees for baseball supremacy over the last decade. While a lot of what Martinez says is likely just good sound bites designed to be exaggerated, the fact that a foreign born player, with no remaining connection to Montreal, and who currently plays for a playoff team in one of the biggest baseball markets in the world, would continue to profess loyalty for a city he left years ago is the personification of why fans are both frustrated and sad at the loss of their Expos. The city shows indifference or even anger at recent events where the Expos are concerned, but I suspect that for most, these feelings are designed to mask a profound sadness and even bitterness. How could baseball first deny us a championship in the one year we were actually good enough to win, and then tear our franchise apart over the subsequent years.

In the coming months and years, baseball will celebrate its return to the American capital, which was once a thriving baseball market in the early years of the sport's long history. The players who once won for the Expos will retire and the Expos will fall somewhere behind the Brooklyn Dodgers and even the Winnipeg Jets in the annals of transplanted teams in sports history. Wongoz will take out his Delino DeShields jersey every once in a while and we'll spend some time saying "What if?" as we always do about a multitude of topics, including the Expos. But until sufficient time has passed, and as long as some former Expos continue to play and shine in major league baseball, there will be reminders. There will be small hints of what could have been. So today isn't actually an end to a sad story of professional baseball in Montreal. It's rather the tired beginning of a series of sad memories that will linger for a while longer. Montreal and Major League Baseball are both better off without each other, but that alone probably isn't enough for most to get over this debacle. Je me souviens.