Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos (21 page)

After splitting their first 12 games of the second half, the Expos won five in a row at home, setting up a potential homestand sweep against the Braves on August 30. With the score tied in the bottom of the 11
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, Gary Carter walked with one out. Williams quickly summoned a pinch-runner: Steve Rogers, the staff ace who’d tossed a complete-game shutout just two days earlier. Cromartie hit a grounder to first, setting up a potential inning-ending double play. Instead, Rogers crashed into shortstop Rafael Ramirez, breaking up the play and causing a throwing error. It was a smart and aggressive play by Rogers, and also a highly questionable move by Williams to put his number-one starter in that spot in the first place. Right when the Expos needed him most, Rogers broke a rib and didn’t pitch again for nearly two weeks.

Other factors contributed to McHale’s growing disenchantment with the manager. Under Williams’ watch, several players hadn’t developed as hoped. Valentine was gone because of it, and Parrish, who’d been second in MVP voting two years earlier, had regressed badly and would finish 1981 hitting just .244 with eight home runs. Granted, injuries played major roles in both players’ decline, but McHale had become less inclined to forgive given the
expectations surrounding the Expos, compared to the disappointing results. Losing the final weekend of the season to the eventual World Series champion was one thing. Finishing third in the first half of the ’81 season, then limping along at 14–12 in the second half, a game and a half behind St. Louis with time running out, was harder to swallow.

On the morning of September 8, McHale called Williams to his suite at the Philadelphia hotel where the team was staying, and told him he’d been fired. Even with Williams’ shortcomings, the firing seemed to happen quite suddenly—and at a strange time, with less than a month left in the season. McHale defended his decision to Brodie Snyder.

“We didn’t feel we could win, the way we were playing, with a lack of direction and discipline and questionable tactics,” he said. McHale defended Williams a bit, saying, “he has done a lot of good things for us.… He knew how to win.” But since the strike ended, McHale said, Williams “seemed to have lost some of that.”

Williams’ firing sent shockwaves through the clubhouse. It was widely known that Williams and McHale had been talking about a new contract for the manager, and those talks had clearly gone nowhere. Though a small number of Expos, most notably Rogers, had grown tired of the manager’s sometimes acerbic approach, the majority reaction was one of confusion.

“I don’t know why they got rid of Dick Williams,” Cromartie said 30 years after the fact. “It was the dumbest thing they ever did.”

“The key to managing is to keep the five people that hate you away from the 20 that haven’t made up their minds,” said Lee. “That didn’t happen this time.”

If firing Williams that late in the season was confusing, hiring Jim Fanning to take his place seemed downright bizarre. Fanning had earned a strong reputation as a scout and talent evaluator
with the Braves and then the Expos, but it had been nearly 20 years since Fanning had worn a uniform. Throwing him into the heat of a pennant race as the team’s new manager was absolutely stupefying.

McHale ticked off the reasons for not choosing someone else. He didn’t want to go outside the organization, because he feared that an outsider would need awhile to learn the Expos’ culture, not to mention that hiring a big name would likely require a multi-year commitment, which the Expos weren’t ready to hand out. Nor did McHale want to give the gig to one of the team’s coaches, because he feared overmanaging from someone trying to earn the permanent job.

“I wanted somebody who would come in for a month without rocking the boat, who knew the players,” McHale told Snyder at the time of the hire. “Jim was a natural choice. What this club needs is a custodian, not an advocate.”

Others weren’t nearly as charitable about Fanning’s credentials. Michael Farber vividly remembered how the
Montreal Gazette
handled the hire.

“Jim was a terrific man, people called him ‘Gentleman Jim,’ ” recalled Farber. “Loyal and selfless and tireless. Incredibly ill-suited to be the manager.

“Twenty-five minutes before his first game as manager, Jim is in uniform, first time in forever. And Jim says, ‘I don’t know, it’s been so long … do the laces go under the flap, or over the flap?’ I went upstairs and wrote, ‘The Expos just hired a manager who doesn’t know how to tie his shoes.’ [Fellow
Gazette
writer] Ian McDonald had one of the best leads I’ve ever seen. ‘Rain spoiled Expos manager Jim Fanning’s debut last night. It stopped.’ ”

The Fanning experiment didn’t start well. Montreal lost its next two games in Philly, giving up 21 runs in the process. The series opener against the Cubs made it three losses in a row,
dropping the Expos’ second-half record to 14–15. More and more, it looked like a third straight disappointing ending to a season was imminent.

But the Expos ended their slide by winning the final two games of the series against the Cubs. That set up a gigantic 15-game homestand, their longest of the year, and a welcome change from that September schedule two years earlier. The homestand didn’t start well, though. Facing the Cardinals (the team they were chasing for the second-half crown), the Expos dropped three of five games, ending the series by splitting a pair of doubleheaders. Montreal was now just 18–18 in the second half, 3½ games behind St. Louis with just 17 left to play. The Expos continued to tread water at the start of another series against the Cubs, scoring an 11–0 blowout win only to lose a 2–1 nailbiter the next day.

That’s when Montreal caught fire. Bill Gullickson started things off with one of the best pitching performances in team history. Facing Chicago, Gullickson spun a three-hit shutout, striking out 13 batters en route to a 4–0 win. The next night brought the opener of a two-game series against the Phillies. Starting for Philly was Steve Carlton, who’d won his third Cy Young Award a year earlier and again ranked among the league’s most dominant pitchers. A classic game ensued: Carlton didn’t allow a single run in nine innings, but Ray Burris, the veteran right-hander acquired by Montreal over the winter to solidify the back of the rotation, didn’t either. It wasn’t until the end of the 10
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inning that both starters finally exited the game, with the score still tied 0–0. Reardon, who’d emerged as an excellent stopper and also someone capable of shutting down the opposition for multiple innings at a time, tossed three scoreless frames at the Phillies. The game went to the bottom of the 17
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inning. With the bases loaded and one out, Dawson finally put the game to bed, slashing a single to centre to give the Expos a 1–0 victory.

That kind of huge hit was typical for Dawson in an outstanding 1981 campaign. In just 103 games, Dawson walloped 24 home runs, stole 26 bases, and hit .302/.365/.553, winning the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards for the second straight year, and finishing second in MVP voting. He did all of that while playing through loads of pain, his knees getting worse with every passing season on the Big O’s unyielding cement turf. He’d have his knee drained three times a year, since it would build up 10 times as much fluid as the average player’s; each procedure would get chased with a cortisone shot, which hurt like hell. His knees still throbbed every day, and wearing a brace would likely have limited the wear and tear, but Dawson insisted on having full mobility in centre field and on the basepaths. He fought through the pain, trusting his over-the-top workout regimen and the team’s trainers and doctors to get him through the season. Ron McClain remembered those sessions well.

“When he would walk through the door,” McClain said, “I’d tap whoever was on the table and say, ‘Okay that’s it, time for the Hawk.’ ”

For the brave souls in the stands who stayed the entire four hours and 28 minutes to see Dawson’s game-winning hit, the win
was exhausting—but electrifying. It also typified a rising trend that no one would’ve expected: in hockey-mad Montreal, the surging Expos had become a hot commodity, maybe even hotter than the revered Canadiens.

The Habs had built a dynasty in the late ’70s, winning four Stanley Cup titles in a row. This wasn’t exactly shocking news—they’d also forged dynasties in the ’50s and ’60s, and won more championships than any other team in the big four North American team sports to that point (even more than the Yankees). But the Habs bowed out of the playoffs early in both 1980 and 1981, right as the Expos started taking off. The well-to-do crowd you’d normally see in the coveted red seats at the old Montreal Forum—men in three-piece suits, women in fur coats—started showing up in droves at Olympic Stadium.

“The Canadiens, for a short time, didn’t block out the sun,” said Farber. “There was an opening there. If the Canadiens weren’t going to play firewagon hockey, the Expos could win people over by playing firewagon baseball.”

“For a few years, the Expos were not only the top sports team in Montreal—they were the top sports team in Canada,” said author Alain Usereau. “The Habs dynasty ended in the late ’70s. The only Canadian hockey team during that period that went to the Cup final was the [Vancouver] Canucks, who were not that great and got swept by the Islanders. In Montreal, everything short of winning the Stanley Cup was a failure. Some people thought Montreal was entitled to win the Cup. ‘Will you go to the parade this year?’ ‘Nah, I’ll go next year.’ Then the Habs got ousted three straight years in the first round.

“The Expos took their place. They had very colourful players at that time, who were perfectly suited to Quebec and to French Canadians. Sports fans here really like to watch a bum, to see how they would succeed. Here’s an example: the Hilton Brothers
were very popular boxers in Montreal, even though they’d be the last people you’d invite as guests to dinner. People identified with Bill Lee, Rodney Scott, Ron LeFlore. They identified with those teams.”

“There was an aura,” said Charles Bronfman. “One of the nice things was, a lot of corporate people would take people to the games. But don’t forget, to fill up a stadium, you have to average 25, 30 thousand people. That can’t just be corporate stuff. It really became the place to be for a hell of a lot of people. It was a tough place to get to. For people on the West Island, it was very difficult. But people kept coming anyway.”

Of all the beautiful people who showed up to Olympic Stadium in that era, none was more recognizable than Donald Sutherland. The New Brunswick–born actor grew up a huge Expos fan. In 1972, he married French-Canadian actress Francine Racette and lived a bicoastal existence, working out of Hollywood and spending ample time in and around Montreal. He was to the Expos what Jack Nicholson is to the Lakers—the celebrity superfan with primo seats. Expos fans growing up in the ’70s and ’80s remember seeing Sutherland behind home plate—in a trench coat and hat, right in the centre-field camera shot—as surely as they remember watching Staub, Rogers, Carter, Dawson, and Raines.

Sutherland was a diehard fan, often driving three hours roundtrip from his home in the Eastern Townships outside Montreal to see home games. He showed up to one game in ’81 with his arm in a sling, having injured himself on set; he was, of course, wearing an Expos patch on the sling. He became an ambassador for the team, doing voiceovers on Expos documentaries. He arranged to have friends in Montreal set the phone down next to the radio so he could listen to games, whether he was in L.A. or on a movie set thousands of miles away in Europe or Asia. Marcia Schnaar, a long-time Expos office assistant who
worked for everyone from the team’s general manager to the travelling secretary, remembers getting occasional, unusual calls from Sutherland.

“One time, he called from his cellphone,” said Schnaar. “Nobody even knew about cellphones yet, but he had one. He was shooting a movie in Paris, and he’s got just a minute before he needs to get back, but ‘please, please, tell me what’s going on in this game.’ He needed to know.”

Calls to the office or leaving phone lines open for three hours to listen to the game—these were just fallbacks. Whenever possible, Sutherland’s agent would attach a clause to his movie contracts, stipulating that the studio must provide a radio and/or TV with satellite access on set. That way, if there was any way to pick up that day’s Expos game, he’d be able to hear it or watch it, no matter where in the world he was shooting.

“Donald was a great fan of the game,” said Van Horne. “He was good for the team—it was good for the franchise and for the city that he would be seen as a baseball fan. For all the years that he was supportive of the team, a lot of people associated Montreal with Donald Sutherland.”

Sutherland and other Expos crazies were treated to a frenzied finish in 1981. Montreal led the second-half standings by 1½ games and headed to St. Louis for a two-game set, only to drop both games and fall a half-game behind with five to go in the season. First facing their ’79 nemeses, the Pirates, the Expos swept that two-game series, getting strong starts from Gullickson and Burris. A Cardinals split during that same two-day stretch gave the Expos a half-game lead with just one three-game series remaining, in New York against the Mets.