Authors: Jonah Keri
Jim Fanning:
“People don’t remember that Jeff Reardon wasn’t Jeff Reardon yet. He only had 10 saves in his career before coming to the Expos.”
Steve Rogers:
“Reardon had a bad back, but they sent him down there and he was ready to go for the ninth inning.”
Serge Touchette:
“They wanted to go with their best guy at the time, which was Rogers. Even if he wasn’t a relief pitcher, if you’re going to get beat, you want it to be your best guy. Rogers was the best pitcher in baseball at the time. He pitched well every time out down the stretch. He beat Steve Carlton twice in a week in the first playoff series. He threw a complete game against the Dodgers in Game 3. He would be pitching on two days’ rest, but he was pitching so well. I thought it was a good move.”
Tim Raines:
“Rogers had to come in, but he had almost never pitched in relief in his career.”
Jim Fanning:
“Ask yourself who was the best pitcher in the National League the last five weeks of the season. Rogers. He’d given up two runs in the entire playoffs. After the rainout, he came to [pitching coach] Galen Cisco and me and said, ‘It’s my day to throw between starts anyway.’ I told him if it came to that, I wouldn’t have him relieve during an inning in progress. I said it’d be at the start of an inning. Burris was pitching a hell of a game, then he started to tire. We had an opportunity there to start the ninth, where it was not a save situation. So Steve Rogers came into the game.”
Steve Rogers:
“You know being brought in for that situation, it was not what had been discussed prior to the game. There were a lot of things that ebbed and flowed in that decision-making process. I was going to be the first guy out of the pen if Ray got into trouble and got knocked out early. It was always contemplated that I would be the first guy out of the bullpen before it got
out of hand. Then he goes out and throws eight innings of one-run ball. Hell yeah, Ray was on his game.
“So they sent me down to warm up in a spot I wasn’t necessarily expecting. I was fine physically, but my adrenaline was pumping too hard. I didn’t control it and I was overthrowing the sinker. Mechanically, I lost the angle. I just took the bad mechanics from the bullpen out to the mound. I was going to have a throw day on either the second or third day, so I mean, I could have thrown five innings if they needed it. Physically and mentally at least, I was fine.”
Garvey led off the inning with a first-pitch popout. Then Rogers got himself in trouble. Facing Cey, the Dodgers’ fireplug third baseman, Rogers fell behind 3–1, then fired his trademark sinker. Instead of diving below the batter’s knees as it had done so many times throughout Rogers’ career, the pitch stayed up—a telltale sign that Rogers’ mechanics weren’t right, that he wasn’t executing his pitches the way he normally did.
Cey took a huge swing and crushed the ball toward the left-field corner and the very reachable 325 sign. But he didn’t quite get all of it. Hanging up in the cold October air, the ball died at the warning track, settling into Tim Raines’ glove for the second out.
That brought Monday to the plate. The Dodgers’ right fielder was a modest 5-for-22 without a single extra-base hit in the playoffs leading up to that at-bat. Fanning had left-handers Bill Lee and Woodie Fryman available. Lee had warmed up and was ready to go, though he’d pitched sparingly in the postseason to that point. Fryman had been torched for five runs in 2 1/3 innings of work during the playoffs.
Bill Lee:
“Reardon, Fanning would bring him in for the right-handers, but he’s got to bring me in for the left-handers. When the
inning started, I had warmed up on my own. I did it on my own, and I tapped my hat, and he brought in Rogers. He gets the first two guys, lefty’s coming up, and Fanning leaves him in.
“Monday ain’t gonna hit me. I’m gonna throw him a fastball, then he’s gonna foul it off his foot. I’m gonna throw him another fastball, then he’s gonna foul it off again. I’m gonna throw him a breaking ball away, he’s gonna wave at it, inning over.
“He went with Rogers because that way he wouldn’t have been criticized. That’s the way he thinks, because, see, for Fanning, when you think, you hurt the ball club. Fanning, he can’t pull the trigger. He has a really nice gun, but he’s got no fuckin’ bullets in it.”
Jim Fanning:
“Rogers was going to be the guy. It didn’t matter if the guys coming up were left-handed or right-handed hitters.”
Steve Rogers:
“We wouldn’t even be out there if I hadn’t pitched so well leading up to that game. If I don’t pitch that well, they don’t even think of putting me out there. If I just scuffled in the third game and I come out after six innings, would they have looked at me [to pitch the ninth inning of Game 5]? No, it would have been Reardon from the get-go.”
In 1981, we were still years away from widespread, batter-to-batter obsessions over righty-lefty matchups, to be sure. This also wasn’t the first, or the last, time Lee and Fanning would emphatically disagree; one incident the following season would result in a near-fight, and a huge fallout for both men’s careers.
Bottom line, Rogers wasn’t coming out. But he was struggling, overthrowing and failing to locate his sinker. For the second straight time, he fell behind the batter 3–1.
Rick Monday:
“I’m looking for a pitch I can drive. Very seldom does he get a ball above the knees, so you have to hit it whenever it is above the knees.”
Steve Rogers:
“You can make a case that the stretch of three starts leading into this game was the pinnacle of my career. But my mechanics just weren’t there that day. Gary called sinker away, and I just threw it so badly that it just was one of those settling, nothing fastballs.”
Serge Touchette:
“ ‘It was a BP fastball.’ That’s what he said afterwards.”
Terry Francona:
“It was a good swing. But it was so cold. I don’t think anybody thought he hit it hard enough to go out.”
Andre Dawson:
“I didn’t even think it would make the wall. It just seemed to carry and carry. I don’t know what the wind was doing that particular day. I knew he hit it good, but I didn’t think he hit it
that
good.”
Rick Monday:
“Here’s the thing: it was so cold. There had already been balls that were hit hard that went nowhere—even in batting practice. You hit the bejeebers out of it and it goes nowhere. Steve had been so successful against us that year, and just a couple of days prior. And we knew we were probably not going to get a ball elevated at all.
“I finally do get one, and it’s the only time in 19 years and 240-something home runs that I ever lost the flight of the ball. I knew it was hit hard, but I thought it was hit too high. Because I lost sight of the ball, I went down the first-base line and I’m watching Andre Dawson and he keeps going and keeps going and I’m
thinking it’s going to be too high—it’s going to be caught. Then he kept going and I was like, ‘Maybe it’ll be off the fence, maybe it will be off the wall.’ I was already past first base at the time. I was thinking, ‘If it’s off the wall I would be on second, maybe third base.’ ”
Tim Raines:
“I’m in left field and I’m watching Andre go back to get the ball. He’s running out of room.”
Terry Francona:
“It kept carrying and carrying. Next thing you know, he’s going around the bases with his arm in the air.”
The Monday homer felt like a crushing blow. But all was not yet lost. The Expos started a rally in the bottom of the ninth. After retiring Rodney Scott and the heavily slumping Dawson to start the inning, Valenzuela walked Gary Carter. Another walk, this one to Larry Parrish, knocked Valenzuela from the game. Lacking a true closer, Lasorda summoned Bob Welch from the pen to face Jerry White—the same Jerry White whose Game 3 homer might’ve ended up being the biggest in franchise history had the Expos made it to the World Series. On the first pitch, White slapped a slow roller into the hole between first and second. Lopes ranged far to his left, gathered it in and fired to first, where a fully outstretched Garvey snagged the throw an instant before White’s foot hit the bag. Inning over, game over, season over, dream over.
Terry Francona:
“It just deflated us. Nobody thought we were going to lose.”
Tim Raines:
“The Monday home run, it was probably one of the … I wouldn’t say the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it was pretty hard to take. And then the last out was a groundball, bang-bang to first base. And I’ll never forget this: Warren
Cromartie and myself were sitting on the bench, because everybody else had left. Just sitting there. ‘What the hell, these guys beat us.’ We sat on the bench after it was over and I was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re not going.’ I could not believe we weren’t going to the World Series. We won [Game 3], all we needed was to win one game. We just couldn’t win that one game.
“We probably had the best team in baseball. No, we
did
have the best team in baseball that year. We’d have kicked the Yankees’ ass that year. If the Dodgers beat them, we’d have probably swept them. We had the team.”
Mike Scioscia:
“The Expos were a really talented club. You look at a lot of the players on the team, how their careers went, you can imagine how good they were. The guys that didn’t have power could fly. The guys that couldn’t run real well had unbelievable power. And then you had Andre Dawson or Tim Raines that could do both. You know, they had a deep lineup. They had great balance. They could steal a base. They could hit the ball out of the park. They all played terrific defence. So, that was really one of the best baseball teams I’ve ever played against.”
Rick Monday:
“You can’t look past what a tremendous team the Expos had. I quite frankly don’t think that the Montreal Expos of 1981 truly got the attention they deserved in terms of how good that ball club was and how good those players were. At that time, it was a ball club you looked at and said, they could beat you a lot of different ways. They could beat you with pitching, they could beat you with defence, they could beat you with offence, they could beat you with their speed—a lot of different areas. It’s unfortunate we don’t ask, ‘Who else is on the podium?’ It’s, ‘Who’s holding the largest bouquet of flowers?’
“During that series, people were dancing in the aisles. It was
really a tremendous, and I mean a tremendous, venue. In that series it was like a World’s Fair, and the Olympics, and the World Series all at once. People were dancing and hollering, bundled up and having a good time. Every time the Expos did something really well, which they did often during that year, everyone would start singing, “Valderi Valdera.” So now we win it, and we go back into the clubhouse and somebody started singing it in the locker room. It was finally our turn to sing. We had been hearing it over and over and over and over and over, and finally the crescendo was in our locker room. We found out later that some people got irritated, but we didn’t do it as a disrespectful thing. It was blowing off steam; it was a magical moment. For us there was that extra incentive too, that little burr that was still under our saddle from ’77 and ’78. The World Series is going to start the next night. So it was a relatively short one-hour, 10-minute flight. Thank goodness it was not any longer. It was … let’s say a very boisterous flight.”
More than three decades later, some bitter Expos fans haven’t forgiven those involved in the moment, when Monday smashed that hanging sinker over the 12-foot wall in centre, 400-plus feet from home plate. Some questioned Fanning’s managerial inexperience, wondering if the Expos skipper should have used a different pitcher—Reardon at the start of the inning, or a left-hander against Monday after Cey’s near-homer. Or when Rogers fell behind Monday 3–1, Fanning or Gary Carter could have suggested Rogers pitch around Monday to bring up Pedro Guerrero, who’d been awful throughout the postseason.
Others never forgave the two principals in the matchup, Rogers and Monday. Rogers won 158 games in his 13-year career, posting a career ERA of 3.17 (16 percent better than league average). He put up several big seasons, including his nearly unhittable stretch in September 1981, all the way through the playoffs with three
lights-out starts against the Phillies and Dodgers—plus a huge year in 1982 right after giving up the infamous homer. Monday had been the first overall selection in the first-ever amateur draft in 1965. More famously, on April 25, 1976, he grabbed an American flag from two protesters just before they could set it on fire in the outfield at Dodger Stadium. His career numbers were pretty damn good too: 1,619 hits, 241 homers, 125 OPS+.
Still, fairly or not, mention either man’s name in Montreal and many old-time Expos fans flash back to that fateful day.
Steve Rogers:
“I talked to Monday about it after the fact. You know something? I’ve heard it and I understand what he’s saying. He’s saying, ‘My career was more than just one pitch.’ He said, ‘I think I had a pretty damn good career.’ He got paid to hit the kind of pitch I threw. He got paid to hit that ball hard. He did his job and I didn’t do mine.
“The only thing I could say that has bothered me at times about Montrealers—and I understand it, so it hasn’t bothered me in depth, it hasn’t bothered me to the core—but when I’ve been up there a few times over the years, people come up to shake your hand, and go, ‘Blue Monday.’ Everybody does it. I’ve come to terms with that, and it’s because that’s the easiest way for them to relate to me. It’s not meant to be negative. They know where they were when they were listening and the ball went over the wall. Every now and then it’s said in a way that’s not as nice. But I’ve come to grips with the fact that, for the most part, it’s not malicious.”
Jacques Doucet:
“Steve Rogers was the main card of that team: the ace. People forget his great career. I was broadcasting a game for the Quebec Capitales [of the Can-Am League]. Bill Buckner’s one of the managers in the league. He comes into town and I went to him and said, ‘Mr. Buckner, you and Steve
Rogers have something in common. One play ruined your reputation.’ I remember mostly when he was playing for the Dodgers and the Cubs, he was a really good hitter then and throughout his career—2,700 hits! Still, people come back to that one play. Same thing with Rogers.”