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Curtain Call: Montreal Exports
The final players to strut and fret their hours upon the stage before their teams were heard no more
In 2019, the Washington Nationals won their first World Series in franchise history and only the second ever title in the history of Washington, D.C. With the exception of a recent four decade break from 1971-2005, baseball has been in the nation’s capital for nearly as long as it’s been in the nation itself dating back to 1872. But throughout that run, Washington baseball has largely been a disappointment, cast as an exercise in futility up against the other more successful east coast metropolises. This improbable run from a team that had been as many as twelve games below .500 on May 23 has a refutation of the legacy they were burdened with from their predecessors, but it wasn’t the only legacy that the team carried with them.
Manager Dave Martinez had been installed ahead of the 2018 season after the ousting of Dusty Baker, and many outlets were quick to report on one particular nugget regarding Martinez and the franchise that was letting him take the helm. While Martinez had never appeared for the Washington Nationals as a player during his sixteen-year pro career, he had donned red, white, and blue jerseys for the organization a little more than 500 miles away from where they now played. With Martinez at the helm, just ahead of their biggest accomplishment as a team since moving to the District, the Nats whether intentionally or unintentionally reaffirmed their connection to the other historic baseball legacy that they carried with them - that of the Montreal Expos.
The 1960s were the first real period of growth for major league baseball since the beginning of the 20th century, in no small part due to the explosion in the popularity of professional football dating back to the 1958 NFL Championship between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Football Giants. Baseball responded to its first worthy challenger for the national attention by debuting a total of 8 teams over the span of the decade: the Los Angeles Angels and a second incarnation of the Washington Senators in 1961; the Houston Colt .45s and New York Mets in 1962; and a final wave of 4 in 1969 (nice) made up of the Kansas City Royals, the San Diego Padres, the previously-discussed Seattle Pilots, and the Montreal Expos.
Montreal had hosted baseball in the form of a number of minor league teams since 1890, with the name Royals being adopted for the majority of that time by two different franchises. Jackie Robinson among many others had come through Montreal during its time as a feeder squad for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but a combination of the big league squad’s move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and further minor league restructuring lead the Royals to leave following the 1960 season. While this left insufficient time for the city to submit any proposals for the 1961 or 1962 expansion, they were finally able to present a bid in 1967 to the expansion committee. Thanks in part to the presence of the Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley on the NL Expansion committee, with his history of being involved in Montreal, they and San Diego were announced to have successfully garnered the senior circuit’s two new spots in 1968.
Given that Kansas City had staked a claim to the name “Royals” earlier that decade, this new club instead turned to a different aspect of the province’s recent history: the 1967 World’s Fair, commonly known in Montreal as Expo 67. The Expos opened play in 1969 (nice) with a win over the eventual World-Series-winning New York Mets, but their first decade of existence was a slog that never saw them finish above 4th place in the six-team NL East. While a winning culture was far off at this point , Montreal and the Expos together did at least manage to establish an idiosyncratic culture all their own due to the unique geography they represented in the major leagues.
When they came into existence in 1969 (nice), the name Toronto Blue Jays still just referred to a minor league team in the AAA International League. Sure there had also been a minor league team in Havana until the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, and the Expos themselves were stepping into a legacy left behind by the Royals and other minor league teams like those Blue Jays. But still, this was the first American or National League team to ever reside outside of the United States. In the way that all of Canada often now mobilizes behind runs for the Toronto Raptors or Blue Jays, the nation as a whole got behind the Expos before they even started, with citizens of Ottawa even taking out a full page ad expressing their love for the team that had yet to play a game.
What’s more, it existed in one of the most distinct regions in North America. Baseball was increasingly a bilingual sport, with stars like Roberto Clemente and Tony Oliva shining as bright as any American-born player during the 1960s - now, with a team nestled squarely in the “French”-speaking Quebec, it was trilingual.
From the beginning, this created an easy way for players to connect or pander (complimentary) to their crowds, to build a relationship between athlete and city that was unique to this particular crowd. Only here could veteran Claude Raymond, a so-so reliever who finished out his career with three years at the beginning of the Expos run, become a fan favorite simply by dint of himself being French-Canadian. Early star Rusty Staub took up French to better communicate with fans, and they responded in kind, dubbing him Le Grand Orange for his red hair that would later leave an even bigger mark on the team’s culture by inspiring the coloration of mascot Youppi.
Alone, in the isolation of Canada at least until the Blue Jays joined the American League in 1976, this peculiar fanbase took root and was eventually rewarded for their persistent support of their Expos. In 1979 they were finally able to finish their first winning season with a new highmark of 95-65, and two years later in the strike-shortened 1981 an altered playoff format afforded them their first postseason opportunity. Because of the mid-season work stoppage, the playoffs featured a four-team divisional series in each league for the first time ever as a one off, pitting the first- and second-half leaders of the two divisions against one another. Thanks to a dramatic turnaround after the break, the Expos managed to sneak in thanks to this technicality for the franchise’s first ever playoff series and topple the Philadelphia Phillies in five games before losing out to the Dodgers in that year’s NLCS.
Unfortunately, this would be the only playoff appearance for the organization during the entirety of their time in Montreal. Only nine more times in their thirty-three year run in the city would they even finish above .500, as shifting front offices failed to maintain a winning culture for any kind of sustained period of time. The story seemed to repeat itself several times during those three decades - the Expos were incredibly adept at developing young talent like Tim Raines, Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, and Randy Johnson; but when the bill eventually came due for these cores they continued to build, they balked at the price again and again. About once every decade the sports world would hail the arrival of a new Expos wave of youngsters that would come in to change the fortunes of the team and propel them to contention, and shortly thereafter would throw dirt on their grave as a failure to coalesce quickly enough would inevitably lead to another heartbreaking selloff for the fans.
Now, some of this wasn’t their fault - after being granted their first and only postseason spot thanks to the technicalities brought up by the 1981 work-stoppage, their next best shot at contention came in 1994 when they were 74-40…before a work-stoppage wiped out the rest of the season, resulting in the only year in which a World Series was not held since 1905. If you’re looking for signs that God hates your team, that’s as much of a force majeure as anything you’ll find anywhere. And maybe that was enough after years of fire sales burning up the goodwill of the Québécois fans to finally start giving up on the team entirely.
To this point, the Expos had despite their on field performance maintained pretty healthy gate receipts, with regular residence in the top half of the National League by attendance and often top-three during their stronger seasons. This in part was why the owner during this period, Claude Brochu, received just as much criticism for his spendthrift management - it wasn’t as if the team was some black hole of revenue. And so there was hope at the turn of the millennium that maybe, with the right new owner, something could be salvaged from these decades of disappointing finishes to this point. Enter Jeffrey Loria.
Loria, an American art-dealer, had tried to purchase the team earlier in the ‘90s and took advantage of Brochu’s desire to exit the game by acquiring the controlling stake in the team in 1999. This was to be the end of the low-budget Expos: Loria was here to open the checkbook for the team. But what Loria’s increased investment in the team also led to was an enormous growth for his overall stake in the team due to the relative reticence of his fellow Expos investors. And now, the Canadian fanbase started to feel a bit as though they’d allowed an American fox in their Québécois henhouse.
Loria, now that his leverage had increased, began to beat the drum slowly over a new downtown ballpark for his team to replace the aging Olympic Stadium; and on top of that, arguments over broadcasting revenue for both television and radio coverage in English limited the ability for the team to appeal to growing out of market fans just as the baseball world was becoming increasingly connected on a national scale. With the stranglehold that Loria had over the team’s fortunes, his discontent started to cast shadows of doubt over the future of baseball in Montreal.
First came the talks of contraction after the 2001 season. The Expos, along with the similarly disappointing-at-the-time Minnesota Twins, were selected for elimination from the league entirely in a 28-2 vote by the MLB owners due to difficulty in generating sufficient revenue. This likely would have gone through had the Twins not had another year on their lease with the Metrodome in Minneapolis that forced them to play a minimum of one more season in the Twin Cities, thereby staving off contraction for Montreal as well during the 2002 season. But by the time the season opened, even if they would survive this year, they’d already been placed in an increasingly perilous position.
Loria, failing to reach a deal over a new stadium, ended up selling off his entire outsized portion of the team for an obscene profit in order to purchase the Florida Marlins. Those fans would come to curse him later, but in the meantime Montreal fans would curse him in the present as the team was left with a cobbled together ownership under Expos Baseball L.P., essentially a shell company maintained by the other 29 MLB clubs in order to keep the team from dying out while they worked out a solution.
The new collective bargaining agreement after the 2002 season pushed any possible contraction off to at least 2006, buying the Expos a couple more years, but there was still the question of how MLB could possibly get their revenue to what it needed to be in order to sustain the team beyond 2006. One last-ditch effort was made in 2003 and 2004, and they presented us with one of the most American moments that the national past time has ever offered us.
Between the 2003 and 2004 seasons, the Montreal Expos played 43 combined games at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nearly two thousand miles away from their Quebec, the Expos made a home away from home stadium in front of fans, largely of the Spanish-speaking variety, waving a host of flags representing the USA, the Puerto Rican Island, Canada, Quebec, and above all the Montreal Expos. Baseball has not been the country’s most popular sport for a long time, and had arguably already been overtaken at this time by at least football if not also basketball thanks to Michael Jordan’s ‘90s dominance; but it has always been the most American sport for better or worse.
Is it great that Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States in the first place? Absolutely not. Is it great that this team from Montreal was in the death throes of a shocking betrayal courtesy of an American businessman? Absolutely not. Does that make this celebration in the stands of a middle-of-the-pack baseball team, a celebration by fans more than a thousand miles away from the rest of the fanbase, a celebration that is overcoming geographic and linguistic barriers unmatched by any team in professional history - does it make that any less special? Absolutely not.
And as special as it was, it also absolutely does not do enough to stave off the inevitable.
The announcement about the move to D.C. came on September 29, 2004. This happened to also be the day of the final home game that the Montreal Expos would ever play. Hosting none other than former owner Jeffrey Loria’s Florida Marlins, the Expos were in the midst of a four-game losing streak. As it had for years at this point, the attendance was suffering as well, with fewer than 7,000 fans a night during this abysmal 2-6 homestand that would be their last. But for one final game, with the impending departure of their team confirmed, Montreal came out in numbers one last time to find out who would end up being the player to turn the lights off.
Enter Terrmel Sledge, an outfielder wrapping up a promising rookie season with the Expos. If that name seems a bit curious, the explanation doesn’t necessarily make it any less peculiar. Apparently there was some difficulty in landing on a name for him, and with his parents deadlocked between Terrence and Melvin they supposedly decided to just smash the two together into Terrmel.
Sledge, coming from a mixed Korean and Black familial heritage, was born in North Carolina before splitting his college career between California’s Long Beach State and Massachusetts’s Cape Cod league. Like the Expo’s experimental jaunt to Puerto Rico, Sledge was the ideal version of the kinds of cultural stew that North America prides itself on. After spending his formative years in all of these far flung corners of the United States, he knocked out one last disparate corner of the nation thanks to being drafted by the Seattle Mariners. Just about a year later with his internal passport sufficiently punched, he finally went international after a trade to Montreal to continue the international exchange that the city was uniquely well equipped to host.
Though for one moment, it is worth mentioning that he had some international travel under his belt by this point thanks to his career with USA baseball, but not because of any on-field accomplishment. In 2003, while a member of the national team, Sledge became one of the first players in the country to test positive for anabolic steroids!
Thankfully for him, there were no real consequences for his positive test with this being such an early incidence, and his minor league career with Montreal continued ahead of a big league callup just a year after his PED incident. He’d sported a .269/.336/.462 slash line in 133 games, just above league average, and been able to perform adequately enough at all three outfield positions to earn some downballot Rookie of the Year votes. There was no way of knowing at the time, but this season would feature his highmarks across the board: of his career 0.5 bWAR during a four-year career, 1.3 of that was accumulated in 2004, and no that’s not a typo. This rookie season was his age-27 season, and a debut that late doesn’t typically portend a fruitful career.
Even at the end of this season though with his stock at an all-time high, what are the fans at home supposed to feel about a Rookie of the Year candidate who’s guaranteed to spend the rest of their career in a different jersey, a different city, a different country? Whereas a Rookie of the Year campaign in most years galvanizes a fanbase and inspires some reason to emotionally invest in the years to come that the franchise will hopefully invest towards in a financial sense.
But owner after owner of the Expos had failed to uphold their end of the bargain; and after years of watching the team churn out promising pieces for a future contender only to watch them round into form after departing, now the fans knew that even the players that the team did keep would bloom elsewhere. Rather than imagining a future where Sledge is roaming the outfield of Olympic Stadium, this player perfectly suited to what had struggled to take shape in the distinct corner of the baseball world that had was just one of many players to whom they had to figure out how to say goodbye.
Olympic Stadium on the night of September 29, 2004, probably looked quite a bit like the picture below that was taken earlier that season, save for all the empty space. 31,395 butts filled the seats that evening to see the Marlins lay an absolute beatdown on their hometown, with the final margin 9-1 in favor of the fish. Take one second, if you will, to focus in on that red advertisement above the center field scoreboard. It’s for a beer produced by Canadian company Molson called “Export”. Really feels a little on-the-nose given the circumstances.
Marlins pitcher Rudy Seánez took the mound in the bottom of the 9th to put the final nail in the coffin and made quick work of infielder Maicer Izturis, who flied out to right on the third pitch and would never again appear for the Expos after this season but would spend 8 years with the Angels as a solid platoon player before returning to Canada to finish his career as a Blue Jay. It only took Seánez a single pitch to induce a groundout from first baseman Val Pascucci, a converted pitcher from Oklahoma who after 2004 wouldn’t appear in the majors again until a brief ten-game stint with the Mets in 2011. And with that, Sledge was all that was left. Batting in the cleanup spot, worked the count to 3-1, but on the fifth pitch popped out down the left field line to close the book on the Expos in Montreal.
A few years after the Montreal Expos came into existence, some nasty business happened in their future home of Washington, D.C. President Richard Nixon was implicated to be involved in espionage on his political rivals in what would later become known as the Watergate scandal. Because we as a society still had shame at this point, this would lead to Nixon’s unprecedented resignation from the presidency which he announced at a subsequent press briefing.
When first learning of this, I remember the emphasis placed on his choice of words for a farewell: the French phrase “au revoir” which rather than “goodbye” is better translated to “until we meet again”. Even in this moment, supposedly the ultimate depth of American political depravity to this point, this farewell included a door being left open just a sliver for the former Chief Executive. While those of us used to English might not necessarily pay too much mind to the distinction, there are instances when a grasp of other languages can offer us a specificity in our words to say exactly what we mean. I only draw attention to this distinction because there was no such ambiguity in the farewells that Expos fans bade their team. The finality was palpable.
There was still the formality of a final series in Queens against the New York Mets, the very team that the Expos had opened play against all the way back in 1969 (nice). While they did manage to snap what had become a five-game losing streak by taking the first two games of the three-game set, the Mets came roaring back on the final day of the season to body the Expos into submission 8-1. Terrmel Sledge started in left-field and went 2-4 on the day, but neither he nor any of the other starters would have the honor of the final plate appearance on this auspicious day. In the 8th inning with the game well out-of-hand, manager Frank Robinson had emptied the bench for the likely-final defensive outs of the season.
Taking centerfield in the eleventh hour was Endy Chávez, best known for being passed around like a hot potato from 2000-02. After being initially signed by the Mets, the Royals selected him in the 2000 Rule 5 Draft but then returned him to the Mets before immediately trading for him once again that same day. He would be selected off waivers first by the Tigers, then by the Mets two months later, and then he would change teams for the sixth time since December of 2000 on February 22 of 2002 when the Expos claimed him after he was once again exposed to waivers.
He would once again sign with both the Mets and the Royals in the future, but for now Endy Chávez was a Montreal Expo for all of 2002, ‘03, and ‘04. Much like Sledge, he’d posted career best numbers this season in an ultimately futile effort on an arguably futile team. And now, much like Sledge, his lone at bat of the day had due to circumstances taken a place in the history books. Facing the New York Mets, the team that had rejected him as much as any team could and would still trade him again years off in the future, Chávez worked a 3-2 count Bartolomé Fortunato before grounding out to second base and ending the run of the Montreal Expos.
Some vestiges of the Expos still remain, arguably none more persistent than their mascot, Youppi. In an unprecedented move, the decampment of the Expos from Quebec freed up Youppi to change sports and become the full-time mascot of the NHL’s Montreal Canadiens, a post that he…it…they still hold today.
And of course, the organization still exists in its present form in Washington, D.C., where it had combined all of this emotional baggage with that of their new city. While the colors were the same (imagine that, a sports team using a red, white, and blue color scheme), and the W on the caps had a similar script feel to the Expos logo of old, the Nationals did in their early years work to establish their own identity separate of all the various teams casting shadows on them from every angle. Players like Chávez and Sledge would both kick things off in Washington, but soon new faces would take their spots in the lineup to be the ones making memories for fans of this franchise.
However as with many teams that have made recent iconographic changes, they eventually realized that folks have a certain nostalgia for uniforms of old. And so for the 2019 season, which marked 50 years since the 1969 (nice) debut of the original Montreal Expos, the Nationals in July brought out the classic uniforms for their own curtain call. And while it may just be a coincidence, if you remember how this piece started, you remember where those 2019 Washington Nationals found themselves three months later.
Maybe this didn’t mean anything to some fans in Montreal. Maybe, despite all that had transpired, it still meant everything others. A World Series is always a culmination of so many things in an organization’s history to come before it. I suppose all you can do when presented with the inherent injustice of one group of fans getting to enjoy that culmination at the expense of others is hope that the Washington fans in October 2019 can recognize the full scope of the history that culminated in that win. That they can remember the fans in Montreal, the fans in San Juan, the fans all over Canada, and all the Staubs and Raymonds and Dawsons and Sledges and Chávezes that they rooted for.