The Fall of Montreal Baseball

Coming off their renowned World's Fair of two years earlier?Expo '67?and now with a big W against the Mets, Montreal was ready to step up to the rest of the cities in North America and declare that they were players. And they were for a while. In 1976 Montreal hosted the world's best athletes with their wildly successful summer Olympics. Baseball heated up in Quebec and by 1979 the Expos were playing before more than two million people a year, and winning more than 90 games a season. In the strike-shortened 1981 season the Expos made it to the playoffs?their first and only time?and were dubbed "the team of the 80s." The future of baseball looked like it might be north of the border.

Then in the 90s it all fell apart. In 1998 Quebec almost seceded from the rest of Canada. As the French separatist movement was heating up, baseball in Canada cooled down. The Expos' last great year was in 1994, when they had the best record in baseball and were headed to a playoff berth. That dream ended with the Aug. 12 baseball strike in that blackest of seasons. The 1994 strike almost killed the game, but it came back?that is, everywhere but in Montreal.

The Expos were always known as a frugal organization, and through the years they lost such great players to free agency and trades as: Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, Larry Walker, John Wetteland and Moises Alou. In 1998 the team's attendance fell below one million a year. It kept falling. And the team wasn't making it up with tv money. Only 48 Expo games?all on cable and all in French?were shown in 2001 in Quebec, bringing in a mere $500,000 to the team?the lowest of all Major League teams. In 2001 only 642,748 souls went to Olympic Stadium for Expos games. After that, the owners jumped town and bought the Florida Marlins?another disaster in the making?and Major League Baseball had to take over the Expos for the 2002 season.

Now the Expos are doomed. It's almost a sure bet that operations for the team will be suspended for the 2003 season, and the people of Montreal have accepted that?at least for their city?baseball is dead.

On Aug. 15 I flew to Montreal. I arrived on a sweltering hot day. After checking into a downtown hotel I took a six-kilometer walk out to Olympic Stadium. If New York has taught me one thing, it's that if you want to see a city, you put on your walking shoes.

Montreal is a fairly cosmopolitan place, and an island, like Manhattan. With 3.4 million inhabitants, it's the second-largest French-speaking city in the world. The natives here put themselves in the same league as Manhattan, but Montreal is more like Brooklyn: row houses line street after endless street, neighborhoods are filled with ethnic tribes and the city is home to scores of churches. Halfway into the walk I ducked into an air-conditioned bank to exchange money. The rate that day was 154 Canadian dollars to 100 U.S. A young woman with a nametag reading "Jane" gave me my Canadian dollars and, as I wiped my forehead with a handkerchief, I commented on how hot it was outside. "Were you expecting snow?" she said with a laugh. "...Americans think we live in igloos up here. Montreal is very warm this time of year. You're not in the Great North or anything." I took my Canadian swag and continued my walk through the city.

As I ambled due east, Montreal became slightly seedy: closed storefronts, garbage on the streets and walls spray-painted with French graffiti. The district looked run-down but it felt safe. There was none of that silent dread you feel on some streets in New York. I'm sure there is some crime?I just didn't see any, and the local papers didn't report any, at least during my stay.

In the distance I spied the giant tower that looms over Olympic Stadium and worked my way to the front gate. As fans trickled in bold scalpers were working the small crowd 10 feet from the entrance.

"Tickets. Tickets. I'm cheaper than the box office. Get your tickets here," a balding, paunchy middle-aged man was chanting. I asked to speak to him and he, like most residents of Montreal, was unfailingly polite. He took a break and said his name was Claude and that business, well, sucked.

"You should have been back here in the 80s. We had some team then. You'd get 30 to 40 thousand a night. Now the Expos are forgotten. The city feels betrayed by baseball. They are going to close us down. We saw this coming since '98 or so. I mean, what happened? They sold us out, so why should anyone care? Thieves run baseball. Legal thieves is all they are and they turned on Montreal."

Claude returned to his sad lament of "Tickets, tickets" and I went in and bought a general admission seat for $8?that's $5 U.S.?then walked into the time warp that is Olympic Stadium. Built for the 1976 Olympics and home to the Expos since 1977, the domed stadium set the city of Montreal back a billion dollars. After the Expos quit this place it'll be the white elephant of the town. I came out of the hallway and into the bright artificial light and looked out on the field with awe. Olympic Stadium?the Big O?is a shrine to all the excess and awfulness of the 1970s. I could almost picture Pete Rose bouncing a baseball on the turf as he ran to the dugout.

They?with good reason?just don't make them like this anymore. Olympic Stadium is a typical cookie-cutter Astroturf baseball field that was once the future of the game. Now it looks shopworn, but still somehow coolly geeky?like a frayed leisure suit. And for all the popularity of the new nostalgia stadiums in Baltimore and Cleveland, on a hot, humid day there's a lot to be said for a domed stadium that's air-conditioned. The stadium can officially hold up to 46,338 fans, but in 1979 it could seat more 59,000. Now sections of the ballpark are roped off, and some seats remain empty for the whole season.

That night the Expos, a solid young team that still has a chance?albeit a longshot?of getting a wildcard playoff spot, were playing the L.A. Dodgers. The crowd was announced at 10,780?a big draw for the 2002 Expos. The game was a pitching duel, with the Dodgers up 1-0 for most of the game. In fact, that's where the score stayed, but it was an exciting game. And the crowd was as loud as 30,000 at Yankee Stadium. The Expos have a secret weapon their fans use to make noise: The stadium has these hard plastic seats?fanny form-fitting for your comfort?that are attached to solid steel posts. If someone gets up in left field, the seat slams up with such force that you can hear it all the way out in right field. Whenever the Expos had a man on base, the fans would grab their seats and bang them, making an unholy racket.

Between innings old-time rock 'n' roll was played over the p.a. and most of the Expo fans got up and danced. There was a carnival feel to the game and I found myself caught up in "Expo fever." The people dancing between innings are shown on the huge screen in the outfield, and when they see themselves the whole section goes wild. This was Aug. 15?the day before the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Elvis is huge in Montreal. The city's lone English-language paper, the Gazette?had Elvis stories on the front page the whole week. During the seventh-inning stretch I watched the screen and saw an Elvis impersonator gyrating in the stands. This was a guy I had to see for myself. I searched the stadium and finally found him sitting out by left field. He wore a flowing sky-blue silk shirt decorated with sequins and a wig that looked like a crow landed on his head. The black Elvis wig was held in place with a chinstrap. The impersonator was the star of the night and on every song the cameras flashed to him. The young kids in the stands ran to dance behind him and soon the section turned into a swaying group of lunatics singing and gyrating along with "Hey, Baby."

No one was in a rush to leave; in fact, most of the fans stayed till the last out. In the bottom of the ninth the Dodgers brought in their All-Star reliever, Eric Gagne, to protect their slim lead. The crowd went wild, since Gagne is a Montreal native. The Expos were down 1-0 and there were two outs, but they had a man on second base. The crowd would not quit. Jose Vidro hit a rope to right field for a single. Speedy Montreal pinch runner Henry Mateo rounded third as Dodger right fielder Shawn Green let go with a bullet that caught Mateo at the plate for the third out. The crowd sighed with disappointment.

I left the stadium with a smile and realized that that was the most fun I'd had at a baseball game since I was a kid. For the dancing and carrying on between innings alone Major League Baseball should leave a team in Montreal. Hell, they know how to have fun at Olympic Stadium?kids and adults alike. Beer is served during the whole game, yet the crowd keeps its composure. There was none of that mean-spirited New York fan behavior like the "Show us your tits!" chants that crude Yankee fans come up with to harass women in the stands.

The next morning I sat and read the paper at a local breakfast joint. In print the Expos are an afterthought. The front page of the sports section had women's tennis, golf, Canadian football and Bill Gates coming to Montreal for the world bridge championship. I asked one of the workers at the bistro?a young woman by the name of Marie?how she felt about the Expos.

"Baseball has shown they do not care about Montreal, so the people here don't care about baseball."

From all the conversations I had with people up there, I realized that it's not that Montrealers dislike baseball?they just don't love it. Film, jazz, sex, hockey, comedy, Elvis, politics and Canadian football they love. Baseball gets a small smile and a shrug.

That night the San Diego Padres are in town and I again plunk down my $8 Canadian and have the run of the stadium. Armed with a general admission ticket you can sit wherever you want except the box seats. There, security makes its stand. I walk around Olympic Stadium sipping on a beer and watching fans smoke in the hallways undisturbed. I make my way out to the nether regions of left field and look down at a blue outfield wall that's covered in dust. Housekeeping hasn't hit that partition in quite a while. The deserted walkway behind the fence is strewn with empty soda bottles and plastic bags. The game is on but I'm transfixed watching a confused young man work the wooden scoreboard in the outfield. The Expos have an electronic scoreboard in center, but in right and left the walls are lined with hand-changed wooden scoreboards for out-of-town scores. The kid struggles with the numbers and I wonder what road he took that led him to this loneliest of jobs.

On this night, before 7680 fans, the Expos beat up on the Padres 11-6. San Diego has former Met Bobby Jones pitching for them, and the Expos have former Met Masato Yoshii going for them. Now the two men meet up again in the wilds of Olympic Stadium.

Jones and Yosii keep up the tradition of mediocrity that they learned from the Mets: they both get shelled. The crowd cheers as the Expo manager, Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, ambles out to the pitching mound to settle down Yoshii. At 66 Robinson looks as lean and mean as he did playing for the Baltimore Orioles all those years ago. The game has none of the drama that the 1-0 duel of the night before had. I'm bored as the Expos pile on garbage runs in their rout. There's no Elvis impersonator, and the crowd suffers for it. I move to behind third base and watch a fat man walk through the stands with a huge plastic bag picking up soda bottles. He tells me to call him Jim, and I ask him what he's doing.

"People give away Expo tickets, so whenever a free one comes my way I grab it, and then I make money here collecting the returnable bottles. You can make money here but you gotta keep your eyes on the ground. Never know what you can find on the ground."

Jim walks away talking to himself, and while he may make money here, not many others do. I later talk with a Montreal bookie who grins when he hears I'm from New York.

"Now that's a good betting town," he says. "Want to know why? Because New Yorkers like their teams. Football, baseball and basketball they bet with their hearts. They care about their teams and that is a bookie's dream. See, a real gambler doesn't root for a team, he roots for his bet," he explains. "Here in Montreal no one cares for the Expos anymore, so there isn't much betting going on. When a city doesn't care about the team, no one bets."

After the game I take the subway back to downtown Montreal. The trains up here use rubber wheels and are quiet. When they rush into the station all you hear is the whoosh of air. The cars are clean?they have the New York subway beat, except they're not air-conditioned. I get out after a few stops and wander the streets of Montreal. The city feels like New York circa 1990?without the crime wave. Hideous transvestites hang outside of bars trolling for customers. The next block has a few women working their trade. Outside of an all-night deli I pass a group of junkies engaged in a violent debate?and Lord you have not heard junkies argue till you've heard them go at it in French. Young kids lay about cadging change and playing guitars. At night the slackers come out and each block has two or three panhandlers.

The next day I make it a point to head to Moishe's, a famous old-time steakhouse in the center of the city. The steak's good?cooked in butter?and is served to me by a veteran waiter named Vincent. He's been working at Moishe's for 36 years, and tells me how this part of Montreal was once Jewish but is now home to Greeks and Portuguese. I tell Vincent I'm here to see the Expos and he gives me a sad smile.

"Ah, the Expos..." He says it like they are already a memory. "We once had some team there, but no more." The next night the Expos lose to the Padres 6-5 before 9130 fans.

By now I've had enough baseball?Expo or otherwise. The next game, Sunday, promises to be a big day at the Olympic Stadium box office: the first 5000 fans will get a Vladimir Guerrero bobblehead doll. The Gazette reports that the dolls are already fetching bids of $31 on eBay. The game draws more than 24,000 fans and the Expos win. By this time I'm on a plane on my way back to New York. Three Expo games and I don't even have a bobblehead to show for my efforts.

Things I learned when I was in Montreal: 1) Even up there they think Mayor Bloomberg is an ass for his upcoming smoking ban. 2) Up there the Sunday paper is the thinnest of the week. 3) Mon Dieu! All these fuckers speak French! They also all speak English and don't mind if that's what you speak. They're the polite country cousins to the European French. 4) Bart Simpson speaks fluent French. 5) Grown men?even grown men who speak French?look ridiculous when they wear baseball jerseys and hats when walking around the city. 6) Beer vendors at Olympic Stadium expect to be tipped and will politely tell you so if you fail to throw them something. 7) Montreal claims to be known for its bagels, but its bagels suck. 8) To get out of Canada you have to pay $10 U.S. or $15 Canadian. 9) The Expos lasted as long as Christ: 33 years.