Les Gosses sont Bien...Sorta

Michael Cox

I love the Montreal Expos.

Some of it's certainly nostalgia, I'm sure. As a youngster growing up in British Columbia, the twice-a-week Canadian Broadcasting Corporation telecasts from the minor-league-like Jarry Park (or more appropriately, Parc Jarry) brought young stars like Gary Carter and Andre Dawson into my family's living room. Remember that there were no Blue Jays before '77 -- Les Expos were L'Equipe Canada (so you can imagine how retchmaking it was for me to watch the national bravado over the Jays' glory years).

But it's more than a longing for my not-so-distant youth that keeps me an Expo fan (in fact, if it was that, I'd also be longing for more televised curling on ESPN, preferably featuring at least one broadcaster named Gord). It's the way they've managed their team...or at least most of the way they've done it. Unfortunately, things look bleak for the boys in bleu, blanc et rouge, who seem to have two strikes against them in a town that much of the time doesn't know what the cliche means.

First, the good. The Expos' farm system has long been second to none. You could stock several teams with ex-Expo stars, and in fact, some do. That they don't rush players through the ranks, even with the amount of turnover on their major league roster, makes them nothing less than the anti-Mariners. (In fact, they raided the M's for GM Jim Beattie, who apparently was the only guy in Seattle with a clue about player development).

And when they get to the bigs, those players continue to be nurtured by manager Felipe Alou, who seems to be one of the few MLB managers to know not to overpitch young arms. The Expos are damned lucky to have Alou, who this offseason turned down a much more lucrative offer by the Dodgers to remain in Montreal. Mind you, I don't credit that to loyalty, just security and the fact that Alou considers Montreal his permanent home, as well as the fact that you'd have to be crazy to want to manage in Bronx Zoo West.

So, they've got the young talent, the system, baseball men who like where they are and know what they're doing. All the Expos are missing is money, right?

I'm not so sure. Set aside the fact that the team has been run as an enterprise that must make a profit, which leads to a downward spiral of payroll and attendance, each feeding the other, instead of one that requires a cycle of a few paper losses in order to rake it in when the good times come around. On second thought, maybe we shouldn't set aside that fact.

Still, it is clear to anyone who knows much about the general psyche of the Montreal sports fan that its brain is divided into two sections: 80% that constantly broods over the Canadiens, and 20% left over for work, sex, and other sports. Mind you, the 'Spos drew reasonably (if not spectacularly)well when they had their run of almost-titles, but it evaporated faster than grain alcohol when it was clear the team wouldn't be moving in the direction of actual titles.

Even the Expos Usenet newsgroup shows the apathy: in spite of a plucky fan who posted "Expos will be fesity (sic) in 1999," he's outnumbered by spammers, who account for much of the group's 44 recent posts.

The media, as can be imagined, follows suit. The Blue Jays monopolize national broadcast time (hint: the same people own the Jays and the national cable sports network). Their stadium, designed more as objet d'art than functional ballpark, began losing bits a few years ago, and the new roof literally fell in last week.

Team ownership is hoping for a deus ex machina in the form of (soo-prize, soo-prize!) a new ballpark, but with the current local and provincial leadership militantly against public funding, the last hope is for some new investors to buy into the club and fund a yard. Will it happen? Perhaps, but it's a longshot, and it doesn't address the need for additional broadcast revenues, and remember, the Expos are in the NL East, home of the free-spending Braves.

To make a long story short, if there was ever a team to test the conventional wisdom that MLB won't move teams, it's Montreal. However, it won't be without tears, and several may even be shed by me. But if anyone asks, there's just something in my eye.

about the author

Michael Cox has been messing with way too many Perl scripts, because he's sure he saw the likeness of Reggie Jackson in a CGI program he's troubleshooting. Tell him it's more like Eddie Murray at mc@strikethree.com.