Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 418: Jonah Keri on the Beginning, End, and Importance of the Expos

Episode Date: April 1, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Jonah Keri about his new book about the Montreal Expos, Up, Up & Away, as well as expansion draft strategy and spelling defense with a c.

This one's for the kid and the cat and the hawk And this one's for Greg Larry, walkin' the rock And this one's for El Presidente, mowin' old cabs And this one's for Space Bank, Roman Vlad Sometimes it's the little things that bring us together That's why I'm an X-Foal forever, remember Oh, I'm floppin' away And the memories will never fade

Good morning, and welcome to episode 418 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. We are recording this at the end of a day on which 26 teams played baseball games, so we thought, why not take this time to talk about a team that hasn't played a game in almost a decade? So Sam and I, over the last week or two, have been reading Jonah Carey's new book, Up, Up and Away, which also has a subtitle that we don't have time to

say. And we like the book, and Sam has already reviewed it for the site, but we also wanted to talk to Jonah about it. So everyone knows Jonah, his main claim to fame is editing Sam's favorite edition of the Baseball Prospectus Annual. But he also writes for Grantland.com and appears on Baseball Tonight these days and wrote a book about the raise, the extra 2%. So, hey, Jonah. So this is a Baseball Prospectus podcast. And the last time that I was is a Baseball Prospectus podcast. And the last time that I was on a Baseball Prospectus podcast, I did something that became mildly meme-worthy, which is rare. And so I'm going to do it again. Fellas, this is a desk-bangingly good time, and it's good to be with you. But probably not as good as it was to be in Montreal this weekend, I imagine. You, from following your Twitter feed,

it seemed like you were feeling some feelings. So can you share those feelings with us? Just tell us a little bit about what it was like to see baseball played in Montreal again. It was pretty amazing. I mean, there were kind of two prongs to it. One was just going as a fan, and it was pretty cool. 50,000 people for one of the games, 46-plus for the other. uh it was pretty cool um 50 000 people for one of the games 46 plus for the other and it was packed and the way that you interact with that stadium is a lot of people

take the metro take the subway and so you take the subway and a massive people come out and you go into this tunnel and it's a kind of narrows and uh you know typically or many times anyway the expo's were playing there just there's plenty of room to walk through the tunnels, no problem. But occasionally on opening days or, you know, 94, part of the 93 season, certainly back in the 80s when I was a kid, you would have a very busy crowd. And it would be people walking shoulder to shoulder, wearing the hats. You know, some of them were pre-drinking, definitely, various let's go expos and so forth. And you had that time this time. I mean, you couldn't move.

People chanting expos, more expos gear than I've ever remembered. I mean, everybody was decked out. And I was just beside myself. I just didn't know what to do. It was just crazy. Just walking through. It took 20 minutes or something to travel to maybe, I don't know, in Canadian terms, something like 150 meters, I guess,

to get to the front door. And it was amazing. People chanting, let's go Expos, all that stuff. And then you get into the seating bowl, and maybe it was even more overwhelming. It was just this rush of noise. That stadium has always held noise really, really well. And Montreal fans, they represent.

I mean, when people show up, even with the small crowd, people are very loud. And it was just incredible. It was just such a cool atmosphere. And so that was wonderful. But then it spread to all this other stuff. You know, because I did this book, you know, I was involved in all these events. I sort of became – I don't make any pretense about anything.

I'm a very mild protagonist in this thing. But I was a little bit of a protagonist. So the New York Times wrote about it. And they interviewed me. And the Globe and Mail wrote about it and they interviewed me and the Globe and Mail wrote about it and they interviewed me and the National Post and over and over. And it was sort of like, oh, I guess I'm kind of an avatar for the Expos, which is cool and insane. And seven-year-old me doesn't know what the word avatar is, nor does he understand how this could possibly happen. And so the whole weekend became, the whole week really, in fact, two weeks going back to Toronto,

which I did the week before, became the surreal like for instance on the friday i was signing books next to ellis valentine and my mom was sitting five feet away from me that's really crazy that's beyond crazy and then we did a there was a 94 exposed reunion they asked me to speak i was 19 when the 1994 they asked me to speak and i'm telling stories about larry walker and cliff floyd whatever and i come off the stage and cliff floyd gives me dap and it's like good about Larry Walker and Cliff Floyd, whatever. And I come off the stage and Cliff Floyd gives me that and it's like, good job, man, whatever. And you know, when I'm an adult, I'm 39 years old, this should all be totally normal, but it's a very strange experience where you're doing things professionally, but you're interacting with these things as if you're a child and the whole week or a teenager and the whole week was like that, uh, down to,

you know, going out with my friends and interacting with various players and all this stuff. It was just this big soup of incredible energy just on a neutral level that anybody could go in and experience this, combined with me kind of playing this small role, made it just unbelievably special. It was really, this will go down as one of the best weekends of my life, I can tell you right now. So in terms of receptions to a homecoming, it goes Jonah Carey, Rusty Staab,

Gary Carter, roughly in that order. I think that's right. I think that I definitely did a lot more for the Expos franchise than those guys. No, no, it was, uh, it was very cool and very fun and people were super nice. And, uh, it's still trippy to me to sign one copy of anything, let alone like spend all this time to have Ken Hill come up to me. It was, you know, probably the ace of that, uh,

94 team and say, Hey man, I'm buying your book. I want you to autograph it for me. That's really weird and awesome. And, whatever. I'm not sure if I'm bragging or hung up bragging or whatever.

Feel free to call me out for being a dick about it, but it's just, it's very exciting. It's very cool. And, uh, and, uh,

yeah, I ran out of words. I got choked up all that that stuff. And it's still, I kind of can't believe it. The whole thing was just a blur. I didn't sleep for two weeks. It was all crazy. So there's that old saying that you, I don't even know if there's a saying, but there's this kind of like bit of wisdom that you shouldn't build statues of living people because, you know, they'll inevitably have an affair and embezzle money and then you'll look like an idiot. And I mean, you've been in many, I mean, you've talked to many players and, you know, you know how you very quickly get over the

kind of thrill of seeing a baseball player in living person. You just sort of act like, you know, it's no big deal and you're there to do a job. But is the fact that the Expos no longer existed that when you were writing this book and when you were interviewing these guys, did that sort of give you a little bit of freedom to, you know, basically build statues of this franchise knowing that they can't do anything to shame you in any future instance? I guess to some extent, I don't really think that I'm that good at foresight or any of that. I think that I'm really, really a calls him as he sees him kind of guy. Like for instance, when you read the book, I mean, it would be the easiest thing in the world to destroy Jeffrey Loria.

Jeffrey Loria not only has a bad reputation on the Expos, but from the Marlins and the $634 million stadium that he foisted on taxpayers and all this stuff. And I really don't, because the facts don't really lead me down that road. And so I would just kind of look at it and say, if this guy deserves to have statues built in his honor,

fine, and I'll live with the consequences if it turns out that he's, whatever the heck, he's doing something negative later. I can only deal with the facts in the moment. To me, the bigger thing was, you know, because this book is definitely, there's some serious journalistic rigor here. I mean, there's really digging deep, tons of research. It's three years it took me to do this thing.

But it is, you know, there's fandom interspersed into it. And I had a whole conversation with my editor about this was a big x plus fan himself and was decided okay we're gonna put a little bit of first person stuff in there and even beyond that just don't be afraid to kind of imbue the pages with passion and so it comes out that way and i think that uh you know i've seen a couple reviews here and there um professional reviews or even just kind of reviews from just people read on amazon or goodreads or whatever and a lot of people seem to like that and a lot of people maybe don't like that as much or maybe fewer people don't like that.

But whatever. But I didn't sweat and I thought it was okay. So if I'm writing it, I wouldn't say that I'm going Chris Farley show on these guys. But I'm definitely like trying to be the conduit to the fans, saying, well, if I was a fan, I had an opportunity to ask Tim Raines or Rusty Staub or Pedro Martinez some questions. What would I ask and how would I ask it? And, you know, I'm asking these professional questions, but they're definitely tinged with, wow, that was awesome. You know, real Chris Farley kind of stuff. So I'm trying to go kind of halfway. And I think it probably worked. I think that, you know, talking to people who I

respect, who I'm not necessarily friends with, but just getting a feel for it, they're like, you know what, this could have gone totally wrong, but it seems like you got that balance right. And so I'm fine with it. But I mean, if people think that I'm building statues and it's unjustified, then I guess that's a fair criticism as well. Yeah, I like the little bit of the book toward the end that was, you know, a slight cheering in the press box element to it, I guess, because the city and the fans were almost as much a part of the book as the team. And I wanted to ask you about that because people obviously remember the dying years of the Expos when no one was going to the games. And then some people also remember the early years or how the city supported Jackie Robinson or how it kind of came together

around some of the more successful Expos teams. But it does seem like there was a real ebb and flow to the support of the Expos and to the success of the team over the years. And you had a you had a quote in there from Jeff Blair, who was with the Montreal Gazette at the time and said, I think that is a Montreal thing to be something of a latch on sports crowd unless it's hockey. Is that a fair characterization? Yeah, I think you can say that. But characterization? Yeah, I think you can say that. But you know what? I think you can say that for a lot of cities. I mean, Atlanta and Cleveland,

they look like they might be in jeopardy of, I don't know what, losing a franchise or just whatever. I mean, nobody went to those stadiums. It was just totally unpleasant. They were losing franchises. There were just a lot of things going wrong. And I think that every franchise has had these problems at various points.

The San Francisco Giants, who are an elite franchise at this point, they almost moved to Toronto in the mid-'70s. That's discussed in the book as well. So depending on the timeframe, you run into these lulls. And I think that to a certain extent, consumers have choices. And you have to kind of figure out what you're going to do with your disposable income or whatever. Montreal is a very vibrant city, especially in the summer. And there are a million other things you can do.

And I don't necessarily fault people you know but at the same time i am going to jump to the defense of the franchise to a certain extent in the book and i do because it kind of became a caricature i'm a big big nuance guy and i think that you could say something like hey listen you know this is a little bit of a party crowd and a bandwagon city whatever i will say those things but i won't go all the way with it because the facts don't lead me there it's not the case that that means that they're bad fans and that there are no fans because that's flat out not true they have drawn in various periods in the franchise they outdrew the yankees in the early 80s they were you know two million plus

when that was basically the equivalent of three million plus uh you know so i go back and forth on this thing and i just really try to try tell. And again, you know, if someone wants to come at me and say, hey, you know, you are saying these things with bias, I mean, I guess that's okay. But I feel like the job of a regular journalist, a regular sports writer, a regular baseball writer in the first place is to a certain extent to acknowledge that you have bias and to still try to present the facts as they are i mean for instance i love jose fernandez like i just i think he's just the cool you're such an interesting i got the interview in spring training and he's showing me pitch grips and this that or whatever and i just you know he's a young half my age remember it's a little weird but i just i love this guy i think that he's so interesting such a good pitcher so charismatic i love his backstory i love everything about it and i'll write about him and uh you, I think that the kind of the modern age of sports writing, and quite frankly, Ben, I mean, I think that my boss and your sometimes boss, Bill Simmons, can attribute, can say this. He and maybe some other people kind of paved the way to be able to do this,

to be able to write in a way where you could say things and they have analytical rigor. But at the same time, you like i'm into this i'm into this team or player or trend or whatever and i think that that's uh a little bit my style of sports writing i think that i was influenced by that to a certain extent and certainly when i'm writing an expose book that's going to happen so uh yeah you know it's fine i think that i can put those facts forward people know that i'm a fan and I think they can still respect the opinion anyway. So I was a Giants fan in 1992 when they also almost moved to St. Pete. And there was a lot of kind of soul-searching and debate in our house about whether we were still going to be Giants fans after they moved. And there was a lot of discussion about whether being a fan is a contract where both sides have to live up to it or where it's a covenant where you have to live up to your side whether the other side does uh or not um and we never really resolved that and

thankfully we didn't have to because the giants stayed are what you were in montreal um and presumably you have some connections still there to the city do montreal fans root for the nationals is there any any uh any attraction to the nationals or is it a completely different franchise that they have no connection to whatsoever? None whatsoever. It's funny, by the way, about the Giants, that they nearly became the Jays, and they nearly became the Rays, or whatever you want to say.

They nearly moved to both cities and ultimately got bailed out. No, I don't... Actually, I get asked the opposite usually, is do Montreal fans have any animus toward the Nationals? I don't think that's the case either. I think that it's just... It's a city that happened to be in that place

and that's what worked out. It was the most vibrant market, I guess you could say, without a baseball team. And, you know, they are pretty successful and I think that it's a good fit and I'm fine with it. But I don't think there's any strong fandom there. I think that a lot of fans gave up on baseball, which, you know, makes a lot of sense.

If you think about what baseball is, I like the seinfeld thing about that you're rooting for laundry obviously you're rooting for pedro martinez or gary carter whatever but those guys get traded you know eventually and they move on and so you're rooting for the laundry to a certain extent but i think you're rooting for not only the geography but the real tribalism element to it i mean the reason that i get that i'm this lunatic about the expo is certainly like all these players, but it's so personal to me. I mean, I, my first experiences with the Expos are with my grandfathers when I was six or seven or eight. That's a big deal.

You don't get over stuff like that. If you're 30 or 40 or 50 years old, that always stays with you. If you go on to high school and your best friends in the world, go to all these games with you, and you're still friends with these guys and you still go on road trips and wherever with these guys of course that's going to stick with you too and so you know in the end it's not exactly the players or the stadium or anything like that it's just it's everything it's my childhood influences and then my my adolescent influences and all that stuff that plays into it and i would guess you know i don't want to put words in your mouth sam Sam, or anybody else's, but I would guess that if the Giants moved to, you know, Toronto or Sheboygan or St. Peter, a place that really has nothing to do with the team, you would lose a lot of that

because you didn't go, you know, it's not, you never went to Sheboygan with your aunt and uncle or with your grandfather or your mom or your dad or your sisters or your brothers. It's a different environment. And so, you know, that's how it became to me. So some people people picked up the jays i'd say there were a few that did that some people just kind of gravitated to random teams uh but a lot of them gave up on baseball for that reason because they felt that that that that tribalism that covenant had been broken and so they kind of didn't know where to go from there i mean i really didn't root for anybody until you know whatever started doing the raise book and even then it was kind of that professional and personal thing we're talking about that book at the time that i wrote it was really pretty much entirely professional i think it was only toward the end of that process

i was like all right maybe i'll kind of pick up this team a little bit and you know after i'd gotten to know a couple people not many people in the organization but a couple uh but even then it's not visceral you know i have a casual interest in the rays i think they're an interesting team but i mean the expos are just it's these familiar familial and friendship ties that you can never, ever break. And if the Expos never come back again when I'm 90 years old, I will still romanticize about this team for that reason. So you kind of romanticize the team, but you're also pretty clear eyed about the mistakes that they made over the years. the mistakes that they made over the years. But what was the biggest institutional disadvantage you think they faced? Because it seems like there were plenty between just the setting and the taxes and the exchange rate and the ballpark. What was the biggest impediment? You know, those external

factors were certainly big. The one that I keep coming back to, and I have, you know, of course, it's influenced by these other things. But the fact of the matter is they never had a real owner after charles bronfman uh for people don't know charles bronfman was the original owner of the franchise he was the heir to the seagram's fortune takes over the team when he's 36 years old basically because his mom says hey you know come be a part of the opera or whatever and he says no i don't want to do that i want to do my own thing aside from the i want to build my own name and not lean on the bronfman fortune or whatever and so he takes over the expos as the uh you know kind of lead owner of a partnership and uh he does that for 20 years and most of those years were pretty positive in fact in the 70s and

i read about this in the book it was really not that you didn't have the same revenue structure in the game as you did before it came down to was your owner rich or not and charles bronfman was a lot richer for example than george steinbrenner i mean a lot richer and so if a player was deciding on what city they wanted to go to to play baseball it wasn't a slam dunk that you would go play new york over say a place like montreal because maybe montreal could pay you more or would want to pay you more or what have you so all those things came into play and in fact both of those teams along with san diego which also sounds weird, but they were owned by the Crocs, who, of course, owned McDonald's. So, you know, you had Crocs and Bronfman, two owning these gigantic companies at the time, versus Steinbrenner, who was kind of this guy. Jackson, who was the marquee free agent. And part of that is this whole long story, which I'm not going to get into now because it's kind of colorful and I want to keep it in the book.

But they had a real shot at it for a while. Anyway, so Bronfen is involved for a long time and then he starts getting disenchanted and it's not that he can't afford the rising salaries. It's just that he almost feels like, well, it's a family and family doesn't ask for more money. He really kind of got sucked into the vortex of getting too close to the situation. So when Gary Carter signs a big contract with the Expos, by the way, and whatever it goes, 0 for 8, you know, down the stretch during –

it was 82 or 83 or whatever, one of those seasons when they're competing for the playoffs, he takes it personally as if I'm paying this guy all this money and he went hitless for two games. What's going on? You know, just really exaggerating the impact of it and eventually trades him away and uh not a great trade for the Expos by any means the Mets go on to win the World Series and what have you and I think he just felt that that that bond in his mind had been broken that it wasn't a family thing anymore it was a business when in reality it was always a business let's face it uh eventually sells to in the early 90s goes over to consortium of local owners and

this consortium these are multi-billion dollar companies we're talking about bell which is a gigantic telecommunications company a multimedia company uh provigo which is affiliated with loblaws their big supermarket chain case de jardin liest largest chain of credit unions in canada canadian pacific a big railroad company so these giant companies and they all come in and they've got the ability to do whatever and they say we're in for 5 million bucks, never bother us again. And when you've got no committed ownership, and when you've got a team where the owners want to run everything based on 1991 revenue, 1991 expenses, that's not going to work for very long. And that becomes kind of a disaster. And yeah, you know, 94 was a big problem. Certainly they

don't win, get to dismantle their team. Back to 81 where they don't win. You know, 94 was a big problem. Certainly they don't win. They have to dismantle their team. Back to 81 where they don't win. You know, these other things happen, these external factors, taxes, the exchange rate, all these things are bad. And maybe an owner would have shown more faith had the conditions would have been better. But the bottom line is nobody did. And that and then you get to Loria, of course, and that didn't go well either, as a lot of people obviously know. And you just never had that. And they really needed somebody who had both the means and the will to hang in there because revenue sharing and all these things were not really in place the way they are now

to kind of suck it up for a few years. Because the thing is that the Expos have lasted until today. I mean, at a minimum, they'd be worth half a billion dollars. You know, the poorest teams are worth that much right now. But nobody really had any vision. Nobody had any foresight to kind of see that things were going to change and they were going to change for the better. Nobody had any foresight to kind of see that things were going to change and they were going to change for the better.

So Extra 2% was all about a team that faced some similar disadvantages and managed to transcend them through smart ownership and smart operations and getting the edge as much as possible. What was the most Rays-like thing the Expos did, do you think, at any point during their run? I mean, if you look at Dave Dombrowski and Dan Duquette, who were the GMs respectively in kind of the late 80s, early 90s period, they were whatever the heck you want to call them, money ball guys or extra 2% guys or whatever. They knew about the little things. They did a really good job of making these trades and these moves that, you know, it was good old fashioned scouting certainly, but it's also just kind of identifying opportunities. Duquesne in particular, he was kind of a shark. You know,

he traded for John Wetland and he traded for Ken Hill and Darren Fletcher and all these guys who became integral parts of that team in addition to the homegrown guys. And then of course the Cote Grosso's, he trades Delano DeShields for Pedro Martinez. And that trade is discussed in depth, at length in the book. And it talks about all the circumstances that led to the Dodgers trading him. I interviewed Fred Clare, who was the GM at the time.

I mean, I really try to go pretty deep on that stuff. And what it comes down to is when Duquette makes that trade, he is just murdered in the Montreal press because De Shields was due to make about $1.5 million. Pedro's going to make about $150K.k and the thought was this is another salary dump same old expose the shield is a 24 year old dynamic second baseman big fan favorite too i love the shields and nobody seemed to understand it oh you're trading for relief pitcher what's this this guy's skinny why did you trade for ramon martinez who was the more famous older brother at the time and people didn't get that this was a move where you could project this guy. You could project.

Now, nobody knew. I don't think that he would be one of the greatest pitchers of all time. But there was a sense that, at least among people who knew, including Duquette, that he could really be something special. And so I think it's just identifying those moves. You know, the Rays certainly have good homegrown players. But quite frankly, they've drafted very poorly for like six years in a row. And a lot of the reason they're really good is because they traded for Ben Zobrist and, you know, Escobar and Matt Choice. And, you know, they pick up these guys in addition to what they have.

They do such a good job of supplementing. And that to me was what it was, is that they recognize that you had to be strong one through 25. The Rays are very good at that. And the 94 X was in particular were great at that. Their bullpen was strong and deep. Off the bench, they could bring in speed or power. They platooned. They certainly had stars at some positions, but they had all of those things,

and I think that's really a tribute to Dombrowski and especially to Duquette. And it's funny because the start of the Expos is really everything was, the timing was always wrong. If there was a wild card, they're in the playoffs in 79 and 80 and 93. 79, they lose to the eventual World Series champion, the Pirates, by just a couple games. 80, they lose to the eventual World Champions, literally on the second to last day of the season against the Phillies. 81, they came one game short, they lose to the eventual World Champion, the Dodgers. 93, they almost come back and win. And all these things keep happening over and over and they're very close and what struck me when you get into the book is that this is where

kind of i use my nerdy i guess for lack of you know you could call it kind of a baseball prospectus kind of mind to some extent where i say what were the endemic baseball reasons that led to them failing and there were there was cocaine there were all these other things but one of the stats that came up is if you look at their primary second baseman from 78 through 83 a period of six years so the guy who started the most at second base over a six-year period they combined to hit zero home runs now you're not gonna win crap if you have second baseman zero home runs for six years and this is a problem so you had bronkman who had wealth but you didn't have this kind of paying attention to the little things attitude it was we're gonna be the team of the 80s because we have Dawson and Carter and Steve Rogers and so forth,

not realizing, hey, you need a second baseman, a shortstop and a bullpen and so forth. Later on, they're great at recognizing the little things, but because of the strike and because they run out of money and so forth, they don't get that done. They literally just needed to Voltron this stuff together, just transport Charles Brofman into the future or transport these GMs into the past and they might

be a dynasty, but that never happened. Yeah, Royal's second baseman during the Chris Getz era looked down at Expo's second baseman during the 80s. I think it was that bad. It was very bad. So you mentioned Duquette and in this like sort of eight year period, they had Bill

Stoneman, Dave Dombrowski, Duquette and Kevin Malone, all of whom went on to have some sort of success or achievement with other teams as GMs. So why were they so unable to hold a GM during that eight-year period? And how destructive was that? Am I overstating that? Or was it sort of kind of part of the problem that they couldn't keep a front office together for more than two years well it's each one had a different story and some of these stories are very amusing starting with the first guy in this chain murray cook who wasn't great necessarily but he was certainly had an eye for uh for young talent anyway and you know the thought was maybe he'll get better and buck rogers was the manager pretty good manager and in fact in 87 they won 91 games which was a little bit of a

surprise after the Carter dismantling and Dawson leaves at that point. But Reigns had maybe his best season at that point. He could have been MVP in 87 potentially, even though he was colluded against and only started the year on May 2nd. And so Cook is going along and things are fine. And then he goes and has sex with Claude Brochu's wife. That's kind of a problem.

It turns out that's not a good way to stay employed by sleeping with the team president's wife. And so as a result, he gets fired immediately. And Stoneman is made to be a temporary guy, the interim general manager. But he realizes he doesn't want to be a general manager. He's a finance guy. He's a logistics guy. Does not love

being a GM necessarily. So he just kind of steps down. And Dabrowski takes over. and he's a very young guy at that point but a bit of a prodigy and you know the Expos did a great job of developing front office talent as well as player talent and it shows through there's a whole chapter that kind of gets into that so Dabrowski sticks around for a while and then he gets an opportunity because there's going to be an expansion franchise in Miami and so he says you know what I really like being with the Expos but I can't turn this. The chance to build a team from scratch is really cool.

So that's the reason he steps down. Duquette takes over. Duquette does a masterful job taking over for Dombrowski. He's wonderful. What happens to Duquette? He's a Massachusetts boy and the Boston Red Sox offer him a GM job. Well, you can't turn that down. That would be crazy. You have a chance to break at that time. How many years are there? That's 76 years or whatever it was without the World Series. If he could be that guy, he would have that Theo Epstein reputation, and he'd be a hero forever. So he leaves.

Malone comes over, and Malone is put in such a bad situation. After the 94 strike, he's forced to trade Wetland and Grissom and Ken Hill for nothing and get rid of Larry Walker without even offering him arbitration in the span of literally three days after the strike ends. And he just feels he's got a gun to his head the whole time he's in front taking that job. So he leaves.

The team ends up being really good in 96, by the way, and then kind of good a few years after that. But, you know, all these external circumstances led to all these departures. So I don't necessarily think that any of them were disenchanted with the experts per se except for maybe Malone. It was just that all these other things kept coming up. And quite frankly, I don't know that you could deny any of them were disenchanted with the experts per se except for maybe malone it was just that all these other things kept coming up and quite frankly i don't know that you could deny any of those impulses whether it's sleeping with the boss's wife or going on to be the gm of the

red sox so we have to ask the obligatory question at some point we might as well get it over with now will or will there be baseball again in montreal i would have said three years ago and i've answered in a similar way in other places but i would have said three years ago, and I've answered it in a similar way in other places, but I would have said three years ago that it would have been impossible. Now I would say that it's improbable. It's unlikely, but there is some sliver of a possibility. And the reason I say that is just because you can see it. I mean, you can see there's been some progress made. They're doing feasibility studies and there's some grassroots movement and so forth. there's something going on

you know it's it's pretty it would be stubborn of me to do to think otherwise in a way i was more critical and more skeptical of this thing than even some outsiders were because it's just like a i didn't want to get sucked in b i didn't want to be that guy who's being the delusional fan or whatever but i do think there's a little bit of something going on but the thing is you know there are real obstacles here. You know, let's say you can get a multibillion-dollar company involved. And I would submit to you that Bell, actually, that same company that was involved in the consortium, there's a bit of an opportunity there because, as you guys probably are aware, hockey is, you know, everything in Canada. And Rogers, the other big multimedia company, took just a hockey away from Bell.

So there's a big hole in Bell's programming. They're kind of of like you know whatever uh sort of an equivalent i guess you could say and they have to figure out what to do well i mean if they had a baseball team they could kind of build a like an mlb network or whatever type of format and and then but in canada and then they can have this flagship uh product which would be the montreal baseball team so that'd be an interesting possibility they can obviously benefit from the the broadcast rights and so forth, and there's a lot of logic to that. The same way that Rodgers owns the Blue Jays, Bell could own whatever it is you would call that Montreal club.

But here's the thing. MLB has to approve this thing, assuming you can even get a company that will buy the team. MLB has to approve it. Then you have to decide on either expansion or relocation. And people have been banding about the Rays as a possibility, which, by the way is some weird parallel universe where i'm literally obligated to write a book if that were to ever

happen i don't i don't understand how i could weasel my way out of that one i would there's who the hell else has this bizarre uh very very limited uh yield of expertise would have to be me anyway but i don't think that's you know i think that i don't think that's the case and i think that this is something where people are kind of going one through 30 in revenue and say guess the rays are number 30 you got to move the rays the rays are number 30 the expos were number 130 i mean they got nothing loria goes to the local radio stations when he takes over and he says let's work out a radio deal the radio station says perfect pay us a thousand dollars a game and we'll put your games on the on the air i, that's not how sports works. That's not a thing.

You can't pay to have your product televised or put on the radio. And there were all these huge, huge problems. I mean, they had no revenue. Revenue sharing didn't really come into play until after the 94 strike, and even then was kind of slow going. National TV deal was a shadow of what it was. MLB advanced media and all the internet revenue did not exist, of course. Now the Rays start every season conservatively with $100 million in their pocket. If you think about $52 million for national TV, local TV, off the top of my head,

I think it's $18 million. Revenue sharing, at the very least, they're getting $30 million. And that's not counting internet revenue and so forth. So I mean, they have all this money to work with before they sell a single ticket. They're profitable, you know, and you could say, well, you know, it'd be nice if they weren't getting revenue sharing or whatever. But I'm a firm believer in revenue sharing. If you have a team in New York, they have a big competitive advantage. And of course, New York cannot be put on the absolute same level as Tampa Bay or Pittsburgh or Kansas City or Cleveland. It has to be the case that you level the playing field. In fact, I'd be in favor of maybe more revenue sharing if you really want to be 100 percent fair about about it so you know i don't buy this yes

the stadium is not a nice stadium and yes it's out of the way and what have you but listen there are two things going on in tampa bay right now number one is they're profitable as i said and number two is a really good so i don't know what the heck else you want i mean maybe stew sternberg wants a new stadium maybe mlb is going to bitch about it and maybe there might be some future extortion attempts but the bottom line is one team has moved in 40 years one team and it's a new stadium. Maybe MLB is going to bitch about it, and maybe there might be some future extortion attempts. But the bottom line is one team has moved in 40 years, one team. And it's a team where things were just beyond repair by that point. As much as I'm a fan, as much as I would love to see baseball in Montreal, I would love to see it continue. I'd love to see it back.

The fact of the matter is those problems at the time in 2004 were completely intractable, and that is not the case with the Rays or the A's or name your other team that is theoretically in trouble. So let's say that someday baseball expands to 32 teams. They put one of those teams in Montreal. They come and ask you to run it because why wouldn't they at this point, really? And there's an expansion draft. And let's say it works roughly the same way that the original Expos expansion draft worked. Do you think that you would take the same approach they did? Because I thought that was one of the more interesting parts of the book that you discussed how they sort of took a different tack in the expansion draft than other

teams had and it worked out well for them. Okay, first of all, the notion that I could run anything, anything is preposterous and whatever. I guess it's nice of you to say, I have one skill set in the world and it's writing. I literally cannot fix things, change a tire, do anything. And I certainly cannot run a baseball team. You've got heart. You've got heart and love for the Expos. I talk with my hands because I'm a Jew and I can reach things on high shelves.

I guess that counts too. And it would definitely play well in the local market. That's true. You're 100% right about all those things. Anyway, yeah, it was a very interesting pack. You know, ultimately what came out of the expansion draft is they got Rusty Staub, which was phenomenal. They ended up with just, you know, mostly

cruddy players, as you would expect. But Staub was a star. He was 25 or 26 years old. And by drafting players that could be attractive to other clubs, and Jimim fanning who's still around by the way he was with me at a book signing which was the coolest uh he was one of the original architects in the team and he made no bones about the fact that they specifically went out and tried to get bait you know other teams were allowed to protect i want to say 15 guys

off the top of my head so they would look for the number 16 that some other club might really want they would draft them and try to package them together for something better and they they made a couple of trades, but the one for Staub was perfect. And it was great timing too, because Staub had this big, big rift with the Houston franchise at the time. He and the general manager didn't get along. He and the owner didn't get along. He and the manager didn't get along.

They wanted him gone. He wanted to be gone. And so the Expos picked up Don Clendon and especially Jesus Alou, who Houston liked. And so the thought was, okay, let's go ahead and make a trade. And so as a result, the Expos get this star in the prime of his career who's also charismatic and can kind of carry some of that fandom, can kind of be that focal point. And it was really a great move.

And it's interesting, too, because we've had, obviously, expansion drafts since then. There's always a big debate about this. You know, Arizona goes on to win a World Series pretty darn quickly after they had the expansion draft since then there's always a big debate about this you know arizona goes on to win a world series pretty darn quickly after they uh had the expansion draft now a lot of it was they make they spend really big money for free agents a couple years after the expansion draft but the bottom line is they kind of sowed some of the seeds there whereas let's say if it's the it's a time to double raise no that didn't work out quite as well and it took really some dismantling of the team uh vince namoli has to leave and they have to try something totally different before it works out and you know marlins came in the rockies came in all these teams have had different strategies so yeah i do

think that's fascinating that's the thing about this book is you know whatever maybe you care about the exos maybe you don't but there's good kind of meat and potatoes again you know just baseball prospect to see kind of stuff where it's, let's talk about roster construction. Let's talk about what went right and what went wrong. And then on top of all that, which I think is the dominant feature of the book is that I talked to everybody in the free damn world. I mean, I interviewed everybody who could possibly imagine.

And if you can get Pedro Martinez to be candid with you about anything, then you're, you're in great shape. You know, he's just going to tell these amazing stories and all of these guys did. And that was really a lot of fun. So, you know, I think first and foremost, it's a fun book. But secondly, you know, it does have that kind of whatever you want to say, analytical or businessy or whatever feature that just kind of let's ask the hows and whys and figure out how it all came to be. That's certainly in play here. All right.

So inevitably, we have to ask you this. So far as I can tell, there are nine players currently who are either active or something close to active who were Expos at some point. Bartolo Colon, Jamie Carroll, Scott Downs, Luis Ayala, Andy Chavez, Bruce Chen, John Rausch, Maestro Estorres, and Brendan Harris. Who's your money on for the last Expo? I've been saying it's Estorres for a while because he's the youngest of those guys, and he's kind of a versatile middle infielder, and those guys tend to stick around. By the way, he plays for the Blue Jays and was in this game, in these two games over the weekend.

He comes to bat, and I immediately know what's going on, and my buddy and I, my buddy's a Montreal radio host, and so he knows too. We get up and we're like, yeah, and we're chanting Maceurus Turris' name, whatever, and I mean it's dead silent in the stadium. People stadium people like what the hell is wrong with these jokers but i was like it's basically he's an actual expo he had a very distinguished career as an expo also 32 games hit 206 listen that counts and he looked at me like i was crazy when i didn't read him for the book he's like what are we talking about this was like a 2011 or something i think it was at dodger stadium talking to him like in the locker room he's completely out of left field anyway but bartolo cologne pitches for the mets

we were bummed that he didn't get to pitch because he would have gotten a real reaction because they traded for him in 2002 now nationals fans are not happy about that trade because it cost cliff lee brandon phillips and grady sizemore but at the time the experts were just like hey we made a trade where we went for it. This is awesome. And Cologne was very good. And he's a robot, man. Like, I mean, he's over 40.

He weighs 725 pounds. And he's still really, really good. When does he decline? And what are the circumstances which will lead to him declining? Does he need to be 45? Does he need to weigh 1,000 pounds? What has to happen for this to happen? I honestly don't have an answer for you.

So, you know, I guess the easy answer is, okay, you go with, you know, whatever the lefty reliever like a Downs or a Sturris is pretty young. But Colon is – I'm thinking of your list again or the list again. I mean, Colon – yeah, Colon would easily be the best player of those guys right now. So maybe that's just it. Maybe you're just – the Occam's razor answer is just bank on the guy who's the best now on the theory that his decline, uh, you know, if he goes down a little bit, he'll still be pretty good a year from now or two years from now. So I'd love to see a 50 year old Bartolo Cologne pitching in a 2024. And maybe there's some momentum that's been built for

a team coming back at that point. Sure. I'm on board with that. He can throw out the first pitch whenever the team comes back. Well, I was going ask you to to sell this book to someone who has no emotional connection to the expos but i think you've done that already over the course of this podcast and and i really had no emotional connection to the expos but i mean i think the book is worth reading even just for just for the the asides the little breakout parts of the book that don't really have anything to do with the main narrative but just things that you wanted to get in there, Pasquale Perez or the Harrisburg Senators brawl. And there's a great story that you had from Felipe Alou, who you talk a lot about in the book and his player development skills and the fact that he was passed over many times as a

potential manager. And you have a story there where Vlad Guerrero came up and he's swinging and everything and completely unrefined as a player. And Alou just says, leave him alone. There's going to be mistakes. The ball's not going to be thrown to the cutoff man early on. His plate discipline is going to be very raw at best. Leave him alone. Made me kind of wonder what would happen if Alou were the Dodgers manager right now.

I liked all the parts about the drugs. There were many parts about the drugs. The Expos had a pretty distinguished history as a team of players who like to have fun. Have you been to Montreal in the early 80s? This is how it was going to go down. My last question, how hard was it to be bilingual while you were writing this book? Were you slipping defense with a C into your Grantland columns or center with an RE at the end? You switched between them seamlessly. I started writing the book and I filed the first chapter.

Actually, the first chapter that I filed was the Blue Monday chapter and if people want to you know they kind of want to get a taste for it go to grantland.com and google Jonah Carey Blue Monday Grantland and you'll see it and it's an oral history so it's all like basically a whole mini chapter and talks about that stuff it's a pretty good taste of the book that was the first one I did and there's words in there like color and neighbor and defense and what have you and I spelled them the american way i've lived in the state since 1997 that's a long time and my editor my main editor said okay whatever but then the copy ever comes back and there's big x's through everything it says put it in a u put in a u put in a u i said really are we doing this and but the book is you know primarily the main publisher is random house canada we're distributing it by a random house

in the u.s but uh yeah you know know, so it was all spelled that way. And it was a little bit of a change of pace. I did not get into that in Granville. But I have to tell you, when I did slip into French, you know, there'd be kind of sentences and I would just find myself saying, like, there's a term chez nous. Chez nous means, I guess it kind of means with us or whatever, technically. But chez nous is very hard to explain. It's kind of a thing where you, it's a very territorial thing.

You talk about, this was baseball chez nous. This was our brand of baseball. It was very hard to explain it's kind of a thing where you it's a very territorial thing you talk about this was baseball she knew this was our brand of baseball was very unique to montreal what have you and you can't really say that it just doesn't work as well in english and i found myself slipping into that more stuff like that more than anything not the ap style or cp style use a u or not but literally putting in little french asides because i did grow up actually trilingual, used to speak pretty decent Hebrew too, not so much anymore. But I just had all that in my arsenal and just not through any, trying to have any effect or trying to be cute about it, but just this is how I would talk.

I'd speak Franglais, as we say when you're growing up, you speak a little bit of both. And so it would get slipped in there. And one of my favorite things in the whole book is this whole idea of they developed a baseball lexicon. There was no term for anything ball strike home run whatever and jacques doucette and claude raymond who were the original they were the french language guys throughout the history of the franchise they said okay one day we're going to just make up all these terms and my favorite of all of them is one josh donaldson just hit a ball to uh nebraska that

might be gone it is off the top of the wall. I'm doing play-by-play right now. Say what type of pitch it was in French because I'm looking at the lexicon right now. I believe that was a ball rapide, which would be a fast ball. It was like a high fast ball. My favorite term of all of them is for knuckleball, they call it a ball papillon. Papillon means butterfly in French.

I love a butterfly ball, by the way. I would immediately lobby to change this from knuckle, just a very rough love a butterfly ball, by the way, I would immediately lobby to change this from knuckle, just a very rough word. I don't like the way that sounds. Butterfly ball sounds amazing. And so they just came up with these spectacular terms. It was really, really cool. And one thing that really struck me when I went back to the stadium last weekend was, yes, there's a big crowd. This is this, but I went to a baseball game and for the first time in 10 years, they're like, no,veur, the catcher, number nine, numéro neuf, whatever. And they're doing this thing in both languages.

Whatever. Maybe that's a little bit of a lark to people who come from New York or California or Florida or wherever to see the game. But to me, it was integral to the fan experience. It was a big thing that made Montreal a unique baseball market. And I think it's part of what gets missed is that you don't have that in Kansas City or Cleveland or L. even in Toronto I mean that just does not exist and and was a cool and very different thing about that franchise and

you know listen I don't have to make any pretense about the fact that Montreal had its problems I think that DC is a wonderful baseball market but the game is missing something without having that without having that city which is a tremendous city ask any beat writer any beat writer whoever went to that city about covering the team there and for various reasons some of which we can discuss in the podcast and some of which we cannot uh they loved it and they still loved it and people came back and loved it but i think even beyond that it's this kind of this slightly intangible piece of culture that is bilingual that is different uh that is multicultural, that really emanates from Montreal.

So I'm trying to convey all that in the book, the fact that it's a story of mostly a team, somewhat a philosophy, but also a city. All of that is kind of wrapped into the pages. All right. Well, I would say that you must be sick of talking about the Expos by now. But from knowing you, I know that that is not possible. So thank you for joining us. This is, I think, between my half Canadian and you, the podcast has been 50% Canadian today, which is, I think, the most Canadian it has ever been, probably.

So thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me, guys. It was a pleasure. Go buy the book, everyone. If only to read about the time That the Expos tried to recruit All the Cuban players when no other team could Oh, that's the best story I love that story, but we won't spoil it

If we're not finished, by the way I'm not going to tell the story because it's the best story But Mel Didier is the person that made that happen Mel Didier was one of the architects of the team And there's so many good Mel Didier stories Including he goes into the Dodgers locker room Before game one of the World Series And he's kind of talking to the players a little bit and he says if Dennis Eckersley gets to 3-2 he's going to throw a backdoor slider and Kirk Gibson

hurt him and hit that home run which is one of the most famous home runs in history but Didier is this you know wrote this great book called let me tell you a story podna podna p-o-d-n-u-h is the best accent ever and I'm at the game and I saw all these people over the course of the weekend. And the thing that I was the most excited about, because I'm such a nerd, was Mel Didier was just standing, like, outside the main entrance to the ballpark by himself, I guess, waiting on his wife or whatever. And my buddy and I were like, that's Mel Didier. That could be like if Pedro Martinez was standing there with Ricky Henderson

and Tim Raines and Barry Bonds and every cool player ever existed, this was even better than that. We're like, it's Mel Didier. So we went and talked to Mel Didier and we talked about all that and it was great. And that is a phenomenal story. The book is full of little pieces like that.

They just, you know, some of them are integral to the story and some of them are not, but you just, Oh, that was fun. And there was a lot of, a lot of stuff like that going back to 1969.

I'm sorry. There's a lot of self-promotion, but the Mel Didier thing got me going. If you have not read the book, go buy the book. It's called Up, Up, and Away. If you're a Hall of Fame voter listening, go vote for Tim Raines, I guess, in lieu of buying the book or in addition to buying the book. Follow Jonah on Twitter, at Jonah Carey. Read his writing at Grantland.

And you've got some book tour stuff coming up that people can find it at your website, jonakerry.com in Denver and Dallas and New York. So thanks again, Jonah. Thanks, fellas. All right. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com, sign up for the play index, use the coupon code BP to get the $30 one-year subscription.

And please send us emails for tomorrow's email show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.