No. 221: LARRY WALKER & THE 1994 EXPOS / What might have been & what could never be. Never had a disenchanted star played better. Never had a GM in a pennant race shit-talked his superstar worse.

I got time with the future Hall of Famer when he wore the Expos uniform for the last time in Montreal (at least until forgiving & forgetting at a reunion).

The pensive-looking rookie was more fun than he looks. Probably a prank.

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MARKING the 30^th anniversary of the 1994 MLB players strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series, I had a look through archival coverage of the Montreal Expos who at the halting of the season owned the best record in baseball, 74-40, on pace to win well over 100 games. In that archival coverage was a piece that I wrote for Saturday Night at Ground Zero for that lost season, that being Stade Olympique with the St Louis Cardinals in for a four-game series in the first week of August. I managed to get private time with Larry Walker on the occasion of his last games in an Expos uniform in Montreal, the fans’ last glimpse of nos amours on a magical run.   

The list of “legendary” teams that didn’t play a post-season game isn’t a long one. Success is the yeast that makes collectives rise to the level of exceptional and memorable.

I suppose those that failed spectacularly might qualify but the expansion Mets killed the lovable-loser category. Maybe a team will someday lose 130 games with a cast of cast-offs with a crew from HBO in the clubhouse for a behind-the-scenes doc, but even that would run a poor second to Casey Stengel’s running commentary on Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Jimmy Breslin’s authoritative account of the season.  Prior abominations—Veeck’s White Sox, the St Louis Browns and clownish others –were rendered moot.

Teams that came achingly close might have a legendary aspect—the ’64 Phillies, the ’69 Cubs and even the ’87 Blue Jays would be in that bracket. I did a deep dive on Toronto’s famous flame-out—check out the 30^thanniversary story and my award-nominated podcast here on No. 104: HENKE, FERNANDEZ & MUSSELMAN et al / The fall of ’87 and the fail of ’17. (You’ll need at least a trial subscription to access it.)

Still, I’m leaning towards Philadelphia on this one—six-and-a-half games up with ten games to play and losing three games with steals of home as pivotal plays (the only run in a 1-0 game and a walk-off dash home in another impossibly close contest). Check out this brief essay on the Society of American Baseball Research website for the painful details.

If you go to Cincinnati or St Louis, vintage fans would lament that their teams were denied their rightful shots at the 1981 World Series when MLB went to a split-season formats—the Reds and the Cardinals had the best overall records in their divisions from Opening Day through October, but ended up on the outside because they were runners-up in both the first and second half of the season. (The Cards’ luck seems particularly hard given that they finished a half game back of the Expos’ in the second half but played one fewer game.) As cruel as all this might be, when was the last time you ever heard someone take up the cause of either of those Cinci or St Louis teams? You’d be making educated guesses at the players in their line-ups.¹

Really, though, the 1994 Expos are in a category by their lonesome. Elements of their run defy logic: As noted in my Saturday Night story, they had MLB’s best record and the second lowest payroll. And, also noted in my magazine piece, even with that, Expos’ management was looking for ways to cut costs, including but not limiting too shedding the team’s highest paid star in mid-season. You might presume that the team might have been able to over-achieve because of the power of the collective, a pull-together spirit—but the 1994 Expos’ common bonding was a resentment of management.   

I followed the Expos closely that 1994 season, knowing that I was going to write a feature about the team and their vedette, Larry Walker. I remember the atmosphere at the Big Owe for that series with the Cardinals—the Expos won the first which ran their lead in the NL East from 3.5 to 5.5 games ahead of Atlanta. I was convinced that Felipe Alou or someone in the clubhouse had struck a Faustian bargain after the series opener—the Expos’ won 3-2 in 10 innings on Marquis Grissom’s sprint-off homer … yeah, an inside-the-park HR as a game winner. The next two wins were routine by comparison: Ken Hill not having his best stuff but going six innings to get the W in Game 2 to go to 15-5 for the season; and Walker lining three doubles in four at bats with a walk in Game 3. More than 39,000 packed the soul-sucking ballpark for the final game of the Cards series and the visitors won—a close game until Mel Rojas gave up four runs working just two-thirds of an inning in the top of the ninth. No matter, diehards thought, more to come.

But that’s all there was and would be.

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ONE of my operating principles in life tracks back to a throwaway line from in “Ambulatory Abe,” a Philip K. Dick-inspired episode of Pinky and the Brain.² In yet another attempt to try to take over the world, Brain builds a mechanical Abe Lincoln intending to pass it off as the 16^th President reincarnate. Pinky doubts his friend can pull it off, suggesting that no one would believe that Honest Abe could come back to life. Brain’s response: “People believe what they want to believe.”

So it is with the 1994 Expos. People will believe that major league baseball would still be in Montreal if the 1994 World Series hadn’t been cancelled. They’ll believe that a championship would have been the catalyst for a shift in the financial paradigm for the Expos, one that would have enabled the team to resign all its free agents, including Larry Walker. They’ll believe that a lot of pieces were in place to inspire confidence that the franchise might in fact win more than one World Series, that Walker would be riding in the lead convertible on the parade route that the Canadiens wore grooves in down Rue Sainte-Catherine.

It's easy to understand the emotional draw of the narrative: From its expansion roots at Jarry Park, the Expos were fun, an anomaly of sorts in a league that too often took itself too seriously. The Big Owe was a dreary place to watch a game, but then again, where else in pro sports could you walk through the turnstile with a 12-pack under your arm and not get pinned to a wall by the security detail. If you had gone to games in Montreal, you wanted the franchise to last forever.

The Expos winning the 1994 World Series was no sure thing. On the 25^th anniversary of the October without a Classic, Neil Paine, a sports statistics maven of the first rank, ran 1,000 simulations of the remainder of the 1994 MLB season as if a strike had been avoided and business proceeded as usual.

Paine, then working as sports editor at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, had bad news for those who believed in miracles in Montreal. Though the Expos had the MLB’s best ERA, though they averaged 5.13 runs per game, though they were six games clear of the Braves and their Maddux-Glavine-Avery-Smoltz rotation, the unsentimental Out of the Park (OOTP) simulation game determined that Montreal would have made the World Series only 25 percent of the time vs Atlanta’s 27 percent. Cinci was hard on the heels of the Spos at 23 percent. Just making it through two rounds of the playoffs was four-to-one deal, 106-wins pace notwithstanding. And if the Expos made the World Series, they’d be a coin-flip to win. The results from simulations for the big prize.

Please check out Neil’s SubStack. It’s always interesting and his weekend loopback, The Week That Was, is worth the price of admission.

The 1994 Expos have their romantic pull, but the one fella who figured to be immune to it would have been Larry Walker. So I was surprised to see this quote at the foot of a Canadian Press story in 2014.

"I’m guessing that’s when it happened," said Walker. "If the ’94 team stays together and the strike ends and we finish that season, I’m not going to say we would have won the World Series, but there’s a pretty good chance that we were going to be in the World Series. Good things could have happened from there. Revenue comes in, more guys stick around, contracts get offered and people don’t leave town. That’s what probably would have happened and who knows how long the franchise would have stayed here. It could still be here now."

Okay, this had to have been a case of throwing a good-old-days gloss on history to be polite—Walker was at the Big Owe, where 50,000 people had come out for an exhibition game and a ceremony that gave fans a chance to cheer for a bunch of guys from the 1994 Expos. You can find the whole story linked here. Walker’s easy to spot in the photo, dead centre kneeling.

I give Walker credit—he didn’t start to suggest that the Expos were a sure thing to win it all, “a pretty good chance” to get to the World Series. Presumably Walker had crossed his fingers before talking to the CP reporter about the potential fall-out from World Series games being played in Monreal—though not ID’d, I’m betting the reporter was my old buddy from CP in Montreal, Bill Beacon, since retired. Bill would have known that the truth was uglier.

In the courts, they call them “prior inconsistent statements,” stuff that lets the air out of a witnesses testimony. I have huge respect for Walker, wrote about him in his rookie year (also for Saturday Night) and was happy that he was elected to the Hall of Fame just under the wire as far as eligibility goes. He had a lot to say to me in ‘94 and none of it sounds like the spin at what passed for a 20th reunion. Maybe he didn’t remember. maybe he’d prefer to forget.

I didn’t really track the career of Kevin Malone, the villain in my Saturday Night piece. Though he was generous with his time, he came off as a pretty unlikeable guy, frankly. Yeah, I don’t know how convincing his face-turn is, the Christian Broadcast Network not being a reliable source of news.

Worth noting here is the fact at the time of writing the piece back in mid-August of ‘94, the balance of the season and the World Series had not yet been cancelled—that wouldn’t happen until September 14, days after the issue went to press and just a week before the issue landed on newsstands. Not the easiest thing to write around, a story that will stand up, but I gave it my best shot. Also, Saturday Night was a century-old general-interest magazine, not a sports publication, so I had to lead the readers by the hand through some baseball talk, which will come off pedantic or didactic. And finally I wasn’t crazy about the display, but I didn’t write that.

The full story is available to paid subscribers below the paywall. You’ll need at least a partial subscription to access it. And please forgive any typos in my transcription that follows.

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YER OUT!

Canada’s best baseball player wants to stay with Canada’s best baseball team. But the Expos are probably too cheap to keep Larry Walker.

From Saturday Night October 1994

AT one of the last home games before the players’ strike, Larry Walker looks out of the Montreal Expos’ dugout to the infield where the team president, Claude Brochu, is explaining to the local press the major leagues’ economic straits and, as 37,000 fans start to file in, griping about Montreal’s status as “a small-market club.” The executive’s words provide no salve to Walker’s wounds, physical and psychic. “All the way comin’ up in the minors the guys in the Expos’ front office told me how much they needed a Canadian guy, y’know, a power hitter with the big-league club,” he says, as he works his way through a bag of sunflower seeds. For a few years Walker was that guy. Now things have changed. No one talks anymore about him entering Montreal’s sports pantheon. “’Course those guys who told me that the Expos needed a Canadian guy are gone now,” he says. “The front-office guys and the scouts have all gone to organizations with more money.”

So too will Walker, one of the paradoxes in a baseball season not short of them: Look at the Expos’ advertising campaigns and there are images of Walker ripping into pitches. Go to the Stade Olympique’s souvenir stand and caps bearing Walker’s name and number are the ones being flogged. He is the most identifiable Expo, yet this celebrated native of Maple Ridge, B.C. is, as he describes it, just part of the ensemble, another set of spikes in the chorus line. Before striking players shut down the ball yards in August, the Expos owned the best record in baseball. Their manager, Felipe Alou, had conjured unlikely wins out of thin air and out of the big league’s second-lowest payroll. Every starter, scrub, ace pitcher, or call up had been the hero for a night or two. No single player had put the Expos on his back and carried them for a stretch.

On pace to break a big-league record for doubles in a season, Walker combined the team’s most conspicuous individual talent and that most Canadian trait, the ability to blend in with the scenery. The subject of trade rumours season-long and a free agent this winter, he is both a hero and a lame duck.