No. 228: FRANK ROBINSON / The Expos were slated to be scrapped & wouldn't have taken the field in '02 if Bud Selig had his druthers. He tapped a HOFer to manage the Expos for the zombie season.

A loyal lieutenant to the Commish, Robinson told me that the unenviable assignment was "the perfect job." Later he'd be talked out of resigning.

Would have loved to work this series vs the Jays into my story, sigh. In May 2002, the Expos swept a three-game set from Toronto in Montreal, part of an eight-game winning streak that moved them into playoff contention.

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THE WEEKEND marked the 20th anniversary of the Expos’ last game and it brought to mind the farewell to the team that I wrote, cough, in the fall of 2002. Yeah, premature, but not by much. This story for Saturday Night magazine serves as a personal history of writing about the team but also a window into a very weird time in unprecedented circumstances. (Granted, things were pretty screwy with the Senators in the late 60s when Ted Williams arrived on the scene and took on a team with Denny McLain and Curt Flood, but no one was looking to disband the team.)

Yeah, folks talk a lot—maybe too much—about the ‘94 team which lost its shot at making the World Series because of the players’ strike and the cancellation of the Fall Classic. (Check out my SubStack entry from August linked here, No. 221: LARRY WALKER & THE 1994 EXPOS / What might have been & what could never be.)

And, yeah, let’s replay Blue Monday once more—kinda tired of that. For baseball fans in Montreal, that loss to the Dodgers is what “Danny Boy” is to Irish bars. We’ll get there inevitably and when we do we’ll have stayed too long.

No one talks about 2002 very much, what should have been the lamest of lame-duck seasons, but was much better than it should have been. I tracked the over-achieving team from spring training through to the summer doldrums, when the team finally faded and fell out of contention for the playoffs. Vladimir Guerrero was lights-out, but less well remembered is Jose Video, a legit All-Star who picked up MVP votes. Bartolo Colon might have been in the Cy Young race if he had started the season in Montreal. There was a lot going on.

Through all this, I came away with a ton of respect for Frank Robinson. I knew his reputation as a fierce competitor—Tim Kurkjian laid it out on espn.com when Robinson died back in 2019. Here’s the link: No one tried to embarrass Frank Robinson and got away with it.

I wouldn't say that Robinson had mellowed when he took on the Expos’ job, but I found him very approachable. In what anyone else would find a thankless job, he saw opportunity—not an opportunity for him, particularly, because he didn’t need one, but rather an opportunity for young ballplayers in the Expos’ line-up, their one shot.

Worth noting this week was Robinson’s bond with Pete Rose, a point that New York Times laid of in its obit for MLB’s all-time his leader (linked here).

With apologies in advance for any glitches in the transcription (this being the rough draft of the story), from the September 2002 issue of Saturday Night.

OUT AT HOME

IN 1969, MONTREAL’S DREAM CAME TO LIFE WITH THE EXPOS. NOW THE NIGHTMARE IS COMING TO AN END. GARE JOYCE LOOKS BACK AT 33 YEARS OF CLOSE CALLS, BAD LUCK AND BROKEN HEARTS

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JUPITER, FLORIDA, FEBRUARY 2002

NOTHING IN the setting gives it away: a clubhouse at a major-league baseball spring-training facility, indistinguishable from the 29 others down the Interstate or a couple of time zones away in Arizona. Not at all luxurious, lacking lounges and big-screen televisions that players are accustomed to at MLB ballparks. And crowded. During the regular season a couple of dozen bodies are on hand. But in the spring there are always young prospects making a bid to stick with the big club and aging veterans without contracts trying to make the most of last chances. So the population of this sweaty preserve has swelled to 40 or so. Go to any spring training site, any year, and the scene is the same. It’s as universal as the poker game in the centre of the room, as immune to time as a baseball card in a hard plastic protective sleeve.

Yet this Montreal Expos team is utterly unlike any other team in the Grapefruit League, or for that matter any other any other ball club ever. This is the first franchise owned by Major League Baseball and the first whose owner has bought the franchise with the expressed intention of disbanding it. Only three weeks ago no one could have said for certain whether there would even be an Expos team this season. At that point the offices were empty: no team president, no general manager, no manager, no coaches, not even an unpaid intern. Javier Vasquez, Montreal’s ace pitcher last year and its representative on the MLB Players Association, was fielding calls from team-mates who wanted to find out whether they should make travel arrangements to report to Jupiter. “There were times I really didn’t know what to say to them,” Vasquez admits.

The team existed as a hypothetical.

Everything was hastily patched together in time to open camp. But with talk about the franchise being broken up or moved to Washington, D.C., or a strike disrupting the season, no one in the clubhouse dares look much beyond the first exhibition game, let alone years ahead.   

With such uncertainty, the betting is the Expos will lose 90 to 100 games and do nothing to draw attention to this boondoggle of MLB’s own making. Yet something else is in play: This will turn out to be a team that baseball’s reigning bastards can’t quite crush. Among the heroes, in fact, will be a couple of the owners’ hired hands, who will stay more honest to the game than faithful to their employers.

It has been said that baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it, and the Expos of 2002 are proof of that – a team that will end up playing better than anyone expected, under the circumstances better than anyone ever imagined.

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A TEAM A KID COULD LOVE: MY PARENTS’ LIVING ROOM, TORONTO, APRIL 1969

FOR FOUNDER Charles Bronfman, a Seagram’s whisky tycoon, Montreal’s major-league franchise is a gift to a city looking to take its place one the world stage after Expo 67. For baby boom Canada, the team is an introduction to a passion in a gilded, if not quite golden, age.

For me and thousands of kids like me, sitting in our living rooms around the country, watching Canada’s first big-league team on TV, it’s an easy transition from cartoons. It isn’t just the red, white and blue uniforms and the script logo on their garish tricolour caps but also the exotic names and the goofy accomplishments. There’s Rusty Staub (le Grand Orange), Mack Jones (the mayor of Jonesville, i.e. leftfield at Jarry Park), and, of course, Jose (Coco) Laboy, a journeyman third baseman whose name will forevermore appear on any future list of baseball’s best monikers. It’s fitting that the first homer in team history comes from the unlikeliest source: a journeyman relief pitcher, a lefty named Dan McGinn, who used to punt for the Irish at Notre Dame. And while MLB is moving into green-carpeted pleasure palaces like Houston’s Astrodome, the Expos playin tiny Jarry Park, a quaint place with bilingual singalongs in the crowd.

Like a lot of my friends in this first season, I have access to the team through the black-and-white set in front of me and in newsprint, where the Expos appear in boldface on those rare occasions when they’re listed among the National League leaders in batting or pitching statistics. In the first two weeks of the season, Laboy ranks atop the NL in batting average, Bill Stoneman pitches the franchise’s first no-hitter, and a generation of adolescent Canadians take up an interest in the game that will sustain them through the decades. They were our first sports crush, a sports fan’s puppy love. Not for a second do we imagine that dark clouds will roll over our beloved team.

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JUPITER, FLORIDA, FEBRUARY 2002

I’M SITTING at a picnic table across from Frank Robinson and we talk about those clouds he rolled in on.

Before this winter you could be forgiven for thinking that baseball’s top executives couldn’t heap more scandal on the game now only derisively referred to as America’s National Pastime. In the 1980s a civil court ruled that MLB team owners had colluded to keep player salaries down. The following decade a strike prompted the cancellation of the World Series and the owners locked out stars and seemed determined to start the next season with guys recruited from the sandlot. The game tolerated and glorified the reprehensible (Ty Cobb, George Steinbrenner) and scapegoated the innocent (Shoeless Joe Jackson, Curt Flood). It seemed impossible for the game’s power-brokers to come up with a new kind of self-inflicted infamy. Yet they did.

Since the owners’ putsch that ousted Fay Vincent in the early 90s, MLB, a business with more than $3.5-billion in annual revenues (figures throughout in U.S. dollars), has not had a commissioner in the traditional sense, which is to say one with a conscience and without a stake in a team. Bud Selig, a singularly unloveable car salesman who owns the Milwaukee Brewers, has occupied the chief executive’s position through this godawful stretch.

This past winter Selig, who oversaw the expansion of MLB by four teams in the mid-90s, proposed a contraction of franchises: the elimination of two financially struggling teams. At first this seemed to be a negotiating ploy heading into the next round of collective bargaining. That changed when Selig vowed to rush contraction through before the opening day of the 2002 season, collective agreement be damned.

Everyone knew that one of the teams targeted for contraction was Montreal. As someone who purported to have lost $20-million-plus a season, expos owner Jeffrey Loria surprised no one when he co-operated fully with Selig. Loria had been described as “a New York art dealer” and billed as a white knight when he first bought an interest in the Expos from an ownership group head by local businessman Claude Brochu in 1999. But Loria had soon squeezed his partners aside, became majority owner and proved to be anything but a savior. Something closer to the prince of darkness.

To facilitate Selig’s contraction plans, a deal was struck: Loria unloaded the franchise on MLB for $120-million and bought the Florida Marlins for $158.5 million. After countless heartbreaks, so many broken promises, so many threats of losing the Expos to a U.S. market, fans in Montreal shrugged off the team’s looming demise. They had heard it all before. Likewise, municipal and provincial governments did little more than wave. The prospects for a 2002 season in Montreal looked slimmer when Loria cleared out the Expos’ office, taking key employees to Florida with him, from manager Jeff Torborg right down to the public-relations director. Anything that wasn’t tied down and might be of use to the Marlins—computers and scouting files, for instance – were packed up and sent to Loria’s new team.

But a reprieve came from deep left field: Minnesota. For scheduling reasons, contraction was only viable if at least two franchises were cut—there had to be an even number of teams, or otherwise a team would be sitting idly by for days at a time during the season. So Selig designated the Minnesota Twins, World Series champions in 1987 and ’91 and a contender for the playoffs in the previous autumn – but a consistent money-losing proposition – as the second team to disappear. Again, the commissioner had an owner who was willing to co-operate (or capitulate): Carl Pohlad. Selig, however, had under-estimated the outrage the move generated in Minneapolis and St. Paul; he also hadn’t expected a Minnesota court to speed through an injunction in February blocking contraction because a lease on the publicly owned ballbark. Selig’s curiously discordant testimony in a U.S. congressional hearing and his own personal business relationship with Pohlad (which violated MLB’s own bylaws) were interesting footnotes. So Montreal was granted another go-round with the Expos, and the team’s equipment, what was left of it  after Loria’s scavenging, was shipped to Jupiter for spring training.

In a jam, the commissioner called on Frank Robinson to be the manager. On the surface this seemed to be a decent appointment. Robinson’s bona fides were in order: He was the only man to win MVP awards in both leagues, the first Black manager in MLB history and a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Yet his chief qualification was a long-standing friendship with Selig, for who he worked in the MLB offices as vice-president of on-field operations. He was Bud’s lieutenant.

Robinson was renowned for his toughness as a ballplayer and crankiness in his stints at the helm in Cleveland, San Francisco and Baltimore. Yet here in Jupiter, at age 66, he couldn’t be more congenial. He encourages and cheerleads players he would have browbeaten in his previous stops, and talks amiably to the few fans who gather behind the foul screen.

With no office to call his own at the Expos’ humbling training field, Robinson sits with me at a picnic table beside the parking lot and seems bemused by the twists and turns on the road to Jupiter. “These are unusual circumstances, I’ll give you that,” he tells me. “But really in a lot of ways this is the perfect managing job. We come in with a lot of people not expecting much of us. I’m not managing just to keep my job – that’s the way a lot of managers have to approach things – but I’m here for this year. I know that going in. The future is the future. It’s another time and place. I can concentrate just on the game.”

Robinson enthuses about working with among others outfielder Vladimir Guerrero and second baseman Jose Vidro, the former held to be one of the five most talented ballplayers on the planet, the latter a rising star. “These guys could play on any team,” he says.

The perfect managing job sounds like spin and nothing more. Baseball jobs are all about security—a five-year contract would be the foundation of the perfect managing job. Robinson will only be around for a second year if somehow MLB is thwarted in its bid for contraction and unable to find new ownership to relocate the team. Otherwise, it seems that this would be just about the last place anyone would want to manage.

It’s easier to understand Omar Minaya's motivation for taking the general manager's job. Historically, the Expo's GMs’ office has always suited bright young baseball men who were looking to establish their reputations. Nothing impresses owners of Tiffany franchises more than an executive who gets results with a small payroll at a shoestring operation and thus Dan Duquette, Dave Dombrowski and Kevin Malone turned dues-paying stints in Montreal into posts with Boston, Florida and Los Angeles, respectively.

Minaya fits the mould. At 43, he's young for the executive class. He hit a glass ceiling working as the New York Mets’ assistant general manager for five years. The Expos job is a step up, something bound to lead to other positions, all better. It's also a step forward. With this appointment, Minaya, born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New York, is blazing a trail, just as Robinson did. Minaya has become the first Hispanic general manager in MLB history.

Like Robinson, Minaya says all the right things. He says that few teams can match the Expos’ core of young talent—Guerrero, Vidro, pitchers Vasquez and Tony Armas Jr. and shortstop Orlando Cabrera. He says the team “won't be satisfied just to play. 500 ball or just contend—we will do whatever we can to help our team win.”

Meanwhile, Selig maintains that “the baseball decisions made by Omar and Frank will be in the best interests of the club,” and that there will be no dumping of players. Of course, nothing Selig can say will inspire confidence, and the numbers remain bleak. The Expos’ revenues for the 2001 season were $34.17 million, the lowest in Major League Baseball, largely because average attendance was a paltry 7,935 and local media revenues were pathetic. Even though the team's payroll, $37 million, was near the bottom of the list—less than a third of the New York Yankees—its operating expenses were more than $72 million. It seems logical, even inevitable, in this supposed going-out-of-business season, that someone willing to cut a whole team loose will be prepared to cut a few of its highest salaries in the interim. That will be fitting; for the Expos it has always been death by 1,000 cuts rather than one lethal blow.

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HAWK BIDS ‘SPOS ADIEU: STADE OLYMPIQUE, MONTREAL, OCTOBER 2, 1986

MORE THAN any other sport, baseball recognizes its players’ landmark achievements—whether it's a batter’s 3,000th career hit or a great pitcher’s 300th victory. It has the capacity for instant nostalgia, favouring its aging stars with farewell hoopla on their last trip around the league. Yet many milestones pass without celebration or tribute dash or even notice one of those is the last home game of perhaps the greatest Expo ever, Andre Dawson, the Hawk.

Long before this game, the last at home of the ‘86 season, Expos executive John McHale compared the centerfielder to Hall of Famers: “Mantle, Snyder, DiMaggio, Mays, they come to mind—but he's not like any of them.” This isn’t just boosterism. Dale Murphy, an outfielder and perennial MVP with the Atlanta Braves, calls Dawson “the best all round player in the league.”

Like his team, however, Dawson's promise has invariably exceeded his performance. As good as he is, he should have been better. For much of the 1986 season Dawson has batted .200, hobbled by an arthritic knee, a high-school football injury aggravated by Stade Olympique’s artificial turf. “I think of Andre like I think of Mickey Mantle,” Montreal manager Buck Rodgers once declared. “Mantle had a great career, but you wonder what might have been if he had had injuries. We’ll never know what Andre would have done if he was healthy.”

Dawson was once just the shiniest jewel in Montreal's glittering lineup, but by this last home game, against the New York Mets, with the team two dozen games out of first place, he's surrounded by mediocrities and minor leaguers.

The Expos lose the game, 8-2. There are 10,762 fans in the Big O. After the game, virtually all the reporters on press row descend on the Mets clubhouse. I head in the opposite direction. The Expos’ clubhouse is almost funereal in its silence. I approach Dawson after he’s showered and changed and ask if he has time to answer a couple of questions. “We can talk but I have to empty my locker,” he explains. Dawson wants to get all his effects out of the clubhouse before the Expos’ last road trip of the season. He'll be going directly to his offseason home in Florida.

“It's hard to play in Canada,” he continues. “The front office fails to realize the quality ballplayers for obvious reasons don't want to play here. Veterans don't want to be questioned at the border, going through customs every road trip. And the tax situation. They can't sign free agents to acquire players it has to be through trade.”

Outfielder Tim Raines, out of the lineup because of injuries, is clearing out the neighbouring stall. He overhears Dawson and chimes in. “The market for endorsements isn't as good in Canada,” he said. “And all the empty seats … there's a dead feeling when 10,000 fans come out at home and you play in front of 40,000 on the road. And it's cold.”

Dawson's disaffection doesn't end there. He's had grievances with the Expos’ general manager Murray Cook, who has shown no great enthusiasm in negotiating a new contract for Dawson. “I didn't come into this season looking to be a free agent,” he says, throwing a few family photographs into a box and tying it shut. “But things happened in the last two months. The Expos have good things to say, but talk is cheap. I believe the team has money to offer. If they don't show any seriousness, then I'll be forced to test the market.”

With that Dawson lifts the cardboard box and heads out the door, stealing a glance back only to see if he has forgotten anything.

The Expos won't make a serious bid to retain the services of their most talented and proudest player. Nor will any other team. These are the days of collusion among owners to suppress players' salaries. Dawson will end up submitting a signed contract to the Chicago Cubs, leaving it to the team to fill in a salary. In their limited largesse, the Cubs will settle on $500,000 for a year's services, well below market value. Dawson will go on to win the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1987, leading the league in home runs and RBIs. He will not only show Cook the error of writing him off, but also show the way for a generation of players coming up in the Expos’ organization: Montreal is a great place to start, but no place to waste your prime.

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THE ORPHANS’ OPENING DAY: STADE OLYMPIQUE, MONTREAL, APRIL 2, 2002

THE DECIDEDLY reluctant and avowedly temporary proprietors of the Expos recognize this first day as a critical one. They dread the possibility that the fans will protest too loudly and provide the media with sound bites and images that would make Major League Baseball the butt of jokes on the day's sportscasts once again. The schedule-makers avoided an April Fool's debut but did their bosses no favor when they booked the Expos’ opponent for the opener set: Jeffrey Loria’s own Florida Marlins.

Opening Day spectacle is cynical and ingenious. When the Expos players are introduced to the surprisingly large crowd of 34,351 fans, they trot out to their positions accompanied by local Little Leaguers. The kids are not symbols of the team's involvement in the community so much as adolescent human shields against booing. A procession of unjeerable luminaries follows: Quebecois athletes from the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics; surviving relatives of baseball heroes who played for the legendary minor league Montreal Royals, including the widow of Roberto Clemente and the daughter of Jackie Robinson. Security guards remove signs made by fans if they are more venomous and profane — they deem only the nostalgic and wistful fit for the showcase.

But baseball’s pointy heads have made one miscalculation. At 9:11 PM the game is stopped for a moment of silence to remember those who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks last September. One fan seizes the moment. “LORIA SUCKS,” he yells, and soon the crowd picks up the chorus. Jeffrey Loria hasn't accompanied his Florida team to Montreal, but his stepson, former Expos executive David Samson, is on hand to serve as a target of the abuse. It culminates with a fan running down to the front row seats on the third-base line, jumping on the roof of the Marlins’ dugout and unfurling a “LORIA SUCKS” banner. When he finally throws it down into the Florida dugout, the crowd rewards him with the loudest ovation of the night. Security guards are so slow to act that they seem complicit.

For most of the night it looks like this bit of comic theatre will be the highlight of the Expos’ opener. A grand-slam home run in the 7th inning by Preston Wilson off Montreal relief pitcher Britt Reames gives the Marlins a commanding 6-1 lead. But then comes a sequence of events that will set the tone for this season without precedent and demonstrate the character and talent of this unwanted outfit.

Again it starts in the seats along the third baseline. While Florida Marlins relief pitcher Braden Looper is warming up, a fetching blonde woman wanders down to the front row, and there does the type of dance usually seen at Chez Paree. It goes on for a good 10 minutes, and once again security lets it go. The routine delights the crowd and evidently distracts Looper. Meanwhile, the Expos chip away at the Marlins’ lead. Then, with two out in the ninth, Jose Vidro, playing with a sore shoulder that had threatened to keep him out of the lineup, singles and drives home two runs to tie the game 6-all. Looper then walks Vladimir Guerrero, and Orlando Cabrera drives Vidro home with the winning run.

The atmosphere is electric in the clubhouse after the game. “Who said there aren't baseball fans in Montreal?” asks Frank Robinson. “They pumped us up and pulled us through tonight.” A few players acknowledge that winning the first game over Loria’s Marlins makes the night sweeter. “The two franchises, we are mirror images of each other in some ways,” says catcher Michael Barrett. “The difference is that we were sold and they were bought--they’re staying on, I guess, and we're moving on. We gave the fans something to cheer about, beating this team.”

Mirror images? Well, the wind notwithstanding the Expos might seem less a mirror image of the Marlins and more an image in the rearview.

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THE LAST TIME IT WAS ANY GOOD AND ALMOST GREAT: STADE OLYMPIQUE, MONTREAL, AUGUST 1994

WHILE MANAGER Felipe Alou is wringing the best record in baseball—74 wins, 40 losses--out of his Expos team this year, everyone is counting down to the day the players will walk out on strike. Few have yet contemplated whether Bud Selig might cancel the World Series. Nonetheless the Expos are a miracle team, not just the best but also the youngest in the National League, averaging barely 26 years. The team sends five players to the All Star game, though not outfielder in future MVP Larry Walker, native of Maple Ridge, B.C. This is the starter kit for a dynasty.

Yet the most remarkable aspect of the 1994 Expos is its price tag. The payroll is the second lowest in the major leagues. Moreover, three-fifths of the team’s starting rotation (Pedro Martinez, Kirk Reuter and Butch Henry) make $460,000 combined. But these bargain-basement prices can't last, and almost everyone knows that this is the last go-round for this roster. Only the fans might have illusions of this squad having in next year.

Before one of the last home games of the 1994 season—a contest against the St Louis Cardinals—I’m sitting in the Expos dugout with Larry Walker, who wears an expression of pain and disgust. Pain because he has played for months with a tear in his shoulder that has forced him to play first base and throw underhanded; disgust because he's listening to team president Claude Brochu tell reporters that the Expos are “a small-market ball club” as 37,000 fans file into the seats. Walker knows that he's done in Montreal. He's tried to negotiate a long-term contract, but the club insists on a one-year deal worth $4 million, almost holding the door open for him to walk as a free agent after the 1994 season. “The fans were raggin’ me early this season because they thought I wanted more money,” Walker says. “Thing is, I wanted to stay in Montreal. I was taking French lessons. But the organization didn't want to make the commitment. All the way comin’ in the minors the guys in the Expos’ front office told me how much they needed a Canadian guy. Now, those front office guys and scouts have all gone to organizations with more money.”

The Expos win their last home series of the 1994 season, one game ending in electrifying style with an extra-inning inside-the-park home run by Marquis Grissom. Those aren't only Walker’s last games in Montreal as an Expo; they’re Grissom’s too. He will be traded before this start of the next season, as will reliever John Wetteland and ace pitcher Ken Hill. The strike and Selig’s cancellation of the World Series will break the hearts of Montreal fans, just like the other time the Expos were on the brink, when Rick Monday of the Los Angeles Dodgers belted a home run off Steve Rogers to win the National League Championship Series in 1981. But the strike, like “Blue Monday,” will only test the fans’ faith. The fire sale before the 1995 campaign will breach their trust. If the Expos were going to let Walker walk away and they were going to dump their best players, then a World Series wasn't ever going to turn this franchise around. It wasn't going to matter in the least, eight seasons down the line.

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BUD THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: STADE OLYMPIQUE, MONTREAL, JULY 11, 12, 13 & 14, 2002

WHEN THE Atlanta Braves come to Montreal for a four-game series after the All-Star break, they have assumed what they and their owner, Ted Turner, consider their rightful place in the baseball universe--first place in their division and the best record in the National League. Yet it is the Expos who have the best record at home in the majors. That they are contending for a berth in the playoffs for the first time since 1994 is a surprise. The fans across the majors have voted two Expos, Guerrero and Vidro, to the starting lineup for the All-Star Game, a not-so-subtle rebuke of contraction plans that no one had anticipated. But the real shock has unfolded off the diamond, orchestrated by Omar Minaya. It was thought that he might start tearing the team apart, dumping salaries and reducing MLB's costs along the way. Instead, he has stayed true to his word during spring training and made a pair of trades that gave Montreal reason to hope for a few more weeks of baseball in October, if not next year. In a trade with Cleveland, he's landed Bartolo Colon, arguably the best pitcher in the American League this season. And even after Selig testily reiterated that the Expos’ payroll couldn’t be increased to make a bid for the playoffs, Minaya closed a deal with Florida to bring back one of the stars from the Expos team in ’94, outfielder Cliff Floyd.

In this baseball season turned upside down, nothing sounds so strange as Floyd’s session with the press before his first game back with the Expos. Floyd claims that he's interested in signing a long-term contract with the club, believing that contraction isn't a done deal. He describes his situation in Montreal, playing for a contender and hitting behind Guerrero as “ideal.”

This series against the Braves is crucial to Montreal's prospects of making the post-season. Anything less than two wins against baseball's hottest ballclub will leave them with too much work and too little time.

By the end of Friday's game, scratching out those two wins seems a daunting task. It isn't just that the Expos lose for the second consecutive night. No, in this second game the Montrealers carry a 3-1 lead into the eighth inning and have knocked picture Greg Maddux, four-time winner of the Cy Young, out of the game. But when TJ Tucker comes out of the bullpen for starter Tomo Okha, the roof caves in on Montreal. “They didn't beat us,” Frank Robinson says after the 8-3 drubbing. “We beat ourselves. We didn't do the little things, didn't make the plays we had to make. We're better than that.”

But then the Expos win a pair in style on the weekend. On Saturday Bartolo Colon overpowers the Braves in picking up a complete-game victory and, with a towering shot to centrefield, Floyd hits his first homer in his second turn as an Expo, one of three by the team in fifth-inning rally that puts the game away. On Sunday, third baseman Wil Cordero, another veteran of the ’94 team brought back by Minaya, hammers an 0-2 pitch 400 feet for a grand slam in the third inning, and Montreal cruises to a 10-3 victory behind the pitching of Javier Vasquez.

Yet in the press box during Sunday's game, team president Tony Tavares tempers any good news on the field with the unchanging message from MLB. “I'm still pessimistic,” he says about the chances of the team staying in Montreal after this season. “It’s hard to see [a buyer for the franchise] coming forward at this time.”

Tavares says that if everything unfolds as planned, Omar Minaya will be working in the MLB offices next season, “if he doesn't get a general manager’s job someplace else.” And when told that a few fans have started a campaign to keep the Expos in Montreal and are getting signatures on petitions outside the gates, Tavares offers: ”I expected that. I thought it would have happened already.”

At the gates, a website designer named Charles Beaudry is doing brisk business when the 25,109 fans stream out of the stadium and line up at the windows to buy tickets for upcoming games. “We've set up savetheexpos.com and I'm convinced there is going to be a team here next season,” he says. “It might turn out that Omar Minaya and Frank Robinson saved baseball in this town this summer. In the long term, a strike makes it hard or impossible for MLB to contract or find a buyer for this team in another city. It might be that a strike this year and the way Minaya brought players in can save it.”

Some insiders believe a strike is inevitable—former commissioner Fay Vincent says it's “75 percent sure.” Thus the odds of the Expos making a run at the World Series this fall are prohibitive. The only longer shot than the Expos being in the post-season is the team somehow lingering another season. But Charles Beaudry notes as he hands out pamphlets: “You could do a lot worse than betting against MLB this season.”

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POSTSCRIPT: “THERE IS NO FUTURE HERE”

THE DAY after the Expos wrap up their series with the Braves, 14 former partners in the franchise file a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Miami against Loria, Selig and Bob DuPuy, MLB’s chief operating officer.

The group of 14, including the son of founder Charles Bronfman, once owned 76 percent of the ballclub, but their share was reduced to six per cent. They contend that Loria, Selig and others were “perpetrators of a fraudulent conspiracy” to eliminate baseball in Montreal as well as reduce their holdings in the team, and thus violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970, or RICO. The partners are seeking an injunction preventing MLB from moving the Expos to another city or eliminating the team through its contraction plan.

The group, which also includes Loblaws, Fairmont Canadian Resorts and Hotels, and BCE, alleges that Loria had lied to the other shareholders and plotted his takeover of the franchise by making a series of cash calls. The suit seeks $100 million in punitive damages and unspecified compensatory damages for the violation of the RICO act and for fraud and for the commissioner’s “breaches of fiduciary duty and negligent misrepresentations.” Damage awards under RICO are tripled. It's not easy to calculate whether a winning court will increase the Expos’ chances of surviving to play again in Montreal.

On the field there will be nothing so promising. Those wins over Atlanta seem to be exactly as good as it's going to get for the Expos, with the fungo bat of Damocles hanging over their heads. By mid-August, their record has settled around .500. Though Colon has pitched brilliantly, though Guerrero and Vidro shine, the Expos’ hopes for gaining a playoff berth have been virtually extinguished. After a difficult loss to Philadelphia, unconfirmed rumors circulate that Frank Robinson has tendered his resignation (“There is no future here,” he’ll tell reporters), only to be talked out of it by Minaya and the players. Still, Minaya recognizes that, for all the heroics in the first half of the season, nothing will last through the fall. On the July 31st trading deadline he deals the recently acquired Cliff Floyd to Boston for two Korean pitching prospects. Says Floyd, who took possession of an apartment in Montreal only the day before the trade: “I'm trippin’.”

Who will make the playoffs and win the World Series seems to matter less to fans and players than exactly when players will walk out on strike.

Still, even after Floyd's departure, there were moments when the Expos offered relief from the gloom around the game. Twice in one series at the Big O, Guerrero hit game-winning home runs in the bottom of the ninth against the World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks, the latter off Curt Schilling, the best pitcher in the National League.

About that time a rumor started circulating: Players for one small-market team had voted not to strike this season. There was no proof that it was the Montreal Expos. The only evidence to suggest that it might be them was what you saw—or what many thought they saw—on Opening Day, or on those occasions when the Expos refused to go quietly. This isn't a case of baseball being so great a game that it could survive the people who run it. No, this is a case of the men in the Expos’ clubhouse—the manager and GM among them—having something special: a respect for the game that allowed them to play on despite the rogues who owned them.

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Thanks for reading. Throwback footnote in the news: Malcolm Gladwell is out with a new book and is making the media rounds. Check out my piece about his misreading of the development of talent in hockey: No. 171: MALCOLM GLADWELL & CONNOR BEDARD / When the influential social theorist lost his way in "Outliers" (You’ll need at least a trial subscription to access this and other essays in the sprawling archive.)