by Barry Stagg
June 1996
CANADA'S EXPOS
Owning the best record in major league baseball has the Montreal Expos fighting to find ways to cram twelve thousand fans per game into the cavernous Olympic Stadium. As the Expos go on to post-season play and make it to the World Series then perhaps fans will come out in numbers rivalling the usual attendance for a typical Montreal Canadians game. With the new Forum a.k.a. Molson Centre now in place in downtown Montreal fan counts of up to twenty thousand per game are expected. The Expos seem to have a long way to go before they get to that average.
In any other major league city forty thousand fans per game would be knocking down the doors to see the team with the best record in baseball and a roster full of young, exciting baseball players. A perfect example is the continued high attendance at Toronto Blue Jays games where the Blue Jays have a bunch of suspect and re-tread pitchers to go along with a few howitzers in the batting order. If the Expos suddenly showed up in now vacant Exhibition Stadium in Toronto the Blue Jays might all of a sudden find a reason to drop the price of hot dogs down below the average cost of parking your car around the stadium.
The Expos have had chronic problems with fan attendance and this year is no exception. One thing is certain, if the team continues to win the fans will come out and come out in droves. Fickleness and front running are prime features of the Montreal sports fan but they eventually get the point and support winners.
The Expos team this year are winners from the manager on down. Sixty year old Felipe Alou is a career baseball man from the Dominican Republic. Alou and his two brothers Matty and Jay all made it to the major leagues with the San Francisco Giants. They are still the only brothers to play three at a time in any outfield in major league baseball. Before his success as a manager, Felipe Alou had a memorable playing career but it is with the Expos that his image is taking on legendary proportions. This is a man who spent twenty years as an Expos "company man" managing throughout the minor league system before the Expos grudgingly and almost accidently promoted him to major league manager. His ability to coax great efforts out of Latin American players is obvious from any peak at the day-to-day line scores for the team. Players like Henry Rodriguez, Felipe's son Moises and star pitchers Pedro Martinez and Mel Rojas show just how good Alou is at getting average players to step up to their optimum level.
Alou even has a playing history with the team as he spent part of a season dividing time between the Expos and the Yankees in the early seventies. By that time he was a first baseman rather than an outfielder. He comes from another era when pride in on field performance coupled with personal dignity were hallmarks of the best major league baseball players. Today Alou excels at getting major league baseball players to set aside their usual nasty surliness and prima donna instincts in order to play baseball the way he played it. For every obnoxious Barry Bonds and Albert Belle there is a sensible antidote like Montreal's Rondell White and David Segui.
All across Canada this summer the t.v. screens will be showing the Expos playing baseball with the same enthusiasm that the original 1969 Expos showed. Then unknowns like Coco Laboy and Bill Stoneman brought baseball to Montreal's Jarry Park and started a love affair between Canada's baseball fans and the team that may just be rekindled into bright, blue flames once again this season. Separatism may be alive and well in Montreal but the love of good winning baseball will transcend every nasty confrontation between the Fleur de Lys and the Union Jack.
Until next month: Be proud, be prosperous.