Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other
periodicals. He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe
and the United States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning
magazine Attenzione and was editorial director of the
East-West Network, overseeing a dozen in-flight magazines and
the PBS organ Dial. Don's latest book, Nullo,
is now available.
One
question that lingered after the 1994-95 major league baseball
lockdown is how Montreal was maneuvered into underwriting some
of the bill for it.
No
other city has not only been such a big fig leaf for baseball
racism but played the stooge so readily for its biggest scandal
since segregation. Old habits are hard to break, especially
when they have been so successful.
There
have already been several incarnations of a Montreal franchise,
the first of which operated as a minor league club between the
end of the nineteenth century and World War I. In 1928 a group
of businessmen that included Charles Trudeau, the father and
grandfather of future prime ministers, relaunched a team in
the high minors dubbed the Royals. With war clouds in Europe
beginning to squeeze long-range capital prospects for Commonwealth
countries, the franchise was ripe for a takeover by the major
league Brooklyn Dodgers in 1939. In pure baseball terms, the
Dodger ownership produced a galaxy of future Hall of Fame players,
including Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Roberto Clemente,
Duke Snider, Don Drysdale, and managers Walter Alston and Tommy
LaSorda. But Montreal has never been just baseball.
Most
obviously, the city was the first home in organized white ball
for Robinson, signed by the parent Dodgers prior to the 1946
season by Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey and Montreal
president Hector Racine. The latter had to cosign the agreement
to maintain the fiction that it was a totally minor league transaction
and that Rickey had no intention of breaking the major league
color barrier that had been enforced since the 1880s. Again
strictly in baseball terms, even ardent champions of the move
accepted that Rickey was right to measure Robinson's talents
at a Triple A level before committing to a social crusade in
Brooklyn. Robinson more than delivered, leading Montreal to
a championship and becoming Canada's most popular player. Rickey's
gamble that Montreal could serve as a decompression chamber
away from decades of racial bias turned out to be the seminal
tactic in creating Brooklyn's fabled Boys of Summer teams.
The
Dodgers maintained control of the Royals until 1960, when team
president Walter O'Malley used what became a familiar alibi
in saying that attendance had become unsustainable and letting
the team go to Syracuse. What he actually found unsustainable
after the 1957 relocation of the Dodgers to Los Angeles was
having to supervise the farm club across a continent, not least
having to shell out substantial air fares for promotions and
demotions. Through the 1960s O'Malley, the first among owner
equals, made periodic sounds about supporting major league expansion
into Montreal. What he hadn't foreseen was the American League
beating him to the punch in 1969, expanding to Kansas City and
Seattle, forcing a hasty National League expansion to Montreal
(and San Diego). The Royals were back, but because Kansas City
had gotten to the nickname first, they were now the Expos.
Through
good, bad, and mediocre seasons, the Expos were a team of individual
stars (Andre Dawson, Gary Carter) more than an
all-star team. For much of their existence they also played
in a white elephant of an arena left over from the 1976 Olympic
Games where the stands seemed to come alive only if somebody
rattled the seats up to the closed-in roof to echoing effect.
It didn't take long for players to refer to the park as a funeral
parlor, and that was just one source of grumbling. Another,
gradually felt in boardrooms as much as in player wallets, was
the volatility between a U.S. and a Canadian dollar, persuading
some Expos that they made less than their contracts stipulated.
The owners didn't like all the currency exchange numbers, either,
and became less and less subtle about moving the franchise.
The
standard explanation for the move to Washington in 2005 was
that attendance alibi again. What is overlooked is that club
owners, including those with the Expos, did all that was possible
to assure that outcome. Step One was to unload through trade
or free agency superior players who were indeed attracting fans.
Among those sent off for little return in the late 1990s were
future Cooperstown residents Pedro Martinez, Larry Walker, and
Tim Raines. Was there any greater proof that the team's progressively
apathetic play confirmed that Canada was a hockey country, not
one for baseball?
Step
Two was the players strike of 1994, which ran through the World
Series, providing owners with a second justification for closing
up in what was branded a suspect market. The assertion still
heard today that the strike made Expos fans stay away from the
team and cause the move to Washington lacks only one ingredient
-- fact. In spite of the dispatch of star players and the frigid
atmosphere of the home park, as well as relatively miserable
play on an artificial sod diamond, the Expos outdrew nine other
teams in the turning-point year of 1995 and increased even that
gate count a year later. Although the Mets and Giants were
among the clubs behind them, the sportswriters and league officials
distracted by all the hockey in Canada didn't claim that New
Yorkers were mainly interested in marathon races or San Franciscans
in shelling clams.
But
the attendance question, while it might not have even been raised
with a better ballpark, was a shadow play in any case. One didn't
even have to believe in the widely reported stories that Expos
officials were getting bonuses for every top-salaried player
they managed to get off the books by dumping on another club.
Far more basic to all the antics -- played down by a docile
media -- was the October 1995 Quebec separatist referendum,
which might have been defeated but so narrowly that MLB had
nightmares about its Park Avenue headquarters acquiring a French
accent if not immediately, eventually. American control of the
national pastime had never been intended to mean some generic
North American control.
It is the terms of that control that would once again determine
the genuineness of any new invasion of Canada.
