It was a night of Montreal Expos nostalgia last Wednesday at the Lethbridge Lodge.
The reminiscing was led by Steve Rogers, the most successful pitcher in Expos history, serving as guest speaker at the Celebrity Awards Dinner which benefits local baseball organizations — the Lethbridge Bulls, the Prairie Baseball Academy, Vauxhall Baseball Academy, American Legion Baseball, the Spitz Canadians, area umpire associations, and local Little League Baseball charters.
It was a bitter-sweet evening, since the Expos are, of course, no longer around. They are now known as the Washington Nationals and all Expos fans have left is memories — and Rogers helped revive plenty of them last week.
The colourful Rogers had plenty of stories to share from his baseball days, including how he became a pitcher. It happened during his first Little League tryout when, after several ground balls went through his legs at shortstop, he was told, “OK, you’re a pitcher.”
After Rogers opened the floor to questions, naturally, someone brought up the matter of the famous home run he surrendered to Rick Monday in the final game of the 1981 National League playoffs. That loss killed the Expos’ hopes of going to the World Series and it proved to be as close as the team ever came to the Fall Classic.
Rogers had been lights-out in those playoffs, defeating Philadelphia Phillies’ ace Steve Carlton twice in the divisional playoff and beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series. So it seemed to make sense at the time to summon Rogers from the bullpen in the ninth inning of Game 5 instead of struggling closer Jeff Reardon.
By Rogers’ own admission, he threw a bad pitch and Monday hit the game-winning home on what is now remembered by Expos’ fans as “Blue Monday.” I remember it as a bitter-sweet day. Though I’ve been a Dodgers fan since before the Expos came into existence, that was one of the few times I had rooted against the Dodgers. Like many other Canadian baseball fans, I desperately wanted to see the Expos reach the World Series.
Still, that season, which had been interrupted by the infamous baseball strike, was a special time for Expos fans. The team, which also featured stars such as Andre Dawson, Gary Carter and Tim Raines, was among the best in baseball. It was one of the high points of Expos’ history, matched only by the Montreal team of the early to mid-1990s when again, in 1994, a prolonged strike killed the Expos’ dreams of playing in a World Series.
This summer, Dawson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, joining Carter as the only former Expos to be enshrined. Dawson had initially expressed a desire to be inducted not as an Expo, but as a Chicago Cub. Similarly, Carter, when he was chosen to the hall, had voiced a preference to be enshrined as a New York Met. Though major league baseball decided the players would go into the hall as Expos, Montreal fans felt hurt that the players had seemed to turn their backs on the Expos.
But Rogers offered an interesting perspective on the situation, noting that, since the Expos no longer exist (and were already destined to leave Montreal when Carter was inducted in 2003), there was no Expos organization to celebrate their Hall of Fame induction. After Rogers’ explanation, their preferences made sense.
So all former Expos fans have left is the memories. Thanks, Steve Rogers, for rekindling some of those.