ESPN MLB

Originally Published: May 29, 2003

Montreal on road trip like no other

Montreal is on a 25-day, seven-city trip that indicates somebody, somewhere has it in for the Expos.

Email Print Share

By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
Archive

Just fantastique, Montreal! Fine, fine show. Really. Something to tell the grandkids.

We'll be crushing you like a Napa Valley grape now.

You could have a full afternoon putting together a list of some of Major League Baseball's more egregious abuses of position -- I'll see your alleged payoff plan to Twins owner Carl Pohlad for folding up shop, and raise you a solid group-collusion negotiating blunder from the 1980s -- and never even get to les Expos of 2003. But we should spend at least a moment in time right now with that deserving group, because it isn't often, even in baseball, that one is permitted full view to the scheduled execution of a team's competitive chances.

That's what this is, of course, this 22-game trip featuring six "home" games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, followed by the always-popular San-Juan-to-Seattle trek -- I said San Juan to Seattle -- to pick up the road games against Seattle. (And speaking of full afternoons, let's all hurry over to Expedia.com to play MLB's newest contest, How Many Airline Connections From Here to There?)

It's a trip with no heart, and I mean not even a black one. Consider this: The Expos began this odyssey in Florida, and soon they'll be in nearby Puerto Rico -- but not sequentially. No, of course not. After Florida and before Puerto Rico, they'll be schlepping back up the East Coast to Philadelphia for a road stand against the Phillies.

Then it's on to San Juan, Seattle, Nova Scotia, New South Wales and -- oh, sorry, you were asking about the Expos' chances of building on that 32-18 start with which they left Montreal the other day?

The answer to that one, thank the stars, is, Nobody Knows. As in, no one connected with MLB's embarrassing Expos group-ownership think-tank had the slightest notion Frank Robinson's team would ever even sniff .500, much less blast past it like an interstate billboard. It happened anyway. It happened despite, not because of. And the truth is, it could continue to happen even in the face of this absolute rot thrown down before the franchise by the league's governing minds.

Nobody knows -- and under the circumstances that is the best that you can possibly hope for. Understand: Baseball's schedulers have set out to absolutely kill the Expos, a franchise whose existence in Montreal they place no priority upon, a franchise whose future is loosely held in dozens of different hands yet gripped firmly by none.

It was no great thing, throwing the Expos to the scheduling wolves. It was a move almost designed to inflict pain, to run aground a roster that wasn't expected to be worth worrying over anyway. No one was going to mourn the loss of the Expos; the league's carnivorous owners saw that franchise as a decent mid-season feeder system for their own competitive stretch drives, GM Omar Minaya presumably charged with selling off the pieces of a team he did his best to put together with electrical tape and pipe cleaners.

But lookie what we have here: Minaya did a brilliant job. Robinson has steered a steady course. And the Expos' players have risen to the challenge in ways that have exceeded even the most drunkenly optimistic predictions.

All of which lends the current unpleasantness an ever more hideous odor. If this was any other decently respected franchise in baseball, rather than the unwanted ward of the state, a 22-game trip away from home would have led to commissioner Bud Selig sputtering defensive answers in televised news conferences. Owners' meetings would have been called. Caviar would have been consumed. Vows of "never again!" would have emanated. And so forth.

As it is, the baseball world looks on in mild curiosity, with the slight possibility of mustering up some borderline indignation somewhere along the way. Because it isn't another franchise, because it's the Expos, a club left for dead so many times in the past few years it might as well wear uniform number 9-1-1 -- because of that, the road swing from Hades becomes something closer to a baseball artifact than to a baseball humiliation.

You know what? That is incredibly wrong. If nothing else, the league's current predicament -- sending out on this crazy, nut-headed trip a team that actually has a chance to be a serious contender through the summer no matter what the payroll books say -- serves to underscore the biggest mistake anyone involved in this process could have made.

MLB, that is, counted out one of its own teams before the season even began. The Expos were scheduled out of contention sometime last winter. It's never over until it's over, unless that's the league office you're going up against.

Fortunately for everyone, including people who actually like baseball, the Expos' front office and players never absorbed that nasty message. They're now in the midst of a trip no other team in the sport will be asked to duplicate -- but maybe, in the end, that'll be all right, too. Maybe the Expos of 2003 will get used to doing it the way it has never been done. Considering the spitball being hurled their way, one can only hope.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com