Je Me Souviens: Memories of the Montreal Expos With My Mom
Je Me Souviens: Memories of the Montreal Expos With My Mom
By Joseph Ferris
The patrol agent. Unimpressed.
My mother. Amused.
I had just declared a baseball from a Montreal Expos game while crossing the border back home to Vermont. It hadn’t been a foul ball. It wasn’t even a batting practice home run.
None other than Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez had tossed it. After fending off two-middle aged Quebecois ballhawks to snag the ball, I rushed back to my mom with a baseball given to an American kid by a Cuban pitcher in a Canadian city.
The patrol agent saw a teenage driver wasting his time. I declared more than just a baseball. I declared the first of many reminders that I had found my team. The Montreal Expos.
As a Brooklyn kid who spent his teenage years in Vermont and went to college in Jersey, I often get asked, “How did you become an Expos and Nationals fan?”
I’ll never forget my first major league game. It was 1993 at Shea Stadium. The year the Mets were The Worst Team Money Could Buy. After just one game rooting for them in person, I was done. That was also the year the Yankees had Jimmy Key, Danny Tartabull, and Randy Howe. I put a Don Mattingly poster up on my bedroom wall and my fandom was official. I was all in on the Yankees.
A year later, we moved to Vermont. A year after that, the Yankees began a stretch that ran through 2003 where they made the playoffs every year, made it to the World Series six times, and won four championships.
By 2001, though, I wasn’t feeling the connection. That April, my family saw Boston beat the Yankees in the Bronx. Leaving the stadium, I was surrounded by dejected New Yorkers. I felt nothing.
Summer 2003 was when it all changed. Almost a college freshman, my parents allowed me to take the train to Penn Station after buying myself a ticket for the July 4th game between the Red Sox and Yankees.
David Wells got the start for the Yankees. It did not go well. Joe Torre pulled him after giving up eight runs. As fans reigned boos down from their seats, Wells tossed his glove into the stands. Theatrics aside, another loss to the hated-Red Sox once again left me feeling nothing.
Many point to the 1994 baseball strike as the beginning of the end for the Expos. Others have written extensively that the team’s demise started long before the 232-day long strike that ended a season where the Expos were running away with the NL East. No matter which camp you fall in, the Expos were on borrowed time when baseball returned in 1995.
Between that year and the end of the 2004 season, the Expos lost a rosters’ worth of All-Stars that included John Wetteland, Pedro Martinez, Cliff Floyd (twice!) and Marquis Grissom who were sent off in trades while Larry Walker, Moises Alou, and Vladimir Guerrero walked in free agency.
In the final three seasons of their time in Canada, GM Omar Minaya (while helming a team owned by Major League Baseball) orchestrated a well-intentioned but disastrous trade at the 2002 deadline with the Indians where he sent Grady Sizemore, Brandon Phillips, and Cliff Lee to Cleveland in exchange for Bartolo Colon.
Minaya hoped Colon would propel the Expos to a playoff appearance and that would build momentum for a new stadium in Montreal. The Expos fell short. In the following off-season, Minaya shipped Colon off to the White Sox for the uninspiring trio of Rocky Biddle, Orlando Herandez, and Jeff Liefer.
Adding insult to injury, Montreal played 22 “home games” in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the 2003 and 2004 seasons. All this happened while talk of moving the team to DC, Northern Virginia, San Antonio, Portland, or other locations hung in the air.
It was no surprise that already subpar attendance tanked. Corporate sponsorships evaporated. Media deals were so hard to come by that even some home games only had radio coverage.
In spite of these distractions, roadblocks, and existential threats, the Expos found themselves in the middle of the Wild Card chase when the calendar turned to August in 2003.
***
August 17, 2003.
That was the game my mom and I attended. Once El Duque tossed me that baseball, the game got started.
We were treated to a pitchers’ duel between the Giants’ Sidney Ponson and the home team’s Tomo Okha. Ponson kept the Expos scoreless through eight innings. As the ninth inning rolled around, Okha was in line for a tough-luck loss, giving up two runs in six-and-a-third innings pitched.
That’s when the magic happened. San Francisco let Ponson start the ninth. He loaded the bases with one out. With the Giants still up by two, manager Felipe Alou brought in his closer, Tim Worrell, to get the last two outs.
Worrell coaxed a strikeout from Wil Cordero and only had to get past Brad Wilkerson to beat the Expos.
Having told this story to friends, family, classmates, first dates, strangers, and everyone in between I always make a point of noting that Wilkerson was leading rookies in home runs but was also the league leader in strikeouts. After almost two decades, I’m no longer sure how accurate the anecdotes are, but they give the story an extra measure of drama so they’ve remained part of my retelling. To be fair, I’m not sure Brad would even remember.
Wilkerson worked the count full. There were some 17,000 people in the stands that afternoon. Everyone was on their feet. Banging the seat bottoms against the seat backs. In a domed stadium, the noise made it sound like 160,000 people were cheering the Expos on.
Worrell threw. Wilkerson made contact and the ball sailed over the centerfield wall. As the Expos celebrated the walk-off and the Quebecois fans cheered from the stands, I knew I’d found my baseball home.
My mom and I listened to Montreal sports radio until the signal was fuzzy reverb as we chased the Quebec sunset home to Vermont. Before the one-man show-and-tell of the baseball with the border agent, my mom decided we should get tickets for another Expos game. We picked $1 hot dog night the following week. That promotion and a team in the heat of a pennant race brought 33,000 fans to the game. The Expos did not disappoint with a 11-1 win over the Phillies.
The Expos missed the playoffs by eight games that year. In the offseason, Vladimir Guerrero signed a five-year, $70 million deal with the Angels.
Baseball is the kind of game that embraces superstition. Turk Wendell’s affinity for the number 99. Bryce Harper and his pregame waffles and seven shower routine. Wade Boggs always taking batting practice at 5:17 PM for night games.
I’ve come to realize the same is true with fans. It’s a good-luck hat. A certain spot at the bar.
Players and fans alike hold tight to these quirky habits because they take us back to a place and time we cherish. They become a talisman. A good luck charm. A happy place. Odd as it may sound, Olympic Stadium—Stade Olympique—is all of those things wrapped into one for me.
In the years after that Expos summer, the relationship with my mother took a turn for the rocky and tumultuous. After beating cancer in the spring of 2004, she attempted suicide days after Christmas. In the first hours of 2005, doctors did not expect her to survive. She did, but everything was different. A bipolar diagnosis and inconsistent therapy led to periods of silence between the two of us followed by momentary reconciliation.
In those times of separation when thoughts of her suicide attempt were prevalent, I’d fall back on memories of those games at Olympic Stadium. Her willingness to travel to Montreal to have a few more hours with her oldest son before he left for college. Her catching the exhilaration I felt when we saw a walk-off and as I wouldn’t shut up about it during the walk through the subterranean parking lot.
Olympic Stadium stands apart from every other spot we visited together. It marks a place where there are only happy memories of her.
The Expos left Montreal for Washington following the 2004 season. They started 2005 as the Washington Nationals.
My mom passed away on September 2, 2012. Eighteen days later, the Nationals clinched their first playoff appearance.
***
Olympic Stadium still stands.
It was eleven years after dollar hot dog night before I returned to Montreal. And it was a trip that would bring me back to Stade Olympique. Two years after my mom’s death, I returned chasing more than the ghost of Expos baseball—2014 marked the first time that the Blue Jays would play two exhibition games in Montreal at the end of spring training.
Sitting with two friends in seats just a few rows and a section over from where my mom and I saw that first game, the sellout exhibition felt like the funeral the Expos had always deserved but never received. It was one part wake, one part cri de coeur to bring baseball back to Montreal. It was a communion with the sport I’ve loved my entire life and the memory of my mother.
By the seventh inning stretch, one of my friends and I got to talking with a woman sitting behind us who was wondering why three twenty-somethings from New York had made the trip up—on the train no less—for an exhibition game.
With short-cropped gray hair like my mom, she told us that in 1969 she attended the first Expos home game. She was just out of college, like my mother that year, working at a downtown department store. She told her boss in April ‘69, she was taking the day off to go to the game. The boss told her she would be fired if she left. She went anyway. She said there was no way she was going to miss this game some 45 years later.
The exhibition series has given the effort to bring a major league team back to Montreal momentum. I still proudly wear my Expos gear and will purchase any swag I come across. No matter the future of baseball in Montreal or how tattered my Expos gear becomes, I take comfort in the endurance of the building that is home to the memories that keep the best of my mother alive.
The CBC reported in 2017 that it would cost upwards of $700 million to demolish Olympic Stadium. That’s the kind of price tag that keeps a building standing. Ozymandias would be proud.
***
Je Me Souviens.
That’s the phrase on Quebec license plates. It translates to I remember. While the phrase’s origin is up for debate, I find the embrace of memory, a cherished Quebecois past, an unintentional reminder of the time my mother and I spent together in Stade Olympique.
When I think of the Expos and my mom, je me souviens Stade Olympique.
Joseph Ferris a native Brooklynite who fell in love with the Montreal Expos as a teenager after his family moved to Vermont. Once again living in Brooklyn, Joe is a fan of both the Expos and Nationals. He can be found buying way too many minor league baseball hats and arguing that Montreal second basemen Jose Vidro was and remains criminally underrated as a player.