Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos Read Online Free
days after Jean Drapeau convinced Warren Giles and the National League to take a leap of faith on Montreal, and on Jarry Park. It also gave the newborn organization exactly eight months to get ready to play. They’d have six months to hire an office staff, hire a manager and coaches, build a scouting department, and get everything set for spring training. Oh, and they’d need actual players to fill an actual roster.
This was an ambitious timeline. No, wait. Not ambitious. Completely insane.
McHale was the man charged with overseeing this seemingly impossible set of tasks. Born and raised in Detroit, McHale signed with the Tigers as a first baseman in 1941. He made his big-league debut two years later, at age 21, but didn’t last long in the majors, appearing in only 64 games thinly spread over five seasons. Hisplaying days over, he stayed in baseball, eventually seizing the role of Detroit’s director of minor league operations. At 35, he was running the Tigers as general manager. In 1959, he took the same job with the Milwaukee Braves, where he presided over a roster that included Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews just entering their primes, and Warren Spahn still going strong at age 38. With the Braves coming off two straight trips to the World Series, and three of the game’s top players riding high, McHale had landed the second-most attractive job for a baseball operator at the time, trailing only the Yankees.
However, despite winning 83 games or more for eight straight years, the Braves would finish no better than second in that stretch, and wouldn’t see the post-season again for more than a decade. In those days there were no Wild Cards, and no divisions, either: only the two league champions made the playoffs, advancing straight to the World Series. Meanwhile, the Braves developed few impact players to complement Aaron, Matthews, and Spahn, save for up-and-coming catcher Joe Torre. But by the time Torre emerged as a top player, the Braves’ core had aged and the team was going nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except Atlanta, as apathy in Milwaukee drove the club to move after the 1965 season. The Braves had led the National League in attendance in each of their first six seasons in Milwaukee, while also winning two NL pennants and a World Series. To see the team skip town a few years later was a shock, and a big black mark against McHale’s tenure as GM. By 1966, McHale was gone, ousted from the Braves GM job and headed to the MLB offices to serve as an aide to Commissioner William Eckert.
McHale’s baseball legacy had once seemed destined to be written by those three future Hall of Famers in Milwaukee. Instead, he would make his biggest mark as the man presiding over the first major league team outside the United States. He wasalso someone who learned from his mistakes. Though McHale would remain heavily involved in final decisions throughout his tenure with the Expos, he’d trust many of the day-to-day decisions on player acquisitions and roster building to someone else—his Chicago-born, Iowa-raised assistant from those Braves days, the man who would become the first general manager in Expos history.
When Jim Fanning grabbed the reins in Montreal, he had less than two months to prepare for one of the most important moments of the team’s first decade: the expansion draft. Each of the existing major league teams could protect 15 players, while the four expansion teams—the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the American League, the San Diego Padres and the Expos in the National League—would then be free to draft those players left unprotected. There are two schools of thought when planning an expansion draft: The first theory holds that fans want to immediately see a competitive and recognizable team, which makes drafting unprotected veterans the way to go, even when they’re a few years past their prime. The problem there is that while your team might be recognizable, there’s no guarantee that it
This was an ambitious timeline. No, wait. Not ambitious. Completely insane.
McHale was the man charged with overseeing this seemingly impossible set of tasks. Born and raised in Detroit, McHale signed with the Tigers as a first baseman in 1941. He made his big-league debut two years later, at age 21, but didn’t last long in the majors, appearing in only 64 games thinly spread over five seasons. Hisplaying days over, he stayed in baseball, eventually seizing the role of Detroit’s director of minor league operations. At 35, he was running the Tigers as general manager. In 1959, he took the same job with the Milwaukee Braves, where he presided over a roster that included Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews just entering their primes, and Warren Spahn still going strong at age 38. With the Braves coming off two straight trips to the World Series, and three of the game’s top players riding high, McHale had landed the second-most attractive job for a baseball operator at the time, trailing only the Yankees.
However, despite winning 83 games or more for eight straight years, the Braves would finish no better than second in that stretch, and wouldn’t see the post-season again for more than a decade. In those days there were no Wild Cards, and no divisions, either: only the two league champions made the playoffs, advancing straight to the World Series. Meanwhile, the Braves developed few impact players to complement Aaron, Matthews, and Spahn, save for up-and-coming catcher Joe Torre. But by the time Torre emerged as a top player, the Braves’ core had aged and the team was going nowhere. Nowhere, that is, except Atlanta, as apathy in Milwaukee drove the club to move after the 1965 season. The Braves had led the National League in attendance in each of their first six seasons in Milwaukee, while also winning two NL pennants and a World Series. To see the team skip town a few years later was a shock, and a big black mark against McHale’s tenure as GM. By 1966, McHale was gone, ousted from the Braves GM job and headed to the MLB offices to serve as an aide to Commissioner William Eckert.
McHale’s baseball legacy had once seemed destined to be written by those three future Hall of Famers in Milwaukee. Instead, he would make his biggest mark as the man presiding over the first major league team outside the United States. He wasalso someone who learned from his mistakes. Though McHale would remain heavily involved in final decisions throughout his tenure with the Expos, he’d trust many of the day-to-day decisions on player acquisitions and roster building to someone else—his Chicago-born, Iowa-raised assistant from those Braves days, the man who would become the first general manager in Expos history.
When Jim Fanning grabbed the reins in Montreal, he had less than two months to prepare for one of the most important moments of the team’s first decade: the expansion draft. Each of the existing major league teams could protect 15 players, while the four expansion teams—the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the American League, the San Diego Padres and the Expos in the National League—would then be free to draft those players left unprotected. There are two schools of thought when planning an expansion draft: The first theory holds that fans want to immediately see a competitive and recognizable team, which makes drafting unprotected veterans the way to go, even when they’re a few years past their prime. The problem there is that while your team might be recognizable, there’s no guarantee that it
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