Tag Archives: baseball

Good-Bye Nos Amours

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By Jason Menard

The Montreal Expos are officially (well, more or less) leaving town for good this year. The field of Olympic Stadium will no longer play host to Nos Amours. It appears to finally, once and for all, say goodbye to Canada’s first professional baseball team.

I should feel sad. I should be angry. But the problem is, I don’t feel a thing. I said goodbye a long time ago and never looked back.

I grew up an Expos fan during the glory years of The Hawk, The Rock, Cro’, Tim Wallach, Steve Rogers, Black Monday, and on into the divine “Year That Never Was” in 1994. I even stuck around to see the one who may be the greatest Expo ever – Vladimir Guerrero.

I was angry at the fire sales, the inept and deceiving ownership, and the constant jokes from outsiders who didn’t understand. I shook my head at lazy sports columnists who referred to Montreal – with over three million people within 15 minutes of the island – as a small market.

Spending a few years in Ontario as the Blue Jays rose to prominence, I spent many a day defending Canada’s First professional baseball team from its upstarts to the West. Most of all, I resented the expressed belief that Montrealers didn’t support baseball. But that’s all in the past, now.

What I choose to remember are the good times. For years I would take the Métro to the Stadium and take my seat in the left-field bleachers for Opening Night. In later years, I would take my son, when he began to take an interest in sports – and could stay awake longer than the fourth inning! And what I remember most is this – baseball in Montreal works.

I’m not a fan of Olympic Stadium by any means. In fact, the only times I’ve seen the stadium alive was for the Grey Cup and on Opening Night. When you packed 50,000 screaming fans into the stadium, you got an atmosphere. The feeling was electric and everywhere you looked you saw the smiles lighting up each and every face – young and old, male and female, French and English.

And then came game two. For the last decade, like a cresting wave, crowd size would crash until 5,000 people was considered a good draw. Sure, people would come out for $1 steamie (hot dogs to those devoid of Quebecois) night, but rare was the day that I couldn’t buy walk-up tickets and have my pick of the lot.

Where did those 45,000 fans go? Well, the simple answer was that they knew they weren’t wanted, so they didn’t go back. The Spectacle was over, life goes on…

For years Montrealers were told that Olympic Stadium was a terrible place to watch baseball and that the sport couldn’t survive in such a venue. So, people started to stay away. After all, if you’re told how terrible it is to go someplace, why would you go. And then there were discussions about the downtown stadium that would revitalize the sport in Montreal. But that died.

People would stay away, and then the ownership would get rid of the best (read: most expensive) players and get futures in return. This only compounded the problem. After all, why would you go watch baseball in a terrible venue, just to get attached to players that would end up leaving anyway? And still the sportscasters would find cause to criticize Montrealers for not supporting this team.

So the spiral continued down, eroding fan support. But the fans weren’t gone – they were just in hibernation, waiting for the bit of good news that never came. Then MLB takes over and the team is left playing with one hand tied behind its back. Rumours of moves to West Virgina, Las Vegas, and Washington became annual events. So why should you go to a game, when they’re just riding out their time with a less-than-competitive team in a stadium that kind of looks like a toilet bowl.

Appropriately, the fans flushed the Expos.

I stopped going to Opening Night. I stopped going to games. I stopped watching baseball altogether. And while the pundits will now polish their boots to kick Montrealers while they’re down — making their snide comments about Montreal’s lack of support and small market mentality, I’ll know better.

Because I was there. Me and 50,000 others at Opening Night, the thousands who followed the team in The Gazette and La Presse, the countless masses who gathered around TVs in living rooms, pubs, and bars to watch the games – we know, in our heart of hearts, the truth.

We never got a pitch to swing at. Baseball just gave Montreal a decade-long Intentional Walk.

2005 © Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

The Bloom is Off This Rose

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By Jason Menard

So the legendary Pete Rose has finally come forth and admitted what most of us already suspected – that he bet on baseball. And now it’s expected that all will be forgiven and let’s roll out the welcome mat to the Hall of Fame for Charlie Hustle.

I’m sorry if I don’t buy it. Charlie Hustle he may have been, but now he’s more Charlie Hustler.

Perhaps I’m just a cynic, but this confession of guilt and the pleading mea culpa would have rang far more true if it didn’t coincide – and feature prominently in – his latest autobiography. Perhaps I’d be more charitable if this ending of this 14-year farce didn’t come as Rose was running out of eligibility for Hall of Fame voting. Oh sure, he would have been voted in by the Veteran’s Committee, but I can’t believe that Rose’s ego would allow him – a sure first-ballot entrant – to enter through the back door.

No matter what he says now. No matter how hard he tries to play the victim, now — more than ever — I firmly believe Pete Rose should not be reinstated and eligible for the Hall of Fame.

Many people will argue that people who have committed far worse transgressions against humanity find themselves enshrined in Cooperstown, to which I’ll wholeheartedly agree. But I also firmly believe that what a person does outside of the game should not be a factor in judging their worthiness for enshrinement.

Despite what many try to make athletes out to be, they are not role models and should not be judged as such. They are humans, subject to the same weaknesses and foibles as the rest of us.

The problem with Rose, ironically, is not so much his gambling but the way he’s chosen to make a mockery of the game he professes to love so much. Gambling on baseball, while a mindnumbingly stupid thing to do would probably have been a forgivable transgression given time. However, telling bold-faced lies and attempting to tarnish the credibility of those who lobbied the initial accusations against him is unforgivable. This farce has done more damage to the game than place a few bets ever would have.

I don’t deny that Rose had – or may still have – a serious gambling problem. And yes, it is an addiction. But Rose has yet to take the biggest step in beating his demons – accepting full responsibility for his actions. As he has for much of the past decade and a half, he’s looking for scapegoats upon which to pin the blame for his current troubles.

He says things like gambling was a way to replace the high that he missed from competition. And while that may be true, thousands of players, all of whom shared a competitive drive, found other outlets to satisfy their thirst for “the rush.”

Had Rose admitted he made a mistake at the time, it’s true he probably would have been suspended for life. But had he fessed up, accepted his punishment, and got on with his life, he would have eventually become a sympathetic character is this sad drama. Our society is very forgiving when it comes to its idols, and it only would have been a matter of time before fan pressures would have built up to the point where the baseball establishment wouldn’t have had any choice to let him back in.

As it stands now, his 14-year history of lying has made a mockery of the game and should be the factor that stands between continued exile and reinstatement.

There are those who will say that baseball commissioner Bud Selig insinuating that all will be forgiven should Rose simply fess up obligates him to reinstating Rose are wrong. All Selig has to do is turn around and say, “Sorry Pete, I lied.”

After 14 years, that’s a concept that Rose is sure to understand.

2005 © Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved