A FAN’S NOTES

The Washington Nationals

When the World Series begins next Tuesday night Canada will have a new federal government in some wretched form or another. It was no small gift to be out of the country for some 16 days ducking coverage of our desultory and divisive election campaign. Today, in that dispirit of avoidance, I insist upon writing about baseball.

Fifteen years ago the Montreal Expos limped into their new home in the District of Columbia. As befitted the then sorry state of the franchise, they took the long way, arriving via Puerto Rico. The team had been in decline since their one and only truly legitimate shot at baseball immortality had been quashed by the strike of 1994. Nos Amours were orphans, unwanted wards of Major League Baseball. The club’s last two owners were straight out of Charles Dickens; the first group miserly and inept while the second trawled the depths of douche-baggery hitherto unknown in a sport which has always welcomed the Platonic ideal of douche bags to its roster of owners throughout its history.

Expos has always been one of the most evocative nicknames in Major League Baseball. It shouted bilingual Montreal, Man and His World and Canada’s 1967 centennial. The stylized M logo remains a landmark in Quebec and Canadian graphic design. Considering the club’s unique and colourful identity, I was crushed when the itinerant team was generically and jingoistically re-dubbed the Nationals. Given the American capital’s demographics, baseball’s ugly history of segregation and then the game’s ultimate elevation through integration, here lay an opportunity to pay homage to a Negro League team: the late Expos could have revived the legend of the Grays.

And so it went, another public relations coup botched, another ground ball booted. I paid attention to the nascent Nationals for a couple of years because they were now losing under the critical gaze of The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell, America’s best baseball writer (with apologies to The New Yorker’s Roger Angell and Sports Illustrated’s Peter Gammons)). In 2005 the Nats, not the ‘Pos, drafted Ryan Zimmerman, the first baseman is now the face of the franchise. Gradually ex-Expos faded away until there were none of them playing ball in any major league city. The last tenuous tie that binds is that current Nationals manager Dave Martinez spent some time in Montreal as an Expo. Meanwhile the game changed, nine innings became excruciating to endure, boring, hours of all or nothing at all: taters or whiffs.

Twenty-nineteen did not bode well for Washington. Byrce Harper, the club’s marquee player, opted for the obscenely greener free agent pastures of Philadelphia. Fifty games into the season the Nationals were 12 games under .500. Now they’re waiting to face either New York or Houston for the World Series championship. The ups and downs of unscripted sport can be a welcome distraction from more dismal and pressing realities.

Is this team’s World Series berth bittersweet for an Expos fan? Maybe. Fifteen years have passed. The Expos seem as remote as the old Washington Senators, a twice-failed franchise currently reincarnated in multiples as the Minnesota Twins and the Texas Rangers. And there’s not the Canadian hockey hurt of Quebec Nordiques fans watching their club win the Stanley Cup in the guise and colours of the Colorado Avalanche the very next season following their departure from the provincial capital. But who’s to say the Nords would’ve made it out of the Easter Conference? And who’s to say this Nationals baseball team, its front office, its manager and coaches, its players, would have been fielded by a Montreal organization this season?

Still, transient teams perhaps provide lessons, unintended, beyond sports’ traditional aphorisms of the noble notions of teamwork and striving for all the glory that only determination and victory bestow. As generations pass collective memory fades until finally something that once happened maybe never happened at all. I’m just talking baseball. The World Series this October has little to do with the Montreal Expos; new history is being made and being rewritten over the old, erasing it, obscuring it. Like any Expos fan I am a witness now; soon enough there won’t be any of our kind and Nationals fans will eventually forget we once existed.

     

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