Brady one that got away for Expos
Patriots legend was drafted by Montreal, but opted for college instead
An excerpt from “Always Remembered: New Revelations and Old Tales About Those Fabulous Expos,” the sixth book written about the Montreal Expos by former beat writer Danny Gallagher:
Other than paying attention to Tom Brady, my interest in the NFL is minimal.
For a good part of the last 20 years, Brady has been the king of football except for his down season of 2019. Five Super Bowl wins. A boyish-looking, hunky, freakish force of nature, fitness aficionado and strict nutrition fiend.
And just think, the Expos drafted him on June 2 in 1995, the hangover year they suffered from the awful aftermath of the strike-marred 1994 season when they were gunning for the playoffs and a possible berth in the World Series only to be dismissed by the cancellation of the season. Brady was a sixfoot-three catcher at Junipero Serra high school in San Mateo, Calif. and Expos scout John Hughes decided to draft him (503rd overall) for scouting director Ed Creech and general manager Kevin Malone. Brady was 17, just shy of his 18th birthday.
One week after Brady was drafted, the Expos just so happened to be in San Francisco at Candlestick Park for a series against the Giants so they arranged for Brady to come from his nearby home and take BP, tour the clubhouse and meet the players and staff. That was June 9.
“I was travelling with the team and John Hughes said he was bringing in a young catching prospect,” Malone recalled. “We thought very highly of him, his stature, his poise. He was very mature for his age and presence. He worked out for us. He had all the tools we were looking for, to project him as a major-leaguer. He had the arm strength, he was a left-handed hitter with power. He had a good swing. He was cerebral and analytical.”
Something got in the way, though. Brady’s father Tom Sr. wanted his son to go to college and get an education. So Jr. enrolled at the University of Michigan. The rest is history.
Just like Condredge Holloway and Matt Dunigan and a few other future quarterbacks in the CFL and NFL, Brady was much loved by the Expos. As it turned out, Holloway, Dunigan and Brady didn’t suit up in a big-league uniform for the Expos. Like Brady, Holloway was 17 when he was selected by the Expos as their No. 1 pick in 1971 out of Lee high school in Huntsville, Ala. Like Brady, Holloway turned down the Expos to take a scholarship — at the University of Tennessee. Dunigan tried out for the Expos on a minorleague contract in the 1980s but he was let go. “It was a great honour for Tommy to be drafted by the Expos but we had made it clear that he was going to go to Michigan to play football,” his father told this writer. “At the time, he was a pretty good baseball player. He was more skilled in baseball than he was in football.
“He had a complete resumé in baseball. He had played 12 years of baseball when Montreal drafted him. He started playing at a young age, whereas he had a checkered resumé in football. He had only played four years of football including 7-on-7 when he went to Michigan. He loved baseball. Football, he wracked on it. He had the right tools for baseball. He had a terrific gun to second, he had some power in his bat. The Expos had said they would take care of him but that didn’t sway him, even though he was told he was pretty highly rated.”
And then came the kicker from Tom Sr.
“The background on all of this is that for one reason or another, Tommy hurt more after baseball games. His arms always hurt, his knees hurt, his elbows hurt. He didn’t hurt so much in football,” Papa Brady said. “And he’d been a 49ers fan for many years. Plus, he would get a great education at Michigan.”
On that cold and windy day at Candlestick, Hughes approached Expos outfielder Rondell White, whom he had known for several years in California, to guide Brady through his day with the Expos. There was a moment in time in the clubhouse when a group of Expos veterans and younger players crowded around Brady as he sat on someone’s stool at a locker.
Brady was like a god, it seemed, as the players hovered around as if he was holding court. Somehow, White and the other players got it ingrained in Brady’s head that he should indeed go to Michigan and play for the Wolverines and not pursue baseball.
The players were preaching and bemoaning to Brady that he would earn $800 or so per month in the minors and drive around on school buses for games before a few hundred fans, whereas at Michigan he could have a lot of fun on and off the field and there would be 100,000 fans at every game.
“Go to Michigan, go to Michigan. That’s what Tom was told,” his father said. “Tom didn’t have the pedigree in football and he kinda chuckled when the players told him that he should go to Michigan. He had been to Candlestick so many times watching the Giants.
“Tom was a pretty good catcher and could have fit in under the optimum circumstances but we knew that coming up through baseball’s minorleague system isn’t easy, that you would struggle. In college, you cut your teeth right away. There is also more emotion in football than in baseball. It’s 60 minutes a week.”
The funny, ironic part of Brady and his short time with the Expos at Candlestick was that he was more or less a nobody at the time. As 1995 bench coach Luis Pujols told me last year, there were many unproven draft picks like Brady, who came to different ballparks to work out with the Expos. Pujols doesn’t remember Brady that day at all.
In his 300-page, 11x14 coffeetable book “The 12 Method: How to Achieve A Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance,” Brady talks about his decision not to go and play baseball with the Expos after he was drafted. Although football is a brutal sport, Brady thought baseball was just as gruelling in many ways.
“But by then I didn’t want to play baseball anymore,” Brady wrote in the book. “Ironically, the punishment it inflicted on my body, and my knees especially, was probably the biggest reason I ended up losing my love for the game.
“It was the pain I coped with day after day that led me to focus exclusively on football — though by that point, my love of the game had overtaken my love of baseball anyway.”