The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Expos fans have mixed feelings about Nationals
MONTREAL — Tim Raines started wearing the tricolor cap as a teen and proudly sported the Montreal Expos logo for years, all the way onto his Hall of Fame plaque.
So no wonder who he’ll cheer for when his old team — albeit now in Washington — plays in its first World Series, a half-century after the franchise debuted far away. “I’m happy,” he said. “Even though it’s not Montreal it’s still a part of the Montreal franchise . ... They are the Nationals, but they wouldn’t have been the Nationals without the Expos.”
Romance bloomed in the French-speaking city in 1969 when its NL expansion team began play as the Expos. Montreal’s fans, who had welcomed Jackie Robinson with open arms with the minor league Royals in 1946, christened their team “nos amours” — our loves.
Jarry Park, the 29,000-seat stadium that took the same name as the municipal park where it was located, is no more. Its press box and the grandstand behind home plate are all that remain; they have been incorporated into one end of IGA Stadium, an 11,000-seat tennis venue that hosts the Canadian Open. On the site where U.S. Open champ Bianca Andreescu now swings her racket, longtime Expos ace Steve Rogers began making major league hitters swing and miss his devastating slider as a rookie thrust into the franchise’s first pennant race in 1973.
Chosen fourth by Montreal in the first round of the 1971 draft, Rogers threw a onehit shutout in his second big league start and went 10-5 with a 1.54 ERA for the Expos, who fell short of the NL East title in a five-team race to the wire.
“We were not a ragtag bunch, but everybody on that team came from somewhere else,” Rogers said from home in Jenks, Okla. “Then that focus down in September and everybody fighting, with all those other guys from experience with other organizations, it was really something very special. And it really felt like, ‘Oh gosh, well this is a lot of fun. I’m sure we’ll do this every year.’ ... As we all know, that wasn’t going to be the case,” he said.
Longtime Expos fan Marvin Matthews proposed to his future wife on the Olympic Stadium scoreboard when the couple attended what proved to be Montreal’s final home game in 1994. The Expos had the best record in the majors when a strike canceled the season and the World Series. Matthews continued cheering for the team after he moved to Calgary in 1998 and after the Expos moved to Washington in 2005. He paced back and forth while following every step of the Nationals’ playoff run this fall.
“When I correspond with some of the people in Montreal, they just don’t understand how I can feel that way,” he said. “I get more negative responses than positive responses by far . ... they just don’t have any feelings for the Nationals.”
Brad Wilkerson hit Montreal’s last home run and was the last player to wear the Expos uniform when he participated in an exhibition tour after the 2004 season. He played one season in Washington before he was traded. He is pulling for Washington to win the World Series. And while he invites Expos fans to do the same, he understands the lack of attachment to the Nationals.
“They really haven’t claimed Montreal as being part of the franchise,” he said of the Nationals. “And I think that is what has been hurting the Montrealers being fans of the Washington Nationals, because they weren’t really including the Expos history totally, and obviously that hurt a lot of Montreal fans and Montrealers.”