MOSHER WRITES FUN BOOK ABOUT HIS LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE EXPOS
Baseball was my favourite sport as a kid growing up on the South Shore of Montreal.
I was six when the Expos played their inaugural season in 1969 and Rusty Staub became my first sports hero. Some of my best childhood memories involved the Expos, Jarry Park and, yes, even Olympic Stadium.
The Expos were Nos Amours. So I read the new book by Gazette cartoonist Terry Mosher titled Aislin's Montreal Expos: A Cartoonist's Love Affair, with a big smile on my face.
It's a fun, easy read with more than 300 pages full of interesting little stories about every player of the year for the Expos, starting with Staub in 1969 and ending with Brad Wilkerson in 2004. There are some great behindthe-scenes stories Mosher learned as a big fan of the team who became friendly with some of the players, coaches and managers, and was also a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. The book is also full of wonderful Aislin Expos cartoons and some fantastic photos covering the club's history.
“It's not meant to be a history so much as a memoir — and there's a big difference,” Mosher said during an interview this week at his Lachine home.
“There were things that went on I knew nothing about. But I did know enough I felt that I could speak legitimately as someone who had followed the Expos their whole career.”
This is the 57th book by the 81-year-old Mosher, who shows no signs of slowing down.
Mosher speaks from his heart when he talks about the Expos and he has written the book the same way. He attended his first Expos spring training in 1974 to draw cartoons for the Gazette and he went to Florida almost every spring until 2004, the club's final season before moving to Washington.
At the beginning of the book, Mosher has a cartoon he drew of the masks of comedy and tragedy — both wearing Expos caps — and underneath he writes: “Welcome to the tragicomedy that was the Montreal Expos!”
The foreword is by original team owner Charles Bronfman, who writes about how close the Expos came to never happening. Bronfman actually gave his letter of resignation from the baseball project to former mayor Jean Drapeau in July 1968 because while Montreal had been granted a major league franchise, it still had nowhere to play.
Drapeau asked Bronfman for 24 hours and had a team of engineers and draftsmen stay up all night drawing up a plan to put 28,000 seats at Jarry Park, up from 3,000, over a seven-month span.
“I ripped up my letter of resignation and away we went!” Bronfman writes.
The next 36 years were a roller-coaster ride for the Expos and their fans and Mosher covers it all with his own spin on things.
While Mosher would love to see the Expos return to Montreal during his lifetime so he could bring a grandchild — or a great-grandchild — to a game, he didn't want his book to be a “syrupy plea” to bring baseball back. Instead, it's about his love affair with the Expos and he spent 400 consecutive days working on the book.
Mosher writes about how it was former Gazette sports writer Ted Blackman who gave Staub his Le Grande Orange nickname and it was also Blackman who christened the left-field bleachers Jonesville after Expos slugger Mack Jones. There's also a story about the time the Expos' Maury Wills punched Blackman in the face for something he had written.
There's a funny story about how catcher John Bateman went from the Bar-b-barn — which was a regular hangout for Expos players, journalists and cops
— to being at a stakeout with police where some FLQ terrorist suspects had been cornered in November 1970.
Mosher also writes about how José (Coco) Laboy loved Montreal's vibrant atmosphere, like many other Puerto Rican and Dominican players, while Georgia native Ron Fairly hated the city.
General manager Jim Fanning wasn't happy the first time he heard Jarry Park announcer Claude Mouton introduce catcher “John Boccabeeeeeella!” coming up to the plate and told him he had to stop doing it. Mouton reminded Fanning he wasn't in Cleveland or Kansas City and that Montreal fans are different. Plus, the Boccabella call would thrill fans coming to games from nearby Little Italy.
“Mouton went right on `Boccabeeeeeell-owing!', the call becoming part of the Expos' mystique,” Mosher writes.
Dave Van Horne didn't know where Montreal was when
Expos president John Mchale hired him to become the team's English play-by-play voice after hearing him do games for the triple-a Richmond (Virginia) Braves. During the Expos' first game in New York, Mosher writes how Van Horne saw tears running down the face of his broadcast partner Russ Taylor, a born-and-bred Montrealer who had been sports director at CFCF-TV.
“I realized than that this was a big deal,” Van Horne says in the book.
It has been 20 years since the Expos left town and the book brings back so many memories. Mosher hopes memories of the Expos will never die.
“Well,” he said, “maybe somebody will find this book on a dusty shelf somewhere one day if they want to know how a true fan felt about the team.”