Blue Monday: The Expos, the Dodgers, and the Home Run That Changed Everything

by Danny Gallagher, Larry Parrish (Foreword by)

Overview

Blue Monday: one of the most unforgettable days in Canadian baseball history.

Danny Gallagher leads readers up to that infamous day in October 1981 when Rick Monday of the Los Angeles Dodgers hit a home run off of Montreal Expos pitcher Steve Rogers in the ninth inning, giving the Dodgers a berth in the World Series. Readers will be taken back to 1976 when a five-year plan for winning the National League championship was set in place by the Expos with the hiring of experienced manager Dick Williams. Gallagher examines old narratives about Blue Monday and talks to all the key players involved in the game, unearthing secrets and stories never before told.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459741874
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, author, and Montreal Expos historian. He began covering the Expos in 1988 for the Montreal Daily News and is the author of four previous books on the team. Danny lives in Uxbridge, Ontario.

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CHAPTER 1

Expos Sign Williams, Pursue Jackson

When the rubble of the Expos' disastrous 1976 season had settled, team president John McHale and sidekick Jim Fanning didn't look that far in searching for a new manager. Career minor-league manager Karl Kuehl had been a disaster in 1976, and McHale said it was a mistake to have fired Gene Mauch, who managed the team from 1969 through 1975.

So where did the Expos cast their eyes? To a former Toronto Triple-A Maple Leafs skipper, who had been manager of the Boston Red Sox in 1967–69, of the Oakland A's that won three consecutive championships from 1972 to 1974, and then of the California Angels in 1975 and '76.

Dick Williams was considered a turnaround maestro. He guided the Maple Leafs to two consecutive International League titles in 1965 and 1966 and took the Red Sox "Impossible Dream" team led by Carl Yastrzemski to the 1967 World Series before they lost to the St. Louis Cardinals. He had spunk and didn't care if he ruffled a player's feelings.

Fanning and McHale were familiar with Williams because he had been the Expos' third-base coach under Mauch in 1970, a brief respite for Williams after he was let go by the Red Sox following the 1969 season. When he joined the Expos in 1970, Williams had sat back and retooled his thinking strategies while watching the tactician Mauch — that is, when he wasn't hitting fungoes before games or flashing signals to runners and batters during them. The Montreal job gave him a different perspective on managing.

So when Williams left the Angels after his stint with them ended in 1976, Williams called the Expos and asked that he be given the job. He didn't wait for the Expos to approach him. That's how aggressive he was. He felt confident that he would be hired, and he was.

Williams was given a five-year contract. Hiring Williams was the beginning of the rejuvenation of the Expos after a 55–107 season in 1976.

"Dick was a known manager. He was feisty and we weren't a feisty club," ex-team owner Charles Bronfman said in 2017.

McHale figured Williams would light a fire under his charges much like he did with the Boston, Oakland, and California squads, which were known to have a few players who would fight on occasion with each other or almost come to blows with Williams himself.

The attempted remodelling of the Expos didn't stop with Williams. McHale went so far as to try to entice superstar free agent Reggie Jackson to come to Montreal. Jackson had been one of Williams's players in Oakland and the two helped steer the A's to glory. Jackson had spent the 1976 season with the Baltimore Orioles, a brief stopover during his splendid career.

"Reggie was available," former Expos secretary-treasurer Harry Renaud recalled. "He was such a superstar. We flew him into Montreal. We organized a reception for him — the whole weekend. We met with the media, the pooh-bahs, including the mayor, Jean Drapeau.

"Reggie was late. He came down to the stadium and arrived with an entourage; a bunch of them came in a trailer. There were all these hangers-on. It was a travel party. I couldn't figure that out. They were all smoking dope. It was kind of strange with his stature. We had such a big party at Charles's place. There were about 50 people involved.

"The party ended on a Saturday night," Renaud said. "Reggie departed very suddenly. Next thing, he just up and left. There were no goodbyes. That was the end of the story."

The next night, Jackson and Bronfman's close friend Leo Kolber, a member of the team's board of directors, tried to hammer out a deal. McHale and Kolber offered Jackson a five-year deal for just under $5 million.

Apparently, Jackson came to the meeting looking and feeling like death warmed over. "Reggie had a terrible hangover," Kolber said. "He needed a hair of the dog."

Rather than seeking another alcoholic drink, Jackson looked at Kolber's son Jonathan and said, "Hey, kid, make me a milkshake, but it has to have eggs in it."

Jackson also met with the media while he was in Montreal and said he was very interested in the Expos, especially since he knew Williams from their days in Oakland. Williams even took Jackson on a tour of Olympic Stadium as it was being prepped for the Expos' first season there in 1977.

"I want to know if these gentlemen want to build a contender. There's a lot more than signing for a lot of money," Jackson told the reporters surrounding him. "If Dick Williams hadn't been here, I wouldn't be here. People tell me that you have the most beautiful girls in the world here."

The enthusiasm both sides showed prompted Bronfman to tell the media, "I think we are pretty much in agreement on fundamentals."

As one of the game's biggest stars, Jackson was also drawing a lot of interest at that time from the Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, and San Diego Padres.

Ultimately, Jackson accepted a much less lucrative deal with the Yankees: five years for about $3 million plus a Rolls-Royce.

As Renaud said, there are different versions as to why Jackson spurned the Expos. "It had something to do with crossing the border. He was held up by customs at the border. Apparently, he had an unregistered gun. Phone calls were made to Marc Lalonde, the minister of justice, and Reggie was allowed into the country," Renaud added.

One report suggested that he was held up at the airport in Ottawa, not at Montreal's Dorval Airport, because some marijuana was found in his clothes. Another report said Jackson was simply upset that customs people were rummaging through his clothes, period. McHale had told reporters that he and other team officials discussed Jackson's drug case and came away satisfied that he was "not a historical user of drugs" and that he had talked things over with the police. No charges were laid.

"We are absolutely convinced he has no drug problem," Bronfman weighed in at the time.

"I thought we had a good chance with Reggie. They negotiated at Leo's place. Reggie left ... there's an old baseball saying, 'If he leaves without signing, he's gone,'" Bronfman noted, 41 years later. "Reggie made the right decision, no question. George Steinbrenner said one time, 'Ray Kroc of the Padres might have McDonald's, Bronfman might have Seagram's, but I have the Big Apple.'"

Jackson and the Yankees proceeded to win the World Series in both of his first two seasons in New York, both series being against the Dodgers.

Years earlier, on New Year's Eve in 1974, Renaud and McHale had tried to lure another free-agent stud to the Expos: Catfish Hunter. The Expos duo had flown down on Bronfman's Seagram jet to get to Hunter's hometown of Hertford, North Carolina. "It's a great story," Renaud said. "It was eight in the morning and there we were in this old small town. There was this country-type lawyer, and he said, 'Would you like a Coke?' There was no coffee. Then Catfish came in and joined the meeting. What I remember [being] funny about it was that Catfish came in with a Styrofoam cup and was chewing tobacco and spitting in the cup.

"We came out of the meeting very high. We made a great presentation. So we got back to Montreal and we were dressed to go to a New Year's party and we heard the radio flash that he had signed with the Yankees."

Give Bronfman and the Expos credit. They made huge efforts to sign people like Jackson and Hunter, but failed.

CHAPTER 2

The Discovery of Tim Raines

The Expos' spring-training hub in 1977 was in the north-central Florida tourist town of Daytona Beach. As the team was going through the paces that spring, they were tipped off about a high-school player who was suiting up for a game in the same town. The young man was a must-see prospect, and he turned out to be a diamond in the rough.

It came about as the team's Canadian-born scouting assistant Bill MacKenzie was hanging around the office at the Expos' City Island Ballpark facility, getting ready for another day.

"During spring training, a number of us in the office would talk in the morning, take calls, check on scouts to see what coverage they were doing and stuff like that," MacKenzie related. "In the afternoon, I would put on my uniform and go out and coach. One morning, I got a phone call. I picked up. I don't know why I did. I guess the secretary must have had a late night or something. There was this lady on the phone. She said, 'Does your organization know anything about this kid out of Seminole High School in Sanford, Florida, by the name of Tim Raines? He's playing about 3:30 today at Daytona High School. You might want to take a look at him.'

"It was an anonymous caller. To this day, I don't know who it was. I don't know if it was Tim's mother or someone else."

While keeping the woman on the phone, MacKenzie checked the team's files and got back on the line. "I have access to everything here, but no, we have nothing on him," MacKenzie told the caller.

MacKenzie decided he was going to check out Raines. "I just said I had this call about this little black guy from Seminole High School. So I went to the high school and watched him take practice and stuff like that. Here was Raines, a five-foot-eight shortstop for the Seminole Seminoles. He was a skinny little fart about 135 pounds. I said, 'Ooh, he can't play shortstop.' He had no range.

"But anything he hit — and he was only a right-handed hitter then — was to right-centre. He didn't turn on the ball. He hit a ball to right-centre in the gap and you swore you saw Willie Mays running. It was really exciting, watching him run. You could see that he would be a good player. He had that athleticism. There's an athlete, I thought as I looked at him. From that time on, we had Raines on our radar.

"He was the best athlete Seminole had, and they had to play him at shortstop. I said, 'Tim, if you have a shot at going anywhere, you are going to have to do it as a second-baseman or outfielder. I understand the situation here. You have to play shortstop on this team because you're the best player they've got.' Absolutely, I told him that. He thanked me for suggesting that he should move."

MacKenzie knew how to read talent. He was born in Pictou, Nova Scotia, but spent most of his youth in Sarnia, Ontario. Like many Canadian kids, MacKenzie loved to play baseball, and along the way he found himself at St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Michigan, near Sarnia, where he was given a lot of look-sees by the Detroit Tigers' bird-dog scout Harry Moore, who kept recommending that the Tigers sign the catching prospect.

MacKenzie finally did sign, in 1966. He played in the minors for both the Tigers and Expos before his playing career was abruptly ended when he banged up his left shoulder in a home-plate collision. Following the 1972 season, which he spent with the Tigers in a non-playing role, MacKenzie got work with the Expos as a scouting assistant.

With all of his experience, MacKenzie had a knack for spotting a prospect like Raines. MacKenzie proudly tells people that he was the first member of the Expos' scouting staff to witness Raines in action. "Funny thing is, Bill Adair, our Florida area scout, didn't like Raines," MacKenzie said, shaking his head.

That's right, Adair didn't see anything in Raines. Adair was a career minor-league manager, including a number of stints in the Expos' farm system, and he was the bullpen coach for the major-league team under Karl Kuehl in 1976.

"Bill didn't want to draft Raines because he thought he wasn't a prospect. Bill wrote him off," MacKenzie said.

"I said, 'Bill, he's an athlete.' He was like Willie Mays running the bases. He knew when to take the extra base. He wasn't a Punch-and-Judy hitter. When he hit a gapper, it was so exciting to see him run. He was such a beautiful young man. So we told Bill that if he didn't want to draft him that we would draft him right out of the front office. So that's what we did. We drafted him out of the front office. It was Bill who actually got him to sign the contract, but he wasn't the one who did the spade work. I did."

Too often, a scouting director gets more credit than the actual scout who makes the initial discovery, the finding of the player, the following of the player and recommending him. In the Expos' media guides of subsequent years, Raines's bio said, "Signed by Bill Adair." But that's misleading, because Adair had no input in signing him.

"When the day of the draft came up in June 1977, we were hoping Tim's name wouldn't come up and be called by another team. We were sweating bullets," MacKenzie said.

Sitting in a war room at the Americana Hotel on West 38th Street in midtown Manhattan, the Expos, under scouting director Danny Menendez, plucked Raines in the fifth round. Earlier in that draft, the Expos had taken pitcher Bill Gullickson as their first choice. Then they took pitchers Gregory Staffron, Scott Sanderson, and Scott Anderson before picking Raines. Gullickson, Sanderson, and Raines all made the majors out of that 1977 draft.

"So we put Raines in our instructional league," MacKenzie said. "What he did that 1977–78 off-season was put on about 40 pounds and he learned how to be a switch-hitter. He learned how to hit left. It ended up he hit better left-handed than right-handed."

Raines's Seminole baseball coach Bobby Lundquist remembers a fun-loving, joking, humble athlete in Raines. Lundquist said Raines excelled in football, baseball, track and field, and basketball at Seminole.

"Tim was a tremendous running back. He didn't have world-class speed but he had unbelievable balance," Lundquist recalled. "Nobody could tackle him. He'd get 10 yards a carry. Everybody stood up when he had the ball. He was a gifted natural athlete."

One of Lundquist's regrets is that he didn't get Raines to learn how to switch-hit in high school, and he admits that Raines played out of position at shortstop because he was the team's best athlete. MacKenzie was right.

In his book Rock Solid, released in 2017, Raines wrote that the Dodgers spent considerable time sizing him up at Sanford Memorial Stadium and other high schools, but they never did draft him.

"I wish I could remember the scout from the Dodgers coming out to the park to show Tim how to turn a double play and to get out of the way without getting hit because your legs are valuable," Lundquist said.

In fact, many major-league teams took a look at Raines, according to Lundquist. Specifically, Lundquist mentioned Andy Seminick of the Phillies and George Zuraw of the Reds.

"I do remember the Expos coming out and showing interest," Lundquist said. "The knock on Tim in high school was that he had no set place to play in the infield or outfield. He wasn't a good shortstop. No question he had the athleticism, the speed, but he didn't have the size," Lundquist added. "He didn't look like 'that stud.' But he proved everyone wrong."

In basketball, if the team needed a last-second shot to win the game, Raines was the player. Even in baseball, Raines wasn't just an infielder and hitter; he could pitch, too. He could come in late in the game and get the last three outs. Lundquist recalls distinctly that Raines hit much better in his junior year than in his senior year.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Blue Monday"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Danny Gallagher.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Foreword by Larry Parrish
• Introduction

Part I The Long Lead-In

• Chapter 1: Expos Sign Williams, Pursue Jackson
• Chapter 2: The Discovery of Tim Raines
• Chapter 3: The 1977 and 1978 Seasons
• Chapter 4: Coming So Close: 1979 and 1980

Part II 1981: The Year That Was

• Chapter 5: Is This The Year?
• Chapter 6: Did Valentine Not Want To Be Great?
• Chapter 7: Season Torn Apart By Strike
• Chapter 8: Tommy Hutton Released
• Chapter 9: Williams Fired, Fanning Hired
• Chapter 10: Rogers Speaks Out About Williams
• Chapter 11 The Biggest Triple in Expos History

Part III The National League Division Series
• Chapter 12: Taking On the Phillies: first 4 games
• Chapter 13: An Unexpected Pre-game Pep Talk

Part IV The National League Championship Series
• Chapter 14: Dodgers Take Game 1
• Chapter 15: Game 2: Ray Burris Slighted, Pitches Masterpiece
• Chapter 16: In Montreal: Dodgers Hate “The Happy Wanderer”
• Chapter 17: Game 3: Jerry White Hits Big Homer
• Chapter 18: Game 4: Dodgers Tie the Series
• Chapter 19: Conspiracy Surrounds Postponement of Game 5
• Chapter 20: Game 5: The Big One
• Chapter 21: Monday, Blue Monday, and That Hit
• Chapter 22: Cromartie Reduced to Tears
• Chapter 23: Jerry White: The Final Out in Game 5

Part V After Blue Monday: The Long Fade-Out
• Chapter 24: Reardon’s Secret Is Out
• Chapter 25:Bronfman and Others on Pitching Rogers
• Chapter 26: Bill Lee Opens Up
• Chapter 27: An Eventful Season for Francona
• Chapter 28: Don't Blame Rogers
• Chapter 29: Dick Williams Calls Rogers Out

Part VI Rick Monday: The Guy Who Hit That Homer
• Chapter 30: Showing His Emotions
• Chapter 31: The Wrath of the Fans
• Chapter 32: Cutting Ties
• Chapter 33: Beanball
• Chapter 34: Rescuing the U.S. Flag
• Chapter 35: “We are the Champions”

Part VII After All That
• Chapter 36: A Special Tribute to Three 1980 Expos


• Epilogue: The Return of Baseball to Montreal?
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Image Credits
• Index

Editorial Reviews

Those who were Expos fans or followed the team during its existence will want to pick this up to learn a little more about the man who broke Canada’s heart, Rick Monday. Gallagher’s interviews and writing about Monday since that home run give the reader an inside glimpse into the man that many baseball fans have never seen.

The Guy Who Reviews Sports Books