This One Is About The Expos

“I would like to share this with the people in Montreal that are not going to have a team anymore, but my heart and my ring is with them too.”
– Pedro Martinez, upon winning the World Series with the Boston Red Sox, 2004.

I do not follow Major League Baseball. If you were to ask me who was leading the AL East right now, I would have no idea… I would guess either the Yankees or Red Sox and probably be right, but I would really have no clue. If you were to ask me who won the NL MVP last year, I’d say ‘no idea’ and then you would tell me and it would probably be some player I have never have heard of before.

Let me be clear: I do not follow Major League Baseball. I simply do not care. I do not care who won the World Series last year, I do not care who won the Cy Young award. In either league. It does not matter a whit to me. So why, you are probably asking yourself, would I bother making this proclamation, wasting my time writing this screed if I indeed care so little about Major League Baseball? Well, it was not always this way. In fact, there was a time when baseball was my life, my obsession. I have a good memory, see, matched with a thirst for knowledge and a love of facts and numbers, all of which made baseball an obvious choice for a young man of these inclinations. I was also an alright athlete and developed into a decent hitter in time, but all this is beside the point.

The point is, I no longer give a shit about something that mattered more to me than pretty much anything else. The average Friday night for the fifteen year-old version of myself? If there was no ballgame on, there I would be, glass of chocolate milk to my right, bag of zesty Doritos to my left, with the latest issue of Baseball America or Baseball Weekly opened in front of me on the kitchen table. I would pore over the statistics, both major and minor league — something which Baseball Weekly was indespensible for — looking for the next saviour toiling away somewhere in the minors, be it Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Burlington Vermont or Ottawa Ontario, putting up numbers which would someday lead to an MVP-caliber season for the object of my affections:

The Montreal Expos.

It should now be well clear to baseball fans why I no longer care about Major League Baseball. It was not the perpetual, ongoing PED saga, the overinflated salaries or the goddamn New York Yankees. I was – hell, still am – an Expos fan; I will go to my grave a die-hard ‘Spos fan with that ridiculous logo adorning my headstone like the marker of tragedy it is.

My beloved Expos.

I miss them more than words can fully express, that wretched team of broken promises, squandered potential and heartbreak. Sure, after 1994 I never honestly expected them to win a blessed thing, but I could always dream. 1994, in and of itself, was a microcosm of Expo fandom, an exercise in denial and false hope. ‘Oh, they won’t strike.’ Sure. ‘The Spos are gonna win the World Series!’ Yeah, right, pal. What the Spos are going to do is cruise to the best record in baseball then be neutered by a strike, a salary-shedding fire sale and more management changes and empty promises than one would care to remember, all of which contributed to a death which took ten years, culminating in a move to Washington DC.

I am not a Washington Nationals fan.

Sure, they have managed to keep the classic Expos theme of underachieving futility alive, but without any of the style or drama, without any of the arms or bats — because that is the one thing you cannot take away from the Expos: they could always provide other teams, if not themselves, with the building blocks to a successful franchise. Who knew the unfriendly confines of that crumbling concrete behemoth, Olympic Stadium — Le Stade Olypique, or more simply, The Big O — would prove such fertile grounds for world-class talent? Well, Expos fans, for one.

Larry Walker, Pedro Martinez, Vladdy Guerrero, John Wetteland, Rondell White, Orlando Cabrera, Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom — just to name a few.

But all this has been said before and, to those not in the know, will come off as so many sour grapes. So, to fellow Expos fans, I feel your pain brothers and sisters. I feel your pain. To Bud Selig and Jeffrey Loria? May you rot in baseball hell for eternity along with Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and the rest of the unworthy scum.

With that in mind, maybe someday my Expos pain will start to fade and I will be able to sit and watch an MLB game in its entirety without thinking one painful Expos-related thought. Maybe I will rekindle the passion, stoke the embers which may yet lie smoldering somewhere in the recesses of my blackened baseball heart. Maybe I will don some ill-fitting merchandise and sit eating chips, drinking beer and yelling at the television. Maybe my new favorite team will win the World Series and I’ll turn to my future children and say ‘The Expos wouldn’t have done it that way, no siree!’

And maybe that will be just fine.

Poker Players Are The New Athlete

Thank god for televised poker. No really, thank him now, because he knows that if it wasn’t for the celebrity poker matches now firmly entrenched in cable sports programming, we’d all be watching pyjama-clad men trying to hit a ball with a stick.

Televised poker is exciting. I love it in the same way I love to hang around the fringes of a party to which I was not invited and eavesdrop on the conversations of the cool people I wasn’t invited to mingle with in the first place; the conversations are horribly shallow, but everybody looks so good. Plus, there’s cards. And money. B-list celebrity money.

Money is exciting, but not when bound in a ballplayer’s paycheque. Mansions and Bentleys are swell, but where are the fans left? On the outside looking in. We deserve a piece of the pie extraneous to any alleged enjoyment gleaned from watching a baseball game.

The solution is as simple as it is obvious.

Watching baseball players play baseball is boring; watching baseball players play poker is not. There’s all the strategy, the tense anticipation and the resultant payoff without any of the silly uniforms and drunken fans to ruin the ambience.

Baseball is slow.

Poker is slow, but it’s a card game — it’s supposed to be slow. Ballplayers would be right at home.

I say abolish MLB and start up a major TV poker league, populated entirely by former ballplayers. They’ve already got the money and they’ll soon have the time. They could even keep their old uniforms to placate any sore feelings on the part of deprived baseball fans.

Baseball is often played on grass, poker on felt; both are green, but only one is hypoallergenic.

The doping scandals would be solved, important things like television rights and corporate sponsorship deals would remain intact — although Nike might have to adjust their product line slightly and Easton would have to come up with a few ideas for aluminum poker accessories.

Cards! Aluminum playing cards! Not fit for the pros, but think of the college game.

Good idea, right? As good as turning the NFL into a televised weekly Auction 45s tournament.

Fox Full-Contact 45s, sponsored by Colt 45.