Wait Till Next Year? They Don't Have One

ANDRE FORGET/AP
After a big opening night, the Expos' next game drew fewer than 5,000 fans

Every team is in first place on opening day, goes an old baseball maxim. Hope and possibility abound. Unless you are a member of the impossibly hopeless Montreal Expos. Then opening day is just the first chord of a season-long funeral march. "I like to use the analogy of someone who has been told he has a terminal illness," says Expos president Tony Tavares, who prays fans will buy tickets, if only to pay their last respects.

The Expos, sickly for years, are now Team Tumor. After a decade of cheapskate owners and lousy attendance--last year they averaged a pitiful 7,935 fans per game, 24,000 below the league average--Major League Baseball tried to eliminate the Expos this past winter. But the players' union got a reprieve by filing a still unresolved grievance claiming that killing the team would violate the league's collective-bargaining agreement. That agreement has expired, and after the 2002 season, so will the Expos. In the meantime, they must play 162 games knowing that no matter what they do--win the World Series or flop--they'll be dissolved, or at best relocated, in November.

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That alone makes their 2002 season one of the weirdest in baseball history. But it gets more absurd. Assuming the Expos wouldn't exist, baseball commissioner Bud Selig let owner Jeffrey Loria buy the Florida Marlins. When Loria went South, he took with him the Expos' manager, coaching staff, all the team's computers and a complete set of team uniforms--souvenirs of futility. Now the Expos are orphans, literally wards of the baseball state, property of the other 29 owners.

And treated accordingly. Three days before spring training, long after other franchises had organized their teams for the season, Selig finally hired Tavares, general manager Omar Minaya and manager Frank Robinson. Minaya, 42, who signed Sammy Sosa to his first professional contract, is young for the job, full of energy and plans to turn his Expos stint into another G.M. opportunity down the road. Robinson, a Hall of Famer, must truly love the game. He certainly has the players' respect, but hasn't made much headway with Montreal's native language. Robinson wished one of the team's Francophone beat writers "Bonne chance." "Bonne chance a vous," the writer responded. "Uh, what's that now?" It's a shame Robinson didn't get it. No manager needs luck more.

The Expos have sold only about 1,000 season tickets, but they lured a surprising 34,351 Montrealers to the opener. Interest may have been piqued by their first opponent: Loria's Florida Marlins. "The only reason I'm here is to tell Loria to f___ off," said Brian Defoe, one of a gaggle of teen boys who painted the letters E-X-P-O-S on their bare chests. "That, and to get on the scoreboard." He was not alone. The biggest ovation of the night came when a fan holding a LORIA SUCKS sign eluded security and danced on the Marlins' dugout. Next day only 4,771 partisans showed up.

Quebeckers are resigned to the Expos' fate. A culturally diverse lot, they express disappointment in distinct ways. Jeanne Lowry and Michael Lambert sat by each other in the upper deck at last week's opener. "As long as they're here, I'll root for them no matter what," said Lowry, an Expos fan whose optimism places her on the Canadian side of the French-Canadian hyphenate. "I am only here to celebrate my sadness," said Lambert. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation between Anne Murray and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Down 6-to-1, the 'Spos kept battling, and in the ninth inning broke through. Just before the season started, the Marlins traded their best reliever in what was widely seen as a Loria cost-cutting move. The bargain young fireballer brought in to seal a Florida victory ended up blowing the game, giving Expos fans a sweet victory and a sweeter irony. "For years we watched our good players get sold off to richer teams," said Lambert. "It's wonderful to see someone else have to deal with it." Reminded that his team will probably be auctioning all its players come November, Lambert sighed. "It is better than watching them do it one at a time."