In Montreal, It's Few and Far Between

Expos' Season Appears to Be Winding Down for Last Time in Quiet Olympic Stadium

Montreal Expos right fielder Juan Rivera makes his way off the field before a sparse crowd at Olympic Stadium. (Paul Chiasson - AP)

MONTREAL, Sept. 23 -- The final days of the Montreal Expos are painful to watch. Few do. When the scattered fans at Olympic Stadium try to rally the team, they bang the empty seats beside them. The seats are almost always empty. The team rarely rallies. It is in last place, its players bitter, the city more so.

The long, draining arguments about whether to move the Expos from Montreal are settled here -- if not yet in the league boardrooms -- by the glum reality. Team President Tony Tavaras ponders aloud about layoffs at the stadium. There are rumors that next year's schedule has been printed without the name Montreal. And the team played the New York Mets on Wednesday night before an audience of 3,664, about enough to fill a large high school gym.

"It's embarrassing," said Mets pitcher Steve Trachsel, whose team won, 3-2, to avoid its own embarrassment of slipping into the National League East cellar. "The attendance here is worse than spring training."

On Thursday, lured by the season's last $5-seat-and-$1-dog night, the crowd swelled to 11,142. The Expos lost to the New York Mets, 4-2.

The Expos insist they are used to the small crowds, that they play to win no matter how many watch. The meager attendance is an old story. They don't want to talk about it. The relationship between the team and its town is all but over; it would be unseemly to trash talk now.

But it hurts, they admit. "I understand we're not in first," said Brad Wilkerson, a 26-year-old first baseman from Kentucky whose hustle might make him a rising star if more came to watch. "But to have a crowd like tonight in a city as big as this -- it's a shame."

There is plenty of blame to go around. The fans are still angry about the 1994 players strike, which froze Montreal in what had promised to be its really big year, the year they might well have gone All The Way, say the fans.

"The city has turned its back on the Expos ever since the strike," said Ian Tkach, 31, from his regular seat along the third base line. "Every year it's gotten worse. Look, they don't even bother to clean the stadium."

After the strike, the Expos owners traded off a slew of the best players, dumping high salaries to make money, say the fans.

"It was a garage sale," said Rick Choquette, 64, a retired policeman who gets occasional free tickets in the far outfield seats, where he sits apart from the gaggle of scruffy youths who gather there to drink and party.

The final straw, say some of the fans, was the trade in 1997 of Pedro Martinez -- now a star for the Boston Red Sox -- just after he won the National League Cy Young Award.

Attendance slid, bubbling only briefly for occasional moments of hope, such as the run at the end of last season that put the Expos within striking distance of a playoff wild-card slot, and brought 30,000 to the stadium. But that run fell short, and the crowds left, feeding the old accusation that French Montreal only loves the winners, that it doesn't have the heart of, say, Boston, to keep coming back to support a team through good times and bad.

"Montreal is a happening town. The Expos are not happening," conceded Joe Lahae, 22, who works in a CD shop but remains a loyal fan. "Montreal wants hot. They want a victorious team."

Montreal is also said to be a hockey town, in which the Canadiens hold the rapt attention of the fans. But the NHL lockout has emptied the ice, with no discernable uptick in interest in baseball.