For U.S. Fans of Expos, It's Going, Going, Gone

Vt. Devotees Sadly Absorb Team's Departure

Herb Pearo displays his collection of Montreal baseball memorabilia, amassed over 35 years, in the "Expos Room" of his Vermont house. (Photos By David A. Fahrenthold -- The Washington Post)

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- To any Nationals fan who thought Washington's nabbing of a big-league baseball team was a victimless crime: Meet Herb Pearo. He's got a shrine he'd like to sell.

Pearo, 53, has one of the world's largest collections of memorabilia of the Nationals' former incarnation, the Montreal Expos. There are uniforms that he dug out of a dumpster in Florida, batting helmets that an equipment manager sold him to pay off gambling debts, and a bunch of jerseys that another collector traded him in exchange for a Ford van.

It's all displayed in a two-story "Expos Room" at Pearo's house in a remote corner of Vermont -- the results of an obsession lasting more than half a lifetime.

And, now that the team has moved to Washington and left Pearo bereft, it's all going on the market.

"It's time to move on," Pearo said sitting on his porch near a bullpen bench that he spirited out of the Expos' old ballpark in 1976. "The Expos have moved on."

Pearo is part of a forgotten baseball subculture that took root in upstate New York and parts of northern New England after the Expos were created in 1969. Whether because of geography -- Montreal was hundreds of miles closer than big-league stadiums in Boston and New York -- or a simple love of the underdog, some fans adopted the new Canadian team.

For those Americans who did, it was a long, strange ride.

Across the border, they found a place where concession stands served a mixture of french fries, gravy and cheese curds called poutine , and where the mascot was Youppi!, a furry orange Muppet. Their team had a logo that looked like a red, white and blue worm, and a stadium with a roof that resembled the underside of a mattress.

"Everything about it was just weird," said Tom Simon, a lawyer who adopted the Expos when he moved to Burlington in 1993.

Pearo, a Vermont native, loved the Montreal stadium, contrasting its party atmosphere with the surly air of Boston's ballpark. "It was like a happy, sober Fenway Park," he said.

Over the years, the Expos' fortunes rose and then mostly fell, as great players developed in their minor-league system began departing for teams that could pay them more. Montreal's team never made it to a World Series.

But Pearo, who makes money buying and selling antiques and sports memorabilia, stayed with them.