Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri Read Free Book Online Page A

were lining up at our lockers and he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the Expos have just won their first game.’ And reflex action—every kid picked up their hat and threw it in the air. And it wasn’t rehearsed. It was a natural reaction. We were hugging each other. I could cry, you know?”
    After that first road trip, the team flew to Montreal for another major event: the first home game for the team, the city, and the country.
    Still, there was a problem. Teams of workers had toiled around the clock to clear away the early-spring snow while others laboured to coax the grass and dirt into playable shape. But Martin and his crew had run out of time to bolt thousands of permanent seats into place. So the night before the big game, everyone dropped what they were doing and rushed to set up folding chairs—six thousand of them, all told. Sensing the urgency of the deadline, even Fanning joined the effort. Let’s see Connie Mack do that.
    The birth of the Expos in ’69 and that long-awaited home opener delivered a jolt of electricity to the city’s baseball-hungry fans. It also gave many people—the players, McHale, Fanning, Mauch—a golden opportunity to prove themselves, or in some cases re-prove themselves. Beyond the men swinging bats, throwing balls, and making decisions, it was a heady time for others too. Few more so than Dave Van Horne.
    Born and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania, Van Horne established himself at an early age as a broadcaster, calling baseball, basketball, and football games right out of college in Virginia. When the Richmond Braves Triple-A franchise debuted in 1966, Van Horne was the one calling the games, a job he would hold for three years. At the end of the ’68 season, with the Braves done for the year and the four new MLB expansion clubs announced, Van Horne sent out two applications, one to Kansas City and one to Montreal. He had a slight connection with McHale, who’d been ousted as Atlanta’s GM midway through the 1966 season, shortly after Van Horne started doing games for Richmond. Still, as the calendar ticked over to 1969, Van Horne hadn’t heard anything, nor did the Expos have any idea who’d be broadcasting their games. With three hundred applications sitting in a drawer and only a few days to go until the start of spring training, McHale still hadn’t hired an English-language broadcast team.
    Still, it wouldn’t be the 1969 Expos without a story of slapdash operations and last-minute stress. It was Lou Martin who would again step up to fix a potentially dicey situation. The man in charge of whipping Jarry Park into shape had McHale’s ear on other matters too. Martin had served as the Richmond Braves’ GM while McHale ran the big club. Hire the Van Horne kid, Martin advised. That was that. At 27 years old, Van Horne landed a gig calling baseball games for a brand-new team, in a city he’d never seen.
    Van Horne would have just five days to develop a rapport with broadcast partner Russ Taylor before heading to New York for Opening Day. The broadcast went relatively smoothly anyway. Problem was, in the rush to simply produce a professional broadcast, no one had stopped to reflect on its historical nature … so no one bothered to tape the broadcast back home at the radio station.
    When Taylor and Van Horne flew up to Montreal, they were better prepared. They were also blown away by the spectacle that unfolded.
    “They had an Opening Day parade,” Van Horne recounted over coffee in Miami in January 2012. “You had a couple hundred thousand people out to see a team they’ve never seen and see players they’ve never heard of except for one or two guys. The park was jam-packed—well, ‘jam-packed’ meaning they got 28,000-plus people for the opener, as full as it could get. Lou always had the knack of bumping that up to 30,000 or 31,000, which may have counted the people standing on the snow bank beyond the right-field fence to watch the games.
    “What I remember is