’94 Expos Retrospective
As noted on Baseball Think Factory’s Newsblog, this Dean Hybl article is definitely Jonah-nip.
If I discover the cure for cancer, resolve the Middle East crisis and get Bert Blyleven into the Hall of Fame, my epitaph will still say “irrational Expos fan.” And I’m totally cool with that.
RTFA, it’s good stuff. However, the piece missed the biggest reason the Expos soon became awful and have remained awful almost throughout the next decade-plus, into DC:
It wasn’t just that the Expos traded away John Wetteland, Larry Walker, Ken Hill and Marquis Grissom. It was that they got Tony Tarasco, Fernando Seguignol and Elmo in return, because ownership decided it would be a swell idea to give Kevin Malone one week to trade all those guys, and everyone in baseball knew it.
If they’d gotten market value in prospects for all those players, there’s a legitimate chance a rebuild could’ve borne fruit as early as ’97, when Pedro Martinez won his Cy Young, there were still some other young veterans left, and the talent reaped in post-’94 trades would’ve just been coming into their own.
A Yankees Expos WS would have been great in 1994. Ah, what could have been!