When Baseball Broke My Heart: A Fan's Goodbye to the Montreal Expos
Warning: This book will wreck you.
Not in the way bad news does, but in the way old photographs do when you find them at 2 AM. You'll open it for "just a chapter" and four hours will vanish. You'll hear voices you forgot existed. You'll smell hot dogs steaming in concrete corridors. You'll taste the specific heartbreak of watching greatness get yanked away mid-miracle.
This is what happens when your team doesn't just lose-it disappears.
The Montreal Expos weren't good, they were dangerous. Best record in baseball. Pedro painting corners like Picasso. Larry Walker turning doubles into myth. A roster so electric the whole city hummed with October fever. And then?The strike.
Not a defeat. Not even a collapse. Just... silence. The season canceled. The dream stopped mid-sentence. And Montreal never got the ending it earned.
But this isn't a book about baseball. It's about belonging.
It's about growing up in C te-des-Neiges where six languages collided on one block and the Expos were the only thing everyone understood. About pressing transistor radios to your ear past curfew, Jacques Doucet's voice turning groundouts into scripture. About backyard stickball with milk-crate bases and the belief that if you mimicked Kent Tekulve's weird sidearm delivery hard enough, maybe you'd become something too.
You'll meet the ghosts:
Steve Rogers, who threw the pitch that broke a city. Andre Dawson, quiet thunder. Randy Johnson, the gangly giant we traded away. Pedro, the skinny prophet who made grown men weep. Larry Walker, our Canadian god. And that magical 1994 team that should have changed everything.
You'll relive the heartbreak:
Blue Monday. The fire sales. The empty seats. The slow, agonizing fade as ownership gutted the roster piece by piece. The day the team moved and nobody even said goodbye.
But you'll also remember the joy:
Sneaking into Jarry Park with your little brother. Scoring stolen tickets from your cousin who hemmed players' pants. The smell of Olympic Stadium on a July night-artificial turf, spilled beer, and impossible hope. The way a whole city leaned forward when Pedro wound up, believing in miracles because what else was there?
This is for anyone who ever loved something that vanished.
For the fans who never left, even when the team did. For the kids who kept scorecards in the margins of homework. For everyone who knows that some losses don't heal, they just teach you how to carry weight.
Because here's the truth about Montreal:
The Expos are gone. The stadium's a skeleton. The jerseys are vintage. But the heartbeat? That never stopped. It just went underground, echoing in Metro tunnels and late-night radio static, waiting for someone to write it down before it disappeared completely.
Open this book. I dare you.
You'll laugh at the cheap hot dogs and broken bleachers. You'll ache at the trades that stole futures. You'll rage at the strike that murdered destiny. And somewhere around chapter three, you'll realize you're not reading about baseball anymore.
You're reading about first love. About immigration and identity. About how a city's soul can be stitched into nine innings and a powder-blue cap. About what it means to believe in something fragile, fleeting, and utterly unforgettable.
The Expos vanished. But the story? The story stayed.
This is that story.
And once you hear it, you'll never forget it.
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