Nos Amours live on in new book about the Montreal Expos

At Nationals Park in Washington D.C., you will see statues of Josh Gibson, the Hall of Fame Negro League star who played for the Washington-based Homestead Grays; of Walter Johnson, another Hall of Fame member, who pitched all 21 seasons of his baseball career for the Washington Senators in the early part of the 20th century; and of Frank Howard, a feared slugger, also for the Senators, in the late 1960s.

Both versions of the Senators, the team that left Washington to become the Minnesota Twins in 1961 and the team that left Washington to become the Texas Rangers in 1972, are also saluted in a walkway on the opposite side of the ballpark to the statues.

What you will not see at Nationals Park is any reference to the direct forebears of the Nationals: the Montreal Expos.

That is what makes Jonah Keri’s book about the Expos, Up, Up, & Away (Random House Canada, $32), a welcome addition to a baseball fan’s shelf. Sure, the Expos had a dismal history — one playoff appearance in 35 years, two lousy home stadiums, a great team undercut by labour tension and countless fire sales of prime talent — but they do not deserve to be dismissed as summarily as they have been.

Keri, a writer for the U.S. website Grantland and the author of the well-received The Extra 2%, a book on the Tampa Bay Rays, covers it all for the Expos, starting with the initial years in the bandbox known as Jarry Park, through the Rick Monday homer in 1981 that ended the Expos’ sole postseason appearance. There is homage to the 1994 team, a juggernaut denied its chance at glory by a players’s strike. Keri also lays out the debacle overseen by owners Claude Brochu and then Jeffrey Loria which ultimately resulted in Major League Baseball assuming ownership of the failing franchise and selling it to the Washington interests who ignore the past so blithely.

Familiar names of Nos Amours dot the pages consistently: Staub, Carter, Dawson, Raines, Walker, Martinez, Alou, Van Horne. Keri has done his homework well, interviewing dozens of people with Expos associations. The conversations he had with Charles Bronfman, the team’s original owner, and Brochu, are the most illuminating, as they detail where they think things went wrong. Bronfman’s disenchantment, for instance, began as far back as 1984, when he realized team revenue could not keep pace with player salaries. Gary Carter was subsequently dealt to the New York Mets, where he would go on to win a World Series. In many ways, that was the beginning of the Expos' end.

It is a lot of material to stuff into 408 pages but Keri adopts a breezy, conversational tone that helps him hurdle over the inevitable ennui that develops from sports books that set out to chronicle the roll call of a team’s seasons. The inclusion of some Aislin cartoons was a wonderful idea. Keri would be well advised, though, to refrain from his constant use of the awkward contractions should’ve, would’ve, could’ve.

Keri, a native of Montreal who now lives in Denver, adds personal reminiscences about attending Expos games with his friends (they once engaged Larry Walker in a dialogue from their bleacher seats at Olympic Stadium) and it is to his credit that these memories enliven the text and don’t come off as self-indulgent.

He also fights hard to tamp down the fan in him as he assesses whether the Expos could ever be reborn. Instead, he diverts and salutes the spirit of the Expos, predicting more hope for it than a possible rebirth of the team.

With this book, Keri has done much to help keep that spirit alive.