Right around this time every year since 2004 I think about how much I miss seeing the Montreal Expos as part of the baseball landscape. Although they weren't my favorite team, I always found myself drawn to their players and those awesome uniforms. So many great names came out of the Expos organization, particularly in the early 90s when I was at my peak with collecting baseball cards.
Despite the fact that many Expos greats came before them, prospects like Larry Walker, Delino DeShields, and Marquis Grissom all had cardboard debuts in 1990 which felt to me like the start of a youth movement in Montreal. Walker would start creating a Hall of Fame resume. Grissom would go on to win four Gold Glove Awards, half of them with Montreal. DeShields would someday be a key trade component that would bring future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez to Montreal.
The following seasons we would begin seeing cards of players like Rondell White, Moises Alou, and Cliff Floyd all of whom would have solid major league careers. Sadly, most of the players mentioned would find some of their greatest success while playing for other organizations.
The Expos had put together one of the greatest regular seasons I had seen to that point when they strung together 74 wins in 114 games, leading the NL Easst, before the major league baseball strike robbed them of a potential world championship run. That Expos team was loaded with talent with most of the aforementioned players making an impact with that team. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to the Expos had they won it all that year.
Would the Expos still exist or was their fate inevitable given the challenges of being a smaller market team in Canada? It's hard to say, but I have to believe that a World Series would have changed the landscape of major league baseball. In fact, it would have been quite interesting to see both Canadian teams taking three consecutive World Series titles with the Toronto Blue Jays having won back-to-back titles in 1992 and 1993. In any case, I long for the Expos to return to baseball, but for now we may have to settle for reminiscing with some fun cards from yesteryear that feature those awesome red, white, and blue threads.
