Just Get on base – Coming of Age with The Expos

Warm-Up

Most Ottawans of my generation grew up without much in the way of professional sports. Yes, we had the CFL’s Ottawa Rough Riders, but outside of their 1976 championship win, they were a sorry mess of owners, names, and players until their surprise Grey Cup victory in 2016. We also had the junior Ottawa 67s hockey team, a standout franchise to this day, and although they were filled with future professional hockey players, they were, essentially, an amateur team—so it never felt ‘real.’ Other than that, professional sports were a barren landscape. The WHA’s Ottawa Nationals existed for a single season before vanishing. It wasn’t until 1992 that we got a true professional team in the Ottawa Senators—who, of course, stunk for years. 

Ottawa had a loser mentality when it came to sports—and, in fact, one could argue that Ottawa in general has this deep, insecure complex. Yes, it was the capital city, but there was and remains a small-town aura, and that label of it being a dull government town. Anyway…where was I? Yes, sure, we had a brief taste of victory when the Ottawa Lynx won a Triple-A baseball championship, but they, too, eventually disappeared. So, we latched onto teams from Toronto or Montreal. Despite being surrounded by a family of Torontonians, I—perhaps for reasons I wouldn’t understand for decades—embraced the Canadiens (aka, the Habs) and the Expos.

My love for the Canadiens made sense. I had initially cheered for the Boston Bruins during the Bobby Orr/Phil Esposito era, but after watching them repeatedly lose to the Habs, I smartly switched allegiances. I was rewarded with four Stanley Cup championships in the ’70s and two more in ’86 and ’93. The Expos, however, were my true obsession.

They never won it all, but they came close—twice, both times due to strikes. In 1981, a player’s strike split the season into two halves. Since the Expos won their division in the first half, they qualified for the playoffs. After upsetting the hated Phillies, the Expos squared off against the L.A. Dodgers, and, well, most baseball fans know what happened. In the decisive Game 5, on a rainy Monday, October 19—a day many of us sprinted home to catch the final moments of a game that frustratingly started at 1:05 PM—the Expos took a 1-0 lead into the 9th inning. The Expos pulled their starter, Ray Burris, not for a reliever, but for workhorse starter Steve Rogers. With two outs and a man on, Rick Monday swatted a two-run homer to end the Expos’ season. “Blue Monday,” as the moment became known, remains the most heart-wrenching in the franchise’s history.

The other low point arrived in 1994. The Expos were the best team in baseball, easily headed for the playoffs stacked with all-stars like Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Marquis Grissam, Pedro Martinez, and John Wetteland. Then disaster struck in the form of a players’ strike that wiped out the season and any hopes for an Expos championship. That moment marked the beginning of the end. 

By 2004, the Expos were no more, relocated to Washington. By then, our collective Expos fever had long faded.

First Base

Loving the Expos was an all-consuming passion throughout my childhood. Before music and girls entered the picture, baseball ruled the warmer half of my life (the Habs occupied the colder part). With an obsessive nature—perhaps a trait of undiagnosed neurodivergence, something I was only told about in my 50s—I lived through these teams. I didn’t just watch or listen to games—I immersed myself in them. I collected baseball cards, followed the sports pages religiously, and even played dice baseball, constructing entire seasons from scratch. Gary Carter, Steve Roger, Tim Wallace, Ellis Valentine, Charlie Lea, Jeff Reardon, Bill Gullickson, Bill “Spaceman” Lee (the Hunter S. Thompson of baseball) and of course, Tim Raines. I idolized that small mountain of a man and his blistering speed. I even had a Raines jersey and collected everything, even the Dairy Queen’s baseball helmet sundaes that came with a cardboard holder so that you can keep track of the standings.

It was a world I controlled, a refuge from the domestic chaos around me.

Home life was anything but stable. It was more a rooming house than a home. My mother struggled with demons that would one day visit me. My father—a police officer—terrified me. He introduced me to sports, but he was also a racist, sexist, abusive bully. Looking back, I understand I was difficult, too; highly sensitive and prone to volcanic outbursts. Schools raised concerns, but they went unheard. I struggled socially, never knowing how to connect with people. Sports became my escape, a place where I could belong and succeed. It was delusional, but it felt real.

The Expos were central to so many formative moments. I won a contest as an Ottawa Citizen paperboy, earning a weekend trip to Montreal to see the team play. It was my first live game, my first taste of independence—and my first drink. That same weekend, one of my roommates lost control, urinating on the floor and damaging furniture. He was banned from attending the game. I, somehow, escaped punishment and enjoyed Bill Gullickson’s victory over the Cubs.

There were roller-skating dates where I barely noticed the girl beside me, too busy obsessively checking updates on the Expos’ pennant race in 1980, where they once again ended up in second place—one game behind those damn Philadelphia Phillies. Unlike the frantic chaos of hockey (which was where my pent-up anger was unleashed), baseball had a meditative slowness to it, a calm I desperately needed.

Second Base

For one year, I played baseball on a neighborhood team. I was decent, a switch-hitter, and even made the all-star team. But my temper got the best of me. During one game, I was certain I tagged a runner out before he reached second, but the umpire overruled me. I LOST MY SHIT and started running around, screaming about this injustice, and got tossed. Even my teammates were embarrassed.

It gets worse. 

One summer, we played baseball near some townhouses. Our hits frequently bounced off the side of one home. The owner—a man of South Asian descent—had had enough and told us to stop. Furious, I stormed into my father’s workshop, grabbed a can of spray paint, and scrawled a racist phrase across his fence. 

I was caught. My father beat me as we walked to the neighbor’s house, where I was forced to repaint the fence and apologize. It was a horrifying moment, but one that I still struggle to unpack. The Expos, and baseball in general, were a multi-ethnic sport. Race never seemed to matter or even cross my young mind. Was it a reflection of my environment? An outlet for my own internal turmoil? Or was it tied to something even deeper—the unsettling revelation I had just made about my own identity?

Third Base

It was during this time that I made a discovery that shifted everything and maybe partially explained my explosive emotions. My parents had just celebrated an anniversary, and something didn’t add up. I did the math. Their marriage was somehow younger than me.

I asked them about it. At first, they avoided answering. Then one day, I was summoned into their bedroom. My father was lying on the bed, and he turned it into a quiz show.

“When did I arrive in Canada?” he asked.

I answered confidently: “1966.”

“Wrong.” He gave me the real date. It was after I was born.

The realization hit me. He was not my father.

A few years later, thankfully, he left. 

Meantime, it took a decade or so to locate the man I believed was my father. My mother had been out on the town at 19 when a man saved her from harassment, then drove her home. When she later returned, pregnant, his mother told her to get lost. Settling in Ottawa with her parents, my young mother, undoubtedly overwhelmed by the accidental pregnancy, prepared papers to put me up for adoption before my grandmother stepped in. I was raised almost exclusively by my grandparents the first 5-6 years of my life.

In 1999, after years of searching through the National Archives of Canada, I tracked down and met the man I believed was my father. He lived in Detroit with his wife and son, was a Montreal sports fan all his life, and while he remembered my mother he wouldn’t admit I was his son. While we maintained sporadic correspondence over the years, mostly talking about the Montreal Canadiens, we never did meet again, and he never did admit he was my father.

In July 2024, while in Cyprus, I got news that he passed. I felt like i was punched in the stomach. A few months later, his uncle (my great uncle) who was also a long time Montreal resident and local sports fan suggested we do a DNA test to finally settle the score once and for all.

In October 2024, the results verified that we were related and that my father was indeed my father. I always knew he was. The Expos and Canadiens were the proof (okay, and obvious resemblance in photos!). My lifelong pull towards Montreal made sense finally because it was always in me.

Rounding For Home?

Long after the Expos faded into the dustbins of sports history, I became a father and took my sons to nearby amateur games. They brought me calm at long last (well, okay, somewhat calmer!). Ottawa went through a slew of minor teams from the 1990s to today including the Lynx, Champions, and Fat Cats. I had no idea who was on the roster or even where these teams were in the standings. I mostly went, sometimes with my late best friend, Barry, just to carve out a meditative space, to sit outside, breathing in the warm summer air, letting a sort of nothingness wash over me. It was akin to seeing a therapist or taking a yoga class.

But does that all sound too perfect? Like once I found my father, I’d find myself, my home? Truth is, life is messier—like baseball. Unlike hockey, which has a set time limit, baseball can stretch on indefinitely. I see life that way.

I have two adult kids in Ottawa. I’m sitting here in Lviv, Ukraine, writing this. I have an okay relationship with them, but if I’m brutally honest, I often struck out as a father. I was so fixated on my past that I missed the present. I was physically there but not in a meaningful way, like a baseball card—just a cutout with basic facts, not a lot of depth. I have accepted that I am and always have been a bit of a nomad (my job as a film festival director has generously offered me endless travel opportunities across the globe), always there but never here, as they say. Do my sons feel I abandoned them? They say no, but I guess time will tell long after my game ends.

Maybe I am too harsh, as I often tend to be, in baseball, a .300 average makes you an all-star. None of us will ever bat .1000. The Expos never won a thing but watching them from 1979 to 2004 gave me more joys, heartbreaks, and emotions than anything the Blue Jays’ two World Series titles ever did. Baseball gives hope to the losers. No, that’s not right. It shows us the reality of life—that being alive is a victory in itself, that some innings you will stink, but the next inning you might hit a grand slam or even a single. Getting on base is what matters, being alive and in motion. Maybe we never reach home plate, but sometimes just the attempt is enough.