On September 29, 2004, our Loves played their last game in Montreal. The Journal offers you a series of reports as part of this sad twentieth anniversary of the departure of our Expos for Washington.
Claude Raymond has seen about 32,000 of them pass by on a day. At 87, the baseball man is nonetheless categorical: of all of them, none was sadder than the one at the Montreal Expos’ last home game, on September 29, 2004. It will soon be 20 years.
“It’s the darkest day of my life,” said he, who was an assistant manager to Frank Robinson with the Expos at the time. “I’d been in baseball for 50 years and it ended like this.”
Despite all the bad memories associated with that day, Mr. Raymond has one in particular that remains forever etched in his memory. He was the one who threw the last ball from the mound in Expos history.
“It was instinct,” he said. “The game had been over for a while when I decided to go out on the mound. I plowed the dirt and filled the hole in front, like I did every time I went to pitch when I was playing.”
After a ball was found lying around, photographer Gilles Corbeil served as its makeshift catcher.
“After I threw, I signed the ball and gave it to him,” said Raymond, whose 12-season major league baseball career from 1959 to 1971 took him from the Chicago White Sox to the Expos, via Milwaukee, Houston and Atlanta.
A hoped-for miracle
Before this final presence on the mound of the Olympic Stadium, the Quebecer had also delivered a touching speech to the fans. With a lump in his throat from emotion, he had notably formulated: “I hope that one day, we will have a miracle and that it will come back here.”
Two decades later, Mr. Raymond no longer expects this famous miracle.
“I believed in it until the joint custody plan with the Tampa Bay Rays fell through [en janvier 2022]. Personally, I liked the idea. Today, I know that businessman Stephen Bronfman is heartbroken and I no longer have much hope of seeing a return of the Expos in my lifetime.”
Nothing more…
By the end of the month, it will be the Oakland A’s who will experience the ordeal surrounding a move, first to Sacramento for three seasons, then to Las Vegas starting in 2028.
“I’m not crying for the A’s, who used to be in Philadelphia, then in Kansas City,” Mr. Raymond says frankly. “Baseball fans there will still have the San Francisco Giants nearby. It may take a few years, but the few fans in Oakland will only have to cross a bridge to go see major league baseball. Here in Montreal, there’s nothing left.”
In Expos uniform all the way home
After the Expos’ last game at the Olympic Stadium on Wednesday, September 29, 2004, Claude Raymond briefly passed through the team’s locker room, but he still had his uniform on when he went to join his faithful wife, Rita, in the family room. There was no way he was going home without wearing the Montreal club’s colours.
“I went back home to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu with my uniform. Once there, I took a good shower and poured myself a glass of cognac,” recalls the former pitcher, who was then part of the Expos’ coaching staff.
The adventure was not quite over, since the Expos had to travel the next day for a final series of three games in New York, against the Mets.
The Montreal team had won its first two games at Shea Stadium, before losing by a score of 8 to 1 on October 3 against a certain left-handed pitcher named Tom Glavine. It was the last game in Expos history.
