If you’re like me you tend to reward
yourself for tackling & completing a more challenging book with the succor
of the “easy read”: a novella, a book about music, or perhaps even a nyuk nyuk inside-baseball (literally) history of the Montreal Expos. Not
exactly sure what I was thinking with this one. I frequently read and enjoy Jonah Keri's baseball writing on the
Grantland website, so out of a sense of loyalty and curiosity, and because I’d
come through the cathartic crucible of just having completed Flannery
O’Connor’s “The Violent Bear it Away”, I decided to check out his new book on
the Expos, a team I always found fairly comic, as baseball teams go. It also
probably had something to do with a “wacky 1970s sports book” culture that’s
developed over the years; I suppose I hoped this one might join the ranks of
Terry Pluto’s “Loose Balls” (oral history of the ABA), Dan Epstein’s “Big Hair
and Plastic Grass” and Murray Greig’s “Big Bucks and Blue Pucks” (World Hockey
Association history).
That was the hope anyway, but Keri’s book is really
more of a love letter to his favorite boyhood club, with way too much clipped
prose and forced hilarity – the sort of things that are really funny when you’re 15 years old (mascots, nicknames, terrible
ballclubs). I mean, the Expos probably never really had a chance in Montreal;
the fact that they stayed for 30-something years despite awful parks, poor
weather and a rotten financial structure that included tightfisted owners and a
rapidly weakening Canadian dollar was a minor miracle in itself, and a clear
demonstration of the oligarchical nature of organized professional sports. The
team made the playoffs only once, though Keri hyperbolically makes much hash of
the strike-shortened 1994 season that ended with the Expos in first, with much
conjecture about how that was the year they probably might have any maybe could
have “won it all”.
I mean, I know the feeling. As a San Francisco Giants
fan since 1976, it was only the exorcism of ghosts and phantoms that came from
the 2010 World Series victory that truly allowed me to see my team as more than
cursed losers, so I know there’s both pain and pride in suffering. I just wish
Keri could have wrapped it all up in a more interesting and less vanilla bow. “Up,
Up and Away” is the sort of book that’s forgotten mere days after it’s been
read; I’m actually struggling a bit with a review and I just finished the thing
about ten days ago. Outside of some of the financial chicanery that allowed
Montreal to get, and then retain, a baseball franchise in the first place,
there’s really nothing particularly out of the ordinary here. Good players come
and go, prospects don’t pan out, the team draw lots of fans, and then they don’t.
You know Keri had a blast putting this together, and his enthusiasm in
recounting some of his personal tales from Jarry Park and Olympic Stadium with
his baseball-crazed pals are all cuddly and stuff. Yet if you’re looking for
something that captures the zeitgeist of 70s & 80s pro sports, this one’s
definitely something of a footnote.
