In a decade of covering the Montreal Expos, either as a beat writer or a radio reporter, I collected a few unusual or bizarre or sometimes-funny stories that had little to do with covering baseball.
Such as the time my wife and I were almost arrested for reportedly burglarizing the home of an Expos’ pitcher. The most important part of that sentence: “almost.”
The team was on the road and I was not. I had befriended Elias Sosa, a relief pitcher from the Dominican Republic known best for giving up one of Reggie Jackson’s three consecutive World Series home runs. He and his wife lived not far from us in Montreal’s West Island.
But baseball, a game of strikes and balls, went on strike. It lasted six weeks, and somewhere during the work stoppage the Sosas decided to vacate their rented home, and go home to Phoenix. The rented house was empty, except for furniture. He asked if we’d retrieve their modest belongings and store them.
So off we went, with a key, to load up our car. The good neighbours, being good neighbours, rightly called the cops as they say items being moved out of a house they knew was unoccupied. The police arrived, listened to the explanation you’ve just read, and armed with as much personal information about us as they needed, left.
By the end of that season, Elias (he was such a nice man) was off to Detroit, his seventh of eight big-league teams. We later heard his wife was off to Arizona, reportedly with his money and his agent.
And then there was the time we were in Philadelphia, where the Expos were playing and our family of four was “vacationing.” Our two boys were barely out of diapers the night we took them to Veterans Stadium to “watch” the Expos — nowadays we wonder about the sanity of parents who take three-year-olds to major-league games.
The game started early and ended late. To this day, I’m not sure if it was a doubleheader or if it just felt like one. There was rain-delay after rain-delay after rain-delay. The plan had been to take the kids back to the hotel when the game ended, likely by 10 p.m., and I would write and file my game story from there. At midnight, the boys and their mother took a cab to the hotel. When the game ended, following one last rain-delay, there were fewer than 500 people in the stands. Since I worked for an afternoon newspaper, deadlines were normally not a problem.
Until that night. The game ended at 4 a.m. I filed my story at 5:30, right on deadline.
Then there was the time I could have disappeared, like forever, with Edmonton sportswriter Terry Jones. Covering the World Series, we took a post-game red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York. We arrived in the Big Apple at eight.
“Need a cab,” asked two young guys.
“Sure.”
They didn’t have a cab. They did have a car. Luckily, for the agreed-upon fare, they took two travel-weary, naive Canadians to their hotel in Manhattan and not a warehouse in who-knows-where.
And then there was the time…
Enough!
