Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri Page B
Authors: Jonah Keri
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then a shower, after which the clubhouse was nearly empty.
Then
there were the workouts. Training with heavy weights was frowned upon in those days, with trainers suggesting that too much bulk hurt players’ flexibility. So Dawson used Cybex machines to strengthen his quadriceps and hamstrings. Alongside those exercises were push-ups and sit-ups—too many to count. He’d often do all of that after 10 or 11 hours in the ballpark, having gone through all those warm-ups, played the actual game, and treated his knees afterwards. Made sense. There certainly weren’t any lines for the machines that late at night.
Dawson’s diligence kept him on the field and helped fuel some huge performances at every step. In his first year as a pro, he hit .330/.383/.553 at Lethbridge, Alberta, of the rookie-level Pioneer League. The next season, he hit .352/.413/.658 with 28 homers in just 114 games between Double-A Quebec City and the hitters’ haven of Triple-A Denver. He made his major league debut on September 11, 1976, and became an everyday player in the big leagues the next season.
Numbers aside, Dawson’s stone-faced resolve under the stress of searing pain quickly earned his teammates’ respect and admiration.
“You’d see him laying quietly on the training table, getting his knees drained over and over—it was un-fucking-believable,” said Bill Lee, the eccentric left-hander who would join the team in 1979 and become its most colourful character. “We would just go in and look at him. You knew how much it had to hurt, but he never showed it. I mean, his fucking knees looked like fucking Frankenstein’s face.”
It took a little longer to build a stable of dynamic young pitchers to complement the barrage of hitting talent emerging from the Expos system. Rogers got it started.
Montreal snagged Rogers with the fourth pick in the 1971 secondary draft. When the Expos took him, Rogers had 19 hours of senior-level classes left to complete his degree in petroleum engineering. He felt that if he didn’t take those classes right then, he’d never earn his degree. An intellectual and a pragmatist as well as an athlete, Rogers wanted a fallback plan in case baseball didn’t work out. So when he signed that first contract with the Expos, he made a pointed request: Don’t send me to instructional league—let me finish my college education first. It took about 14 seconds from that point for the media to get on his case, a pattern that continued throughout what would become a long, illustrious, and outspoken career.
The argument over Rogers’ desire to finish his degree wasn’t his only immediate beef with the organization. When the three players drafted ahead of him in ’71—the Senators’ Pete Broberg, the Cubs’ Burt Hooton, and the Brewers’ Rob Ellis—all cracked the big leagues right away, Rogers expected the same.
“I went to Triple-A—and I thought I had been screwed,” said Rogers. “I really felt like my talent hadn’t been recognized enough.”
Many elite athletes have that kind of arrogance as they climb the ladder toward professional success. It’s often a healthy and necessary confidence that lets them shrug off failures and keep working toward their goals. Rogers was simply more candid than most about how good he was, and how his team should treat him accordingly. He did learn a little humility, though, and much sooner than he expected.
“I ran into the Rochester Red Wings, Baltimore’s Triple-A team” while playing for the International League’s Winnipeg Whips, he recalled. “They had [Don] Baylor, [Bobby] Grich, [Al] Bumbry, [Rich] Coggins, Terry Crowley … when you totalled all of the team’s major league playing careers, they had just under 100 years of major league service. That team and those players pinned my ears back. They taught me that I had a lot to learn. So I learned that I needed to learn a whole lot before I could move up through the system. Which was a good
Then
there were the workouts. Training with heavy weights was frowned upon in those days, with trainers suggesting that too much bulk hurt players’ flexibility. So Dawson used Cybex machines to strengthen his quadriceps and hamstrings. Alongside those exercises were push-ups and sit-ups—too many to count. He’d often do all of that after 10 or 11 hours in the ballpark, having gone through all those warm-ups, played the actual game, and treated his knees afterwards. Made sense. There certainly weren’t any lines for the machines that late at night.
Dawson’s diligence kept him on the field and helped fuel some huge performances at every step. In his first year as a pro, he hit .330/.383/.553 at Lethbridge, Alberta, of the rookie-level Pioneer League. The next season, he hit .352/.413/.658 with 28 homers in just 114 games between Double-A Quebec City and the hitters’ haven of Triple-A Denver. He made his major league debut on September 11, 1976, and became an everyday player in the big leagues the next season.
Numbers aside, Dawson’s stone-faced resolve under the stress of searing pain quickly earned his teammates’ respect and admiration.
“You’d see him laying quietly on the training table, getting his knees drained over and over—it was un-fucking-believable,” said Bill Lee, the eccentric left-hander who would join the team in 1979 and become its most colourful character. “We would just go in and look at him. You knew how much it had to hurt, but he never showed it. I mean, his fucking knees looked like fucking Frankenstein’s face.”
It took a little longer to build a stable of dynamic young pitchers to complement the barrage of hitting talent emerging from the Expos system. Rogers got it started.
Montreal snagged Rogers with the fourth pick in the 1971 secondary draft. When the Expos took him, Rogers had 19 hours of senior-level classes left to complete his degree in petroleum engineering. He felt that if he didn’t take those classes right then, he’d never earn his degree. An intellectual and a pragmatist as well as an athlete, Rogers wanted a fallback plan in case baseball didn’t work out. So when he signed that first contract with the Expos, he made a pointed request: Don’t send me to instructional league—let me finish my college education first. It took about 14 seconds from that point for the media to get on his case, a pattern that continued throughout what would become a long, illustrious, and outspoken career.
The argument over Rogers’ desire to finish his degree wasn’t his only immediate beef with the organization. When the three players drafted ahead of him in ’71—the Senators’ Pete Broberg, the Cubs’ Burt Hooton, and the Brewers’ Rob Ellis—all cracked the big leagues right away, Rogers expected the same.
“I went to Triple-A—and I thought I had been screwed,” said Rogers. “I really felt like my talent hadn’t been recognized enough.”
Many elite athletes have that kind of arrogance as they climb the ladder toward professional success. It’s often a healthy and necessary confidence that lets them shrug off failures and keep working toward their goals. Rogers was simply more candid than most about how good he was, and how his team should treat him accordingly. He did learn a little humility, though, and much sooner than he expected.
“I ran into the Rochester Red Wings, Baltimore’s Triple-A team” while playing for the International League’s Winnipeg Whips, he recalled. “They had [Don] Baylor, [Bobby] Grich, [Al] Bumbry, [Rich] Coggins, Terry Crowley … when you totalled all of the team’s major league playing careers, they had just under 100 years of major league service. That team and those players pinned my ears back. They taught me that I had a lot to learn. So I learned that I needed to learn a whole lot before I could move up through the system. Which was a good
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