Northern Lights Aren’t Bright : It’s Hard to Get Noticed Playing Baseball in Canada, but Toronto Seems to Rate an Edge Over Montreal

All right. Eh bien . Now pay attention. Or do we say attention ! Let’s see if this makes sense so far.

There are two major league baseball teams in this country. One is in the American League and the other is in the National League.

One is in Toronto, which is located about a barrel roll across Niagara Falls from Buffalo, N.Y., and the good old U. S. of A.

The other is here in the province of Quebec, in Montreal, which of course seems as if it’s on the outskirts of Paris.

But geography isn’t at issue, here. It’s not important to the Blue Jays’ Jesse Barfield, who last season hit more home runs than anyone and cared not one whit what park any of them left on the fly.

“Where you are is not important,” Barfield said. “Whether you win, now that’s what counts. As long as you keep racking up wins, you could be in Egypt.”

Meanwhile, back in North America, playing baseball in a city that is 70% French isn’t really a problem, the Expos say. However, the Expos do see a lot of bunt signs while in uniform and few, if any, road signs in English. But as long as they can find their way to Olympic Stadium, it may not matter.

Still, though, there are some signs along the road that spell trouble in any language. They say who ?

“Look at Neal Heaton,” Expo shortstop Hubie Brooks said. “He’s pitching his butt off. Who gives a (bleep)? Look at Tim Wallach. He’s got a ton of RBIs. Who gives a (bleep)?”

Outfielder Tim Raines nodded in agreement.

“Nobody knows it . . . nobody knows it,” he said.

And know what else? Becoming very important to some Expos and a lot more disturbing to them is this: Baseball may be having something much bigger than a language problem.

The Expos, the only bilingual team in the major leagues, go so far as to print their media guide in both French and English. So if a batter ( frappeur ) gets a hit ( coup sur ) and it’s a home run ( circuit ) to win the game ( partie ), everyone knows what happened.

But now there are some indications here that the partie is over.

Sometime next season, the retractable roof over their heads is scheduled to be able to retract, which it can’t do now because they needed new generators.

Here are the stats. The Olympic Stadium roof is 200,000 square feet of canvas that weighs 50 tons. When it works, it will become the world’s largest retractable roof. Currently, this is a field of one.

Yet, while the roof is up, attendance is down. Way down.

In 1983, the Expos drew 2,320,651, the most since the franchise began in 1969. Last season, in which the club lost an estimated $5 million, the Expos’ attendance had dwindled all the way down to 1,128,981. So at the end of three years, the Expos had lost more people than they had sold tickets to.

Expo fans were disappearing at an alarming rate. The Expos were losing players, too. Unable to sign either Gary Carter or Andre Dawson or Jeff Reardon, they were gone.

At the same time, the Expos were gaining a reputation as penny-pinchers, at least according to Raines, who as a free agent didn’t go anywhere this season and is pinching dollar bills here instead. But he wonders now if he wouldn’t have been better off if he had gone elsewhere.

So what’s the future of the Expos?

“I think it’s a question mark,” Raines said.

“If you’re looking for signals, they’re sending them,” he said. “They’re cutting down salaries, getting lower-paid players and getting rid of the higher-paid ones. I don’t see things getting better if they don’t go away from that.”

Expo General Manager Murray Cook said it isn’t his philosophy that player transactions be based on cutting back the payroll.

“We think we’ve got players who are going to last a long time, longer than the players we gave up,” Cook said. “We didn’t do anything just to save money and we won’t do that. I think that reputation, if it is ours, is really undeserved.”

But Raines strongly disagreed.

“You can’t believe that,” he said. “They got rid of Dawson. They got rid of Carter. You can’t help but think they were cutting costs. And then they have so much trouble signing me. What does that mean?”

For $5 million, the Expos will find out. That is how much they agreed to pay Raines to play for them for three seasons. For the foreseeble future, this also means something.

If the Expo forecast is for Raines to continue, there are also some dark clouds scudding across the top of the canvas roof.

Which of the following is a surprise?

1) The Expos are playing well. (of course.)

2) Nobody knows about it. ( mais oui .)

At this moment, Raines is an unhappy millionaire. He has discovered, much to his chagrin, that money can’t buy love. So Raines, as well as Brooks, the team’s acknowledged leaders, see a lot they really don’t like in the Expo front office, not to mention the stands.

“People here just don’t support the team,” Raines said. “They’re spoiled.

“They feel like they deserve a championship and if they don’t have one, they don’t go to the ballpark. That’s unfair to us as a team. We are a young, exciting team, but that doesn’t matter to them. If you’re not in first place, forget it. They don’t know anything about the game. They don’t know about moving a runner along or hitting behind the runner or a sacrifice bunt.”

Raines also complained about the lack of promotion of Expo players by the front office’s public relations department.

“When I do something good, if you don’t see it live on television, you probably don’t even know about it,” Raines said. “If I did that stuff in New York or Los Angeles, I would have been on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

“They just don’t endorse their product here. They endorse Youppi!,” he said, referring to the Expo mascot. “Why not endorse the players? He’s not even human.”

Brooks said he is convinced that the Expo front office is making a big mistake by not making their players more well known.

“Nobody knows how good we are except the people we play against,” Brooks said. “I just don’t think they are interested upstairs. Spend a few dollars. Do something. I think they must be waiting for us to win it all before they promote us properly. All we can do is play and hope they notice how well we play. Ain’t that (bleep)?”

They’re playing pretty well, actually. Herm Winningham, already one of the top defensive outfielders in the league at 25, and pitcher Floyd Youmans, 23, who one-hit the Houston Astros last week, were part of the deal for Carter, along with Brooks. But it’s possible that neither Winningham nor Youmans is the Expos’ brightest young star.

Rookie of the Year candidate Casey Candaele, 26, has played all three outfield positions, plus second base and shortstop. Not only can he field just about anywhere, but he can also hit from either side of the plate, which means this Candaele is burning from both ends.

Then there is Wallach, the slugging third baseman who would probably be the league’s best at his position at age 29, if it weren’t for Mike Schmidt.

At first base is 25-year-old Andres Galarraga, which is pronounced just like it sounds, as though you were swallowing one of his line drives.

These players, and any pitchers they can find to go along with them, represent the Expos’ future, which doesn’t look nearly as questionable as Raines believes it to be.

Maybe Raines is remembering what it was like to be playing before a big crowd, which is what the Expos were doing in the five seasons beginning in 1979 and ending in 1983.

In succession, they finished second, second, first, third and third and never drew fewer than 2 million except in the strike-shortened 1981 season.

Ah, yes, 1981. That was the Expo season that ended when Rick Monday put the Dodgers into the World Series with a long home run in the fifth game of the playoffs. Apparently, Expo memories are longer still.

“Blue Monday,” Montreal Manager Buck Rodgers said.

Rodgers believes the Expo franchise is still struggling to win back the affections of the fans that they began to lose that October day, as soon as Monday’s home run cleared the fence.

“A lot of people interpreted what we have done as cost-cutting,” Rodgers said. “There was Carter and Dawson and the Reardon thing. No one had ever heard of Neal Heaton, so that was supposed to be cost-cutting, too.

“We were supposed to be awful,” he said. “Everybody was giving me a crucifix and measuring me for a casket.”

As it turns out, the Expos are probably one of the biggest surprises this baseball season. “It looks like some people are thinking that maybe we knew what we were doing after all,” Rodgers said. “I think people are starting to come around now.”

Not that many people, though. The Expos are averaging slightly more than 16,000 a game, about half of what the Blue Jays are doing in Toronto. Also, recent ratings show the Blue Jays’ television audience is nearly double that of the Expos.

The Expos’ television audience is about the same as last season, halting a three-year decline, while the Blue Jays’ audience is up from last season.

Cook said the Expos lost their fans and baseball games at about the same pace, so it is his intention to fix that situation as quickly as possible.

“There’s very little question that we lost an interest here, so we just have to rekindle it,” he said. “The fans in Montreal are used to winners. When the club didn’t win in that period between 1979 and 1981, the fans got turned off and we lost the attention of the people.”

In Toronto, the Blue Jays don’t have a stadium with a retractable roof, but they’re working on it.

The Blue Jays will continue to play in cozy, 43,737-seat Exhibition Stadium until they move into their new stadium, called the SkyDome. It is being built for $240 million at the foot of the CN Tower in downtown Toronto.

Like Olympic Stadium, the SkyDome is also going to have a retractable roof. All of 54,000 fans will be covered for baseball. If the Blue Jays continue to play like they have been, they think many of those seats will be covered, too.

“We’ve got a whole country to draw from,” Toronto Manager Jimy Williams said. “And we get a lot of people from Upstate New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. I think we’ve got a definite recognition factor all over Canada.”

Back in Buck Rodgers’ office, he is tapping out a signal for help on the edge of his ashtray.

What do Rodgers, and the Expos, of course, really need? A new starting staff? A good cigar? No, none of the above.

“A French Canadian,” Rodgers said.

“That would really be helpful in this city,” he said. “Not a token guy, but someone who can play.”

Cook also places a priority on getting a French Canadian player into an Expo uniform. “The fans here have had only two real heroes--Rocket Richard and Jean Beliveau--and both were French Canadians. The locals here love to see their own do well.”

Rodgers also believes it to be vitally important not to let the Blue Jays swamp the Expos for the affections of all the rest of the fans in Canada. It may be hard for the Expos, he said.

“We’re out of the sphere here,” he said. “We really don’t get a whole lot of recognition. But somehow, we’ve got to get our share of the market back from the Blue Jays.”

How?

“We’ve got to win games like they’ve been winning games,” Rodgers said.

In Toronto, the Blue Jays, who spent about a month in first place until they were swept at home by the New York Yankees recently, long ago soared past the 1 million mark in attendance at Exhibition Stadium.

The Blue Jays seem to have everything going for them, maybe even an October match-up against the St. Louis Cardinals in what would then be baseball’s first all-bird World Series. Nestor Chylak would be brought out of retirement to umpire.

But as good as the Jays are, they also seem to be suffering the same affliction as their co-Canada diamond residents. They don’t get any respect, they say.

“People may not realize it, but it’s the same with us as it is in Montreal,” said Willie Upshaw, the Blue Jays’ first baseman. “They all think we’re Canadians or something. We thought winning the division would change people’s minds, but it didn’t. So we’ll just have to do it again.”

Barfield said the Blue Jays aren’t helped much in the recognition department by the Toronto media, which he said tend to be negative, but neither has the team been injured by the pen and camera set either.

“We haven’t really given them anything bad to say the last two years,” Barfield said.

“You know, though, the big thing is we just don’t get our just due because of where we’re playing,” he said. “Look at the All-Star ballots. We got buried. We’re not looking for the bright lights, and it’s great to be recognized by our peers, but it’s sad because our fans should have stuffed the ballot boxes like they do everywhere else.”

But Jesse, isn’t it great to be in Toronto, slamming baseballs out of that tiny little park? And what about your neat uniform? The one you wear has a bird with a red maple leaf on its head. The Yankee uniforms? If you win enough games, those pinstripes are going to start tightening up in a hurry.

So aren’t you glad there’s baseball in Canada? Aren’t you absolutely rustling your feathers to be a Blue Jay?

Silence.

“Ask me that in another year.”

It’s a cinch Jesse won’t be going to the Expos then anyway. He lives in Houston. He’s not a French Canadian. Quel dommage .