Baseball : Expos Decide to Go for Broke With Trade for Langston

Now or never?

The decision by the Montreal Expos to trade pitching prospects Randy Johnson, Brian Holman and Gene Harris for the Seattle Mariners’ Mark Langston isn’t a now or never situation, but it’s close.

Call it: Win now or, perhaps, not again in the near future.

Call it a calculated gamble--three prospects for a proven pitcher who becomes a free agent at the end of the season, and had already rejected a three-year, $7.1 million contract from the Mariners and looms as difficult to sign for the Expos.

“The bulk of our team is in its prime,” Montreal Manager Buck Rodgers said. “We think we can win this year and felt we needed a top-line pitcher. We tried Holman. We tried Johnson. We felt they are still a year or two away. We felt we couldn’t wait to break in a young pitcher with most of the team in its prime.

“We felt we had to go out and get someone who can win now. I asked one of our scouts about Langston and he said that if he had his pick of five pitchers to start a rotation, Langston would be one of them.

“We know he’s turned down a lot of money, that he obviously thinks he’s in the (Frank) Viola, (Roger) Clemens, (Dwight) Gooden, (Orel) Hershiser class, and he may very well be. We’re going to try like hell to sign him. We know that with the money he’s asking, the exchange rate and the aspect of living in a foreign country, the odds aren’t good, but we think the chance to win outweighs the risk.”

The Expos have had little success in luring top line free agents across the border.

They retained Tim Raines--with help from collusion--and lost Andre Dawson. They signed a quality second baseman, Dave Cash, in 1977 and pitcher Ross Grimsley, who went on to become the only 20-game winner in franchise history, in 1978. A fading Pete Rose signed for part of the 1984 season. Otherwise, the free agent cupboard has been filled with generics.

Langston has already spent more than five seasons in the comparative anonymity of Seattle. He wants his place in the spotlight, the big market. A California kid accepting Montreal?

“Isn’t there anywhere else?” he reportedly asked agent Arn Tellum after the Mariners agreed to the Expos offer when Langston and Tellum turned down the $7.1 million proposition late Thursday night.

Rodgers, as he said, knows the odds.

He also knows that the potential of a Johnson, Holman and Harris often goes unfulfilled. He knows his fourth and fifth starters have a 1-13 record this year, that he has had to send Pascual Perez to the bullpen with an 0-7 record and that Raines will be 30 this year, Tim Wallach will be 32 and Hubie Brooks 33.

There is one other thing.

He knows the New York Mets are vulnerable and the National League East is up for grabs.

“The Mets are like everyone else now. They’re not the super team they were two or three years ago,” Rodgers said. “I said that in spring training and still believe it. They have problems like the rest of us. They can be beat, and I feel we can put together the club that can do that.

The new Seattle rotation? It wasn’t clear immediately, but apparently Johnson, the 6-foot-10 former USC left-hander who was 0-4 before being sent out by the Expos, and Holman, who is 1-2, will join Scott Bankhead, 2-4 entering a weekend series in Milwaukee, Erik Hanson (4-4) and Bill Swift (2-0) as the starters. That’s a cumulative 9-14 and a new test for Jim Lefebvre’s managerial skills.

Just off the disabled list, his ailing hamstring still not 100%, Kirk Gibson agreed to move from left field to the more demanding center field for the Dodgers.

Just off the disabled list, his ailing hamstring still not 100%, Eric Davis opted to play it safe, moving from center field to the less demanding right field for the Cincinnati Reds.

It’s a temporary transition that Davis would like to make permanent. “I’d like to move,” he said the other day. “It would probably add another four or five years to my career, but I don’t expect it to happen soon. If you have a real good center fielder, that’s a rarity. And I take pride in being a real good center fielder.”

Walt Hrniak, who defected from the Boston Red Sox to join the Chicago White Sox and become baseball’s highest salaried batting coach at $500,000 a year, is earning his pay, helping elevate the team batting average more than 25 points from last year’s .244.

Chicago’s revolving door pitching staff, however, has baseball’s worst earned-run average, and General Manager Larry Himes refuses to use youth and inexperience as an excuse.

Aside from 39-year-old Jerry Reuss, the other nine Chicago pitchers are all 29 or younger with an average age of 25.2. Himes went on a Chicago radio show the other day and said eight of his 10 pitchers seemed to belong in the minors. He excused only Eric King and Bobby Thigpen.

“I’m getting ready to wave goodby to some of these guys,” Himes said. “It’s like driving a car with four blowouts. I’m fed up and disgusted.”

Himes’ comments followed a one-hour meeting with Manager Jeff Torborg in which they decided to demote Ken Patterson and Jose Segura and call up Jeff Bittiger and Jack Hardy, the 13th and 14th pitchers to appear for the Sox this year.

Dog Days: It rained so hard Monday night in Cincinnati that it appeared that the Reds and St. Louis Cardinals would be unable to play.

However, Reds management waited two hours past the scheduled start, then ordered the game to begin. Two innings later, the umpires ordered the field covered, and one hour and 15 minutes after that, at 11:25 p.m., they called it.

Joe Magrane, the St. Louis starting pitcher, concluded that Reds owner Marge Schott was to blame for even thinking the game could be played.

“I’ve heard the phenomenon before of the master taking on the appearance of the dog,” Magrane said, alluding to Schott and her St. Bernard, Schottzie. “That’s already been established. But I never heard it went as far as the master taking on the thinking process of the dog.”

Still a thrill a minute with his erratic control, Mitch Williams has filled a major void for the Chicago Cubs, converting 12 of 15 save opportunities, only one shy of Goose Gossage’s club leading total of last year.

Obviously, the National League East leaders have no regrets about the seven-player deal in which Rafael Palmiero went to the Texas Rangers for Williams.

“I’ll trade zero game-winning RBIs (Palmeiro’s total of last year) for 12 saves at this point anytime,” Chicago pitching coach Dick Pohl said. “Rafael was cute. The female fans were upset with the trade because he was cute, but cute doesn’t win games.”

Jamie Moyer, who went from the Cubs to the Rangers in the same deal and was 3-0 with a 2.82 ERA in April, is 0-4 with a 6.85 ERA in five May starts and will try again Monday in Atlanta.

Those same Detroit Tigers who drove Sparky Anderson to his Thousand Oaks home on the brink of exhaustion are 6-1 under interim manager Dick Tracewski, who has an 11-2 career record replacing Anderson.

The difference between coaching and managing, as it pertains to the media?

“I used to say hello to everyone and they’d never answer,” Tracewski said. “Now they want to know what color underwear I’m wearing.”

In quest of a successor to fired manager Jimy Williams, the Toronto Blue Jays have now interviewed Bob Bailor, manager of their Syracuse farm club; Terry Bevington, the White Sox first-base coach, and Lou Piniella, the former New York Yankee manager who now does color commentary on the Yankee cable telecasts.

Piniella is the front-runner, but Yankee owner George Steinbrenner will reportedly demand player compensation in return for letting Piniella out of his contract, and during this week’s series with the Angels he ordered Piniella onto the field to work with Yankee hitters during batting practice in what seemed to be a blatant attempt to show that Piniella’s value to the Yankees extends beyond the broadcasting booth, beefing up his compensation demands.

The immediate result was an awkward situation in which Piniella, in street clothes, stood on one side of the cage and hitting instructor Frank Howard, in uniform, stood on the other, with the players caught in the middle.

In the meantime, asked about his interview by six members of the Toronto front office, Bailorsaid:

“You ever see one of those Iran-Contra hearings? I felt like Oliver North. Every once in awhile they’d ask me a question like ‘would you go fishing with one of your players?’

“I think I answered, ‘yes, but not all the time. It would depend on if something good came out of it. It would depend on who was paying for the boat and who was buying the beer.’ ”

Offering a solution to the Blue Jay managerial situation, pitcher Mike Flanagan said Cito Gaston “should sign a three year deal as the interim manager. That would solve everything. When you get right down to it, they’re all interim managers anyway.”