Baseball’s Best Manager Follows Players From Afar

Felipe Alou’s typical morning the past four seasons is familiar to fantasy league managers.

While drinking his morning coffee, Alou opened up the sports pages and pored over the box scores, checking out the performances of his players, the men he played an integral part in developing.

Larry Walker, Pedro Martinez, John Wetteland, even his own son, Moises Alou. Their names form an All-Star team, a list so long these days that he finally is distancing himself from the past that broke up the best team in baseball.

“I have to keep up with the guys that I worked with a lot when they leave for another club,” Alou said just minutes before Martinez, who was traded to Boston after winning the Cy Young in 1997, poked his head in Alou’s office before an exhibition game in Fort Myers. “The tendency is to buy a newspaper and check out all of their box scores. There are so many now that I really can only do it with Moises.”

If Alou were a fantasy league manager instead of the skipper of the Montreal Expos, he’d have a first-place team every year. He could have been a contender, running the Los Angeles Dodgers. But he opted to remain in Montreal and keep developing young players with the far-fetched hope that one day his Expos will be able to keep them when they become stars.

“You are only as good as the talent around you,” said Expos pitcher Mike Maddux, a 14-year veteran of many teams and managers. “He has bluffed his way through a lot of bad hands. When he had the talent and the experience together in 1994, he had the best team in baseball.”

But Alou didn’t have to spend this spring with a bunch of rookies who need another year or two of seasoning. He could have spent it one hour north in Dodgertown, with one of baseball’s biggest spenders.

That Alou didn’t leave Montreal speaks as much to his optimism that baseball can succeed there as it does to his loyalty to the team he has spent the last 23 years with as a coach and manager.

Even today, with his best players sprinkled around the majors, Alou thinks the Expos are only two years away from competing for the playoffs again.

“I have to do something for baseball in Montreal,” said Alou, whose wife, Lucie Gagnon, is a native of Montreal. “It is not only players who have left, it is coaches, general managers, and farm directors. It is left up to me to make sure we keep playing the game right.”

But despite Alou’s profession of loyalty, if not for an overfilled plane, he might have left Montreal. When Expos ownership gave him permission in September to talk to other teams, Alou met with Kevin Malone, the former Expos general manager who now with the Dodgers.

Malone and Dodgers president Bob Graziano visited Alou in his native Dominican Republic and thought they reached a deal. Before signing, Alou wanted to return to his Florida home. Malone and Graziano couldn’t get on the same flight, took off two hours later and learned upon landing that the Expos wooed their man with a $3.6 million, three-year contract extension.

“It was better than signing any free agent,” Expos GM Jim Beattie said. “He makes everybody better by giving the young players confidence and teaching them how to play the game right.”

Malone doesn’t begrudge Alou for the failed courtship, understanding the pressures he faced not to desert Montreal. Without Alou, the Expos’ hope for a stadium would be finished and the team more likely to move. But he says that if Alou is waiting for a brighter time in Montreal, it may be a long wait.

“You’re always building for the future there,” Malone said. “The problem is the future never arrives in Montreal.”

The future almost never arrived for Alou, who didn’t get his shot to manage in the majors until he was 57. He made his debut as a manager 32 years earlier in the Dominican winter league when the American manager quit. The owner then turned the struggling team over to the only Dominican on the roster. From right field, Alou led the team to the championship game.

He didn’t manage again until late in his career back in the Dominican. Again he took the team to the championship game.

He then managed 12 years in the minors before finally getting his shot at the big leagues with Montreal in 1992. Those years of managing young players who left as soon as they showed progress prepared him for his current situation.

“He is comfortable taking the pressure off the young players,” Maddux said. “He tells them exactly what to do and if they succeed, good for them. If they fail, he shoulders the blame. That takes a great deal of pressure off the young kids. I’ve never had a manager who did that.”

Alou has been questioned for not taking a Dodgers’ job that would have showcased his ability to manage with resources. Was it fear of failure? The unknown? Loyalty? “Why did he turn this job down, when he would have had players and money to win?,” said Mark Grudzielanek, who played 3 1/2 seasons for Alou, then was dealt to Los Angeles last year. “He had his reasons to do what he did. You never know what kind of manager he would be with resources, but he did win in 1994.”

That year still haunts Alou and brings out the most passion in his voice. His eyes light up and his voice grows louder when talking about the team that had the best record in baseball when players went on strike.

“We had all the ingredients. We had speed, we had pitching, we had pride. Expos pride,” he emphasized. “They were young, they were hungry. Everything you need to be the best we had. We would still be the best if they were here.”

But only Rondell White remains from that roster. Walker won an NL MVP award in Colorado, Moises Alou won the World Series with Florida, Wetteland was the World Series MVP in New York, and Martinez is the ace in Boston.

Losing all his players was tough for Alou, who had managed many of them in Class A at West Palm Beach. Over the years, he had tinkered with their swings, built up their confidence and developed them into stars Montreal couldn’t afford.

The hardest player to lose wasn’t his nephew Mel Rojas. It wasn’t even his son. It was Walker, a Canadian-born star Alou envisioned playing his entire career with the Expos.

“When he left, to me that was the beginning of understanding the real truth of this franchise,” Alou recalled. “When he left, it was not only the hurt, it was the consequences of his leaving, the dark cloud that came in. When Walker left, I said I know my son will leave now. After Walker, it was everybody.”

Alou could be bitter. Instead he is confused.

Expos owners said the 1994 season had to be stopped to help save the Montreals. Five years later, Alou doesn’t feel saved.

“It is difficult to understand the objective of the lockout or whatever it was,” he said. “It was supposed to help the small-market clubs and here we are five years later and we are about to lose our franchise in Montreal. That’s the bottom line.”