Finally Closing Shop in Montreal

Claude Delorme first put together the binder three baseball seasons ago. Twenty-six pages, countless tasks. The Montreal Expos franchise, the team Delorme serves as executive vice president for business affairs, was supposed to evaporate into thin air, back when Major League Baseball planned to buy the team and then contract it. Seemed like someone should have a list of things to do if and when that happened, so the binder was born.

Sell furniture. Check.

Meet with concessionaire. Check.

Lay off employees. Check, but not without a knot in your stomach like none you have ever known.

“Before, it was just a working document,” Delorme said earlier this month. “Now, it’s subject to implementation.”

Even as MLB’s plan to move the Expos from Montreal to Washington awaits a vote by the Washington City Council on a new stadium financing plan, there is the distinct sense of finality in the team’s former home. The remaining staff works in quiet offices at Olympic Stadium just a floor above the locker room and training facilities, where the fitness equipment already bears tape indicating its future destination: “RFK weight room.” In Washington, Expo President Tony Tavares is trying to set up team offices and hire personnel. In Montreal, the backdrop is that of careers ending, of people looking for something else to do. “In our department, nobody would leave the team if it was still here,” said Chantal Bunnett, the team’s scoreboard operator, a native of Montreal who had been with the Expos for 19 years, since she was 20. “We just loved it. It was probably one of the greatest jobs you could have in your life. It’s sad.”

Delorme himself has worked for the team for 24 years, more than half his life, ever since a summer internship turned into a full-time job. It’s the only full-time workplace he’s ever known. And while the political wrangling in the capital of another nation might cause headaches and angst for residents and officials there, Delorme can only turn to his binder -- which could be titled, “How to Close a Major League Baseball Franchise” -- for the kind of faux solace that comes with total immersion in a task.

“You get very attached to everybody after being here for 24 years,” Delorme said. “But things have been so intense, I’m not sure I’ve had the real opportunity to say to myself, ‘Take a step back.’ I haven’t had the opportunity to say, ‘You know what? It’s over.’ ”

With that, Delorme leaned back at his desk, smiled, and laughed.

“One thing you’ll notice about Claude,” Tavares said, “is that when things are getting to him, he tends to make a joke and laugh about it. That’s the way he deals with it. But it’s been tough. No question, it’s been tough.”

Toughest, though, for the rank-and-file employees, some of whom don’t know what they’ll do next. Because immigration laws don’t allow most employees -- those without a specific skill, such as baseball talent evaluation -- to move with the team to the United States, the Expos are trying to help with the transition to other careers in Canada. The team hired a consulting firm to work with employees on how to write a resume, how to interview, how to move on with their lives.

“They’ve been detached from the real world,” Delorme said. “We’re trying to facilitate their transition from leaving the Expos to getting new work, on down the line.”

That includes some employees who have been with the club since 1969, its first year. Monique Giroux first came to work for the Expos as an intern when she was still in college. She has worked in the media services department ever since, through every ownership group, every general manager, every manager, countless players.

“I don’t know what I’ll do next,” Giroux said. “Wait and see, I guess.”

But what’s happening inside the walls at Olympic Stadium -- where cardboard boxes are more prevalent all the time, where the staff will be down to about 10 people by Christmas -- is detached from the daily business of the city as winter rolls in. Baseball? Not now. Not ever again, in all likelihood.

“The city’s going to be sad for a long time,” Bunnett said, “but most of the people won’t realize it until next summer, when there’s no baseball.”

At La Cage Aux Sports, a sports bar in Bell Centre -- home to the Montreal Canadiens -- talk tends to center more around the NHL lockout, or even soccer, according to the wait staff. When the city’s former team hired a general manager this month, the development warranted a single paragraph in one newspaper, eight in another.

Mitch Melnick, who hosts an afternoon drive-time call-in show on the city’s all-sports radio station, asserted that “anybody born and raised in this area who’s gone through the whole litany of disastrous moves on and off the field knows this is a baseball town.

“If this had happened anywhere else, there would be much more attention to the unfairness of it all. The national media in the U.S., for the most part, didn’t get it ‘til it was too late. They got caught up looking at the box score and seeing, ‘Well, there were 4,000 people at the Expos game.’ They forgot that this was once a model franchise with a deep tradition.”