Jonah Keri

A fun book, a sad book, by Jonah Keri, who was an Expos fan before he was a baseball writer. It shows. The book's the product of several dozen interviews, lots of newspaper account research, other reading, and just growing up with the team. The acknowledgement section of this book may be the longest I've ever encountered.

The book covers the business side of the team's history extremely well. His description of Charles Bronfman is generally favorable, of Claude Brochu (and especially his show more business partners) borders on angry, and his description of Jeff Loria's more sympathetic than most baseball fans would offer. The final chapter, on the team's years under MLB management, is pretty painful, though his description of Omar Minaya's situation is empathic.

But the book never loses sight of the game on the field. That part's often joyful. show less

What a strange, bittersweetly nostalgic weekend this has been, watching the Toronto Blue Jays' two-game exhibition stand with the New York Mets at Montreal's aging Olympic Stadium—a facility that hasn't seen a major-league ballgame since the Montreal Expos pulled up stakes ten years ago, departing to become the Washington Nationals. I must say that it was an excellent move by Random House, publishers of the first-ever comprehensive history of the "Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal show more Expos," to time its release to this particular week.

If you were ever an Expos fan, you know you want this book. If you weren't, reading it might make you one.

Even calling it a "comprehensive" history suggests something dryer than the actual product. I slammed through this highly personal but generously-scoped history faster than any book I've read in the last two decades—in other words, since the year that the Montreal Expos had the best team, and the best record, in MLB, only to have their expected World Series trip cancelled by the 1994 players' strike.

Well researched, yes, comprehensive, yes, but spiked perfectly with tales from Jonah Keri's own longsuffering fan's relationship with the team.

I'm inspired to tell a fan story of my own. Before I do, I should explain that I jumped on the Expos' fanwagon at the age of eight. By the summer of 1989, the year that the Expos really caught fire for the first time, I was a nine-year-old hardcore fan, constantly wearing my Expos cap, using sheets of blank lined exercise paper to log the games that I watched on Saturday afternoons on the CBC. My family did not have the means to vacation outside of the Maritimes so I could never dream of travelling from Halifax to see the Expos in person. The Big O would remain a distant, exotic theatre of sport, that Other Place where Big Things Happened. Through my early 20s I watched from afar the leadup to the crushing disappointment of 1994, and by the time I entered the working world in '96, I had been turned off major-league ball by the strike. But in my early 30s, as MLB began to look to find ways to terminate the franchise, I began to root for the team to survive in the face of being undermined by baseball's own organization.

So it was that on Saturday, August 3, 2002, at the age of 32, I walked into Olympic Stadium for the first time in my life, tears welling up in my eyes in those first moments. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of stepping simultaneously into the Big O of my childhood imagination and the real stadium in Montreal. It was the year that MLB had taken possession of the franchise from New York art dealer Jeffrey Loria—who personally profited around $100 million from the decline of the Expos—and had unexpectedly allowed the team to grow its payroll and sign the outstanding Bartolo Colon to anchor their starting rotation.

Colon started that day, allowing the Houston Astros six hits and three earned runs in a losing cause, the Expos on the wrong end of a 5-3 final scoreline. I was excited to see Vladimir Guerrero and the returned Andres Galarraga, but the two stars managed just one hit between them. But for me the highlight of the experience was listening in on the conversation next to me.

I had bought a "VIP" ticket, the kind of seat in the zone behind home plate that would typically cost hundreds of dollars at any thriving major-league park, but in what was supposed to be the sunset year of this franchise cost me only fifty bucks (what the hell, I thought, I'm only ever going to see them once). I soon realized from what I was overhearing next to me that I was sitting next to a scout from the Milwaukee Brewers (whom the Expos were set to visit in the following week), and a member of the Expos coaching staff. The two were rapidly dropping famous first names in the conversation, and "Omar" featured prominently (Omar Minaya, that is, who had taken over as GM that year). But what puzzled me was the fact that the Expos coach was periodically training a small radar gun on his pitchers.

What the hell?, I thought. Wouldn't the Expos have radar guns set up in permanent locations in the stadium? It seemed very strange. I always wondered about that—until I read Jonah Keri's book.

Page 366. "MLB assumed control of the Expos in February 2002. That gave the team, now wards of the state, just a few weeks to prepare... the Expos would need to use every resource at their disposal. Unfortunately, they had virtually none. Jeffrey Loria had taken _everything_. He grabbed the computers, the scouting reports, the radar guns..." THE RADAR GUNS. The Expos didn't have radar guns set up in the stadium because JEFFREY LORIA TOOK THEM.

Twelve-year-old mystery solved, thanks to Jonah Keri.

But Keri is also good at explicating the multiple reasons for the franchise meltdown, and in the cause of fairness what he exposes is that Loria was partly a scapegoat. He did take advantage of the situation in the end, but what happened was as much a failure of the Quebecois partners in the franchise to fulfil their moral duties as partners, as Keri makes indisputably clear. Over the years, before and during the Loria period, local and national "partners" such as Bell and Desjardins showed they were anything but.

As Keri says, "the erosion of the city's business community [starting in the late 1970s] would eventually prove to be more harmful to the Expos' future than any one lopsided trade or disposable manager."

Keri also, while showing the degree to which Claude Brochu was unfairly scapegoated before Loria, makes a compelling argument that Brochu's infamous 1995 firesale that dismantled 1994's heartbreakingly great super-team was a terrible decision not just in baseball terms but in business terms. Keeping the team intact likely would have done more to offset the negative financial impacts of the players strike and its aftermath than the player sell-off that was supposed to protect the team financially. Just another bitter irony of Expos history.

It's not all bitterness and regret though. Keri's book is also packed with treats for the longtime fan and curious observer alike, and my favourite is the one-page lexicon of French baseball terms. His story of how some of these were concocted from scratch is entertaining and illuminating.

It's been strangely wonderful watching the two Olympic Stadium games on TV this weekend—the Friday night event honoring the memory of Gary Carter, and the Saturday afternoon celebration for the 1994 team. It's been a sort of two-screen experience, looking up from the book's stories and quotes from the likes of Mel Didier and Steve Rogers to see them guesting on the broadcasts and hitting some of the same talking points. The Expos will always remain cemented as my favourite sports team of all time, and now there is finally a book that tells the whole story. I hope there will be more to come—a Dave Van Horne Expos memoir would be especially great. Keri says that Van Horne "told so many terrific stories about his 32 years broadcasting games that I wished I had three books' worth of space to recount them all." Make it happen, Random House! show less

Reviewing Jonah Keri’s “The Extra 2%” is impossible without referencing Michael Lewis’s seminal work on small-market baseball economics, “Moneyball”. Like the Oakland A’s club Lewis followed, the Tampa Bay Rays have had to spend the past decade trying to succeed as a small-market team in a sport dominated by big city teams. Tampa has it even worse than Oakland in that, while the A’s had to compete annually against teams in Anaheim, Dallas, and Seattle, the Rays have had to show more best baseball’s juggernauts: The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. Despite playing from behind in terms of payroll, both teams learned to exploit market inefficiencies in order to build playoff clubs and challenge the moneyed baseball elite.

The history of the Tampa Bay Rays really begins with Vince Naimoli, who was instrumental in bringing baseball to the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. Unfortunately, in their rush to have baseball played in the bay area, nobody considered what a ball club run by the business magnate would be like. Naimoli made his fortune buying failing businesses, stripping their costs to the core, turning them around, and selling them for profit. He was known as a nickel-and-dimer, who considered no expense too miniscule to escape his purview. Unfortunately for Naimoli, in the world of professional baseball, thrift and shrewdness have a different name: cheap. Every expense was scrutinized and no money was spent unless absolutely necessary. For the first five years that the team operated, the front office did not have internet or email, which Naimoli considered a fad. The St. Petersburg High School band, scheduled to play the national anthem prior to a home game, canceled at the last minute when they were informed that they would have to buy tickets to get into the ballpark. In perhaps his greatest act of hubris, Naimoli tried to force the local Dillard’s to pay the club for the right to sell team merchandise. Recognizing that the Devil Rays needed the store more than the store need the Devil Rays, Dillard’s pulled all Tampa merchandise from their stores.

Within five years, the cities had turned on the Devil Rays, particularly Naimoli. A regime change was needed and in 2005, three young Wall Street upstarts took over the team and began using finance principles to build a new franchise. Stuart Sternberg and Matthew Silverman purchased a controlling share in the club and brought in Andrew Friedman as General Manager. They significantly beefed up what had been an unimpressive minor league system. They dropped the “Devil” from the name and rebranded as the Tampa Bay Rays. And they created a more fan-friendly environment that encouraged fans to come back to the park. But most importantly, according to Keri, they embraced the financial practice of arbitrage—essentially, buying low and selling high, no matter how small the advantage—to make trades and sign players who could compete in a loaded AL East. Embracing some of “Moneyball’s” principles, they recognized inefficiencies in defense and relief pitching and began upgrading both areas. Ultimately, this new approach would pay off, as the Tampa Bay Rays would win the AL East in 2008 and make their first World Series appearance.

The Rays’ story is an intriguing one and Keri tells it well. He avoids some of the mistakes Lewis made, such as ignoring how important the previous administration’s acquisitions were to the team. In “Moneyball”, Lewis largely ignores the five most important players on those A’s teams, pitchers Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, and pre-Billy Beane acquisitions Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada. Instead, he focuses on the Beane-acquired players who, while they made a big difference in the overall quality of the team, were not the significant contributors. Keri, on the other hand, gives credit to the Naimoli administration for making some good use of the bevy of high draft picks they acquired for losing so consistently. The core of the Rays AL Championship team was acquired prior to the arrival of Sternberg, Silverman, and Friedman. But it was, as Keri so effectively points out, “The Extra 2%” that made all the difference. show less

If you ever wanted to scratch the surface of advance statistical study of baseball, this is the first book I'd start with. Not a straight cover to cover book, but rather a grouping of essays about a variety of topics. They range from the humorous but thought provoking "What if Rickey Henderson had Pete Incavilia's legs?" to the argument inducing "Did Derek Jeter deserve the Gold Glove". Some essays can gloss over the eyeballs with the depth of statistical information, but the vast majority show more keep it interesting enough to rope in the more casual fan. show less