Raines recalls Montreal, roots for Nats; others, maybe not

MONTREAL (AP) — Tim Raines started wearing the tricolor cap as a teen and proudly sported the Montreal Expos logo for years, all the way onto his Hall of Fame plaque.

So no wonder who he'll cheer for when his old team — albeit now in Washington — plays in its first World Series, a half-century after the franchise debuted far away.

"I'm happy," Raines said in a phone conversation from Arizona. "Actually, I'm happy, even though it's not Montreal it's still a part of the Montreal franchise. Even though they're not the Expos — they are the Nationals, but they wouldn't have been the Nationals without the Expos."

"So even though I never played there, I wasn't a part of the Nationals logo, but in actual speaking it's still the Expos franchise that has been moved to another site," he said.

Romance bloomed in Parc Jarry in the north end of this French-speaking city in the spring of 1969 when its NL expansion team began play as the Expos. Montreal's baseball-starved fans, who welcomed Jackie Robinson with open arms with the minor league Royals in 1946, immediately fell in love and christened their team, "nos amours" — our loves.

Jarry Park, the intimate and rollicking 29,000-seat baseball stadium that took the same name as the municipal park where it was located, is no more. Its press box and the grandstand behind home plate are all that remain; they have been incorporated into one end of IGA Stadium, an 11,000-seat tennis venue that hosts the Canadian Open.

On the site where U.S. Open champion Bianca Andreescu now swings her tennis racket along Rue Gary-Carter, longtime Expos ace Steve Rogers began making major league hitters swing and miss his devastating slider as a rookie thrust into the franchise's first pennant race in 1973.

Chosen fourth by Montreal in the...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Raines-recalls-Montreal-roots-for-Nats-others-14548348.php