It's Bobby. Edited to reflect.

Think of all the first rate players that came up through the Expos: Vlad, Pedro Martinez, Big Unit, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Andres Galaraga, Tim Raines... The "could have been" story with those players in tow is real sad.

Let's not forget the best baseball name of the 80's, Razor Shines, and the best one-handed pitcher since Jim Abbott, Chad Bentz.

steve wrote:Think of all the first rate players that came up through the Expos: Vlad, Pedro Martinez, Big Unit, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Andres Galaraga, Tim Raines... The "could have been" story with those players in tow is real sad.

Let's not forget the best baseball name of the 80's, Razor Shines, and the best one-handed pitcher since Jim Abbott, Chad Bentz.

not to mention Denny Martinez and Delino DeShields...

steve wrote:Think of all the first rate players that came up through the Expos: Vlad, Pedro Martinez, Big Unit, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Andres Galaraga, Tim Raines... The "could have been" story with those players in tow is real sad.

The 1994 (baseball strike/no postseason/no World Series) Expos had a more than decent shot at winning it all.

i'm a Nationals fan.. thanks to the good people of Montreal for never showing up to Expos games.

This got me to thinking about Youppi! vs. Ribbie, but I found that it, among many others, had already been done:

http://homerderby.com/archives/1105

Abductor wrote:

steve wrote:Think of all the first rate players that came up through the Expos: Vlad, Pedro Martinez, Big Unit, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Andres Galaraga, Tim Raines... The "could have been" story with those players in tow is real sad.

The 1994 (baseball strike/no postseason/no World Series) Expos had a more than decent shot at winning it all.

That team was straight up batshit. The pitching staff would have destroyed in the playoffs with a four man rotation. With mid-90s John Wetteland closing - fucking A, forget about it.

Expo is one of the weirdest mascots in the history of baseball.

Expositions. It's not even an agent. Even the Phillies, a team with an equally immaterial name, refer to themselves as individuals, i.e. Philadelphians.

But to be a bunch of Expos... I don't have any idea what that would look like. It's, like, beyond human. A National, a Metropolitan, even a Red... I can envision all of these things anthropomorphically. But what the hell does a walking, talking, baseball-playing Expo look like?

Man, baseball really sold out its sense of abstraction when it moved these guys.

gio wrote:Expo is one of the weirdest mascots in the history of baseball.

Expositions. It's not even an agent. Even the Phillies, a team with an equally immaterial name, refer to themselves as individuals, i.e. Philadelphians.

But to be a bunch of Expos... I don't have any idea what that would look like. It's, like, beyond human. A National, a Metropolitan, even a Red... I can envision all of these things anthropomorphically. But what the hell does a walking, talking, baseball-playing Expo look like?

Man, baseball really sold out its sense of abstraction when it moved these guys.

Point by point:

-He's not "Expo". His name is "Youppi". He yet lives.

-One of the Phillies would call himself a Phillie, not a Philadelphian. Most of them live in South Jersey anyway. Assholes.

-An Expo would be an ambulatory world's fair. A single man who contained polyglot multitudes within his hexagonal concrete heart. A fitting creature to spend thirty years playing baseball inside a billion-dollar concrete spaceship.

-Baseball distanced itself from quality hash when it moved the franchise to Washington, and the hash was what made all of the abstractions above possible and comprehensible. Natural, even, to the hash-enlivened brain.

gio wrote:

Expositions. It's not even an agent.

It is some weird shit.

I think the ABCs (26 man roster?) and Ponce Leons (the entire team is Ponce de Leon, or there are mulitiple Ponce de Leons?) are about as weird, but that's not MLB.