The Team That Might Have Been Actually Was

The 1994 Montreal Expos are one of baseball’s great “what-if” stories – what if they’d played out a full season? What if they’d won the World Series? Would they have been able to hold together such a talented team? Would they have saved baseball in Montreal?
Well, we can’t answer those questions precisely . . . although we can approximate an answer to the first question, and without resort to “what-ifs.” I was playing around with the Streak Reports on Baseball-Reference.com some time ago, and noticed that from August 19, 1993 through May 5, 1995 – a full 162-game schedule including the entire 1994 regular season – the Expos won 110 games and lost just 52. (The Expos finished the 1993 season on a 31-10 tear in a futile attempt to catch the Phillies, went 74-40 to post the best record in baseball in 1994, and opened 1995 with a 5-2 spurt before slumping to a last-place finish with a depleted lineup. For that stretch, they were, in plain sight, a great team for one full season’s worth of games, similar to, say, the 1975 Reds (108 wins), the 1986 Mets (108 wins), or the 1984 Tigers (104 wins). And now, thanks to the magic of Retrosheet, we can not only see that 110-win record; we can flesh out the picture by reconstructing the individual stats of the players who made up a great team. Let’s take a look:
Batting Stats

Team Totals

One thing that really jumps out at you about the Expos’ offense is its incredible balance. The team leader in homers hit 26, but they managed 209 155 home runs – an average of 26 19 per non-pitching lineup slot. [NOTE: Yes, my arithmetic goofed there somehow, as Travis Nelson has pointed out to me. I’ll fix any other arithmetical errors as they come to my attention.] Nobody on this team walked a whole lot – besides Walker with 73, nobody drew more than 54 walks – but everybody drew at least a halfway respectable number of walks and hit for a good enough average to not have a horrid OBP, and nobody struck out 100 times. Everybody could steal a few bases. And everyone hit gobs of doubles. It doesn’t look like a terrifying offense, but it was solid all the way through.
Walker and Alou, of course, were the offensive stars, and would go on to distinguished careers elsewhere. The hidden big year here was Grissom, who was dazzling – playing by far the best baseball of his long, erratic career – down the stretch in 1993, batting .353, scoring 34 runs and stealing 24 bases in 25 attempts in 41 games. And, of course, all the way down the depth chart (see more below) you see guys who have had long, productive major league careers.
As you can see, the Expos had an unusually poor-hitting pitching staff; if you break the numbers down (see below), the mainstays of the rotation were especially awful, while guys like Butch Henry, Denis Boucher and the relievers did OK in limited action.
Pitching Stats

What’s striking here is that, even for a modern team, this staff never finished its starts. Felipe Alou had a great bullpen (and a deep roster to pinch hit for his helpless-hitting starters), and made extensive use of it. . . Ken Hill and Dennis Martinez went in opposite directions down the stretch in 1993, as Martinez salvaged what had been an awful year, while Hill had the swoon some were expecting again in 1994 when the strike hit . . . Wetteland was incredibly lights-out in 1993, and even moreso the end of the year.
More players:

Minor Hitters

Minor Pitchers

Pitchers’ Batting

No what-ifs about it: when the Expos are gone from Montreal, this team will be worth remembering.