Our Working Life columnist, Angie Knuckles, white knuckles it to work in her 2008 Altima while listening to John Mayer. She worries about our futures so we don’t have to. She’s also secretly sleeping with a married man in Sales [ed note: I know but please remove this before publication].
The Montreal Expos, founded in 1969, came to life the same year the moon landing occurred and that I was conceived. Like the moon landing, it’s felt like they never truly happened and that the person I was told was my dad is not my biological father.
The 1970s and 80s were not kind to the Expos, much like disco and shoulder pads were an affront to us all. The only time they reached the playoffs was in the strike-shortened season of 1981, and that was mostly because cocaine can be an effective performance enhancing drug for a mini-season but is harder to maintain for a whole 162 games. Then 1994, the year that destroyed Montreal, when they had the best team in baseball and it imploded under another strike and short-sighted ownership.
Birth of a Dynasty
The Expos’ unprecedented non-losing streak since 2004 is unparallelled in professional sports. I don’t like to cite down long lists of statistics that might explain this unparallelled streak, and I’ll only focus on the one that matters: No losses in 20 years.
Think about that! Two decades in the most competitite league in the world and not having one setback to show for it! Think of what has to happen for that to take place! The excellence of the players and coaches they must have, whose names escape me at the moment but there certainly must be hall of famers in their ranks! Why, there must be an entire section in Cooperstown devoted to them!
But, alas, being a Canadian team and not a coastal American big media market means that the exposure they deserve is not forthcoming.
In HR, we try to only recognize faux achievements with cake parties in the break room while ignoring truly dedicated employees for their underappreciated contributions. So my hat (or baseball cap, I should say) comes off to all of those who have ignored the Expos’ greatness for so long. That truly is a colossal achievement in HR greatness!
