Columnist Dean Juipe: These Expos are having a tough time getting home

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, May 4, 2004 | 9:16 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

With the worst record in the major leagues and a home schedule that includes games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Montreal Expos are baseball's bargain basement, blue light special.

Have map, will travel.

For the right price and proper commitment, the Expos will uproot their few remaining ties with the city that has largely ignored them for the past 35 years and relocate to one more appreciative.

Whether Las Vegas is that city or not will be determined very shortly, perhaps as soon as May 19.

But whichever city prevails in the Expos Sweepstakes can allow itself a broader view: By the time it gets a stadium built, the incoming baseball team will have had a few years to replenish its diminished inventory.

It's an endeavor the Expos, their managers and staff have become accustomed to for the past 20 years. It's a cyclical thing: Montreal habitually develops a plentiful stock of decent young players, only to lose them or allow them to leave as their contracts exceed an unspecified, ridiculously low, threshold.

This is a franchise with a proven farm system and deft, if unsung, front-office touch that has been short-circuited time and again by monetary restraints. It's a plum that is forever being prematurely picked.

But this season, for the first time in many years, the cupboard is almost bare. The Expos' annual pattern of fielding teams on the cheap yet staying in contention looks to be at least temporarily threatened by the dwindling financial resources that Major League Baseball has made available to them.

The Expos are on the market without so much as a trip to Thelma's Resale to disguise the sags in their foundation.

Opening a rare in-Montreal homestand tonight, the Expos not only are off to their worst start ever at 6-20, they are on pace to score the fewest runs per game in either National or American league history. And that's after scoring a season-high six runs Sunday in defeating the Dodgers to end a six-game losing streak.

Montreal has scored only 55 runs, is batting a collective .209, has hit only 14 home runs and is averaging a mere 2.1 runs per game.

Punchless? The refreshment bowl at the church social is toxic by comparison.

Baseball's youngest team is conspicuously close to becoming its most offensively challenged ... i.e., inept ... ever.

In danger: a pair of long-standing marks that are vulnerable if not venerable with the Expos scoring so infrequently. The 1969 Chicago White Sox hold the "modern" record for fewest runs scored and averaged in a season, accumulating only 463, or 2.9 per game; and the 1908 St. Louis Cardinals of the "dead-ball era" scored only 372 times, or 2.4 per game.

The Expos are in this run-producing bind because of the attrition of free agents that has cut into their roster and a forced-hand trade or two that may never pay off. Pitchers Bartolo Colon, Javier Vazquez and Carl Pavano and outfielder Vladimir Guerrero have all been dealt within the past two years and the players received in exchange -- first baseman Nick Johnson, outfielder Juan Rivera and pitchers Rocky Biddle and Claudio Vargas -- pale in comparison.

The result: Montreal has yet to score more than two runs more than its opponent in any of its first 26 games. The team has no margin for error -- or wild pitch, for that matter.

It exists on something of a high wire, bags forever packed as a handful of cities and relocation sites vie for a team based in Canada that is playing 22 "home games" in Puerto Rico.

Home? The Expos don't get there often, whether it's reaching the comforts of Montreal or the safety of the plate.