MONDAY, OCTOBER 21 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU D3
It was Kendrick who, way back
in spring, paced a lineup down Trea
Turner, Juan Soto, Anthony Ren-
don and Ryan Zimmerman be-
cause of injuries. He kept the club
floating despite a 19-31 start. Then
he put together a career year — a
.344 average, 17 homers, insane
production in 370 plate appearanc-
es — that has carried into the post-
season. Kendrick doesn’t like talk-
ing about himself and never pre-
tends to. One-on-one interviews
are rare and short. The most he has
opened up this season, across eight
months at the field, was about his
love for Mike Trout and thoughts
on Hall of Fame voting.
Teammates respect the low-key
approach. He is an elder on the
oldest roster in baseball. Martinez
has repeatedly noted Kendrick’s
influence on young players such as
Soto and Victor Robles. Soto’s
locker is right next door, like Ken-
drick’s was to Hunter’s a decade
ago, and that’s how tradition spi-
rals forward. Soto was behind him
onstage Tuesday night, after the
Nationals swept the St. Louis Car-
dinals in the NLCS, while a sellout
crowd chanted “Ho-wie!” through
a layer of fireworks smoke.
It was hard to hear the public
address announcer name Kend-
rick the MVP. But somehow it
wasn’t so hard to believe.
[email protected]Hunter explained, get front or
back spin with their swing. But not
Kendrick. He crushed the ball so
hard and at the perfect spot on the
bat that it knuckled into the field.
Hunter only ever saw three play-
ers able to make the ball do that,
the red seams stuck between rota-
tions, as if it were speeding up and
slowing down at the same time.
The list is Mark Kotsay, Tony
Gwynn and Truck, who almost
never made it at all.
They call him Howie now, even
if he introduces himself as How-
ard, because those two syllables
are synonymous with this city’s
newfound trust in fall.Respected by teammates
They called him Truck with the
Angels, both because he was built
like one and had a fascination with
big cars.
When Hunter got to Anaheim
in 2008, after spending nine full
seasons with the Minnesota
Twins, his locker was next to Ken-
drick’s. Hunter was eight years
older and took Kendrick under his
wing. They sat at their stalls for
hours, sinking into deep conversa-
tion, skipping from baseball to
their childhoods to interests away
from the park.
On one of their first road trips,
Kendrick bought a digital camera
and began snapping pictures all
over Seattle and San Francisco. He
walked right up to homeless peo-
ple, camera in hand, and asked
about their lives. Then he stepped
back and took a portrait before
showing them on the tiny screen.
Hunter says now that he never saw
a 24-year-old so comfortable
around strangers.
“The more I learned about him,
he starts telling me about how no
schools wanted him, how it was
really hard to stay confident,”
Hunter remembered. “I just kept
thinking: This guy could have real-
ly fallen through the cracks.”
Hunter often stood behind the
batting cage before games to
watch Kendrick. Most hitters,scouts weren’t showing up. That’s
when Kotchman got a phone call
he will never forget.
It was Ernie Rosseau, the head
coach at Brevard Community Col-
lege, telling him Kendrick was
must-see. Kotchman was the An-
gels’ area scout and always trusted
Rosseau’s judgment. So Kotch-
man went out to St. John’s River,
his expectations tempered, and
noticed that no other scouts were
there for the game against a small
program from Illinois. That made
Kotchman comfortable removing
the camera from his bag. Scouts
try to hide interest in a specific
player, especially when the draft is
nearing, but he had exclusive ac-
cess to Kendrick.
“He didn’t have the travel ball
and stuff like that. He didn’t have
the luxuries that other players
have,” Kotchman said of why Ken-
drick was an unknown. “He’s get-
ting the last laugh.”
Kotchman was soon sitting
with Donny Rowland, then the
Angels’ scouting director, as they
watched the Kendrick tape. Row-
land had the basic list of questions
for Kotchman: Could Kendrick
field? He was fine. Could he run?
He had average speed. But Row-
land couldn’t stop watching a
swing that hasn’t changed much
in the 17 years since. It was all that
mattered — and still is.often has credited Woods for his
love of baseball, for nudging him
into organized games and for mak-
ing sure he spent just 18 years in
their two-stoplight town.
It was all he wanted to play once
he got to West Nassau. Richard
Pearce, the varsity baseball coach,
figures that Kendrick could have
starred in football, basketball,
maybe even soccer. One day after
practice, Kendrick challenged the
school’s best tennis player and
held his own. His teammates
stopped with Sloppy. He went by
Howard, and they all wanted to
play like him.
“I traveled the country trying to
find anyone who would listen,”
Pearce said of trying to get Kend-
rick recruited. “But they didn't
want the little guy.”
Kendrick stood 5-foot-7 and
weighed no more than 110 pounds.
Pearce convinced Lake City, a
nearby community college, to
come watch him at West Nassau.
Kendrick made an early error at
shortstop, and the coaches left. He
later hit the game-winning home
run with hardly anyone in the
stands.
But St. John’s River saw some-
thing when Pearce and Kendrick
took a visit. He began his first and
only season there in the spring of
2002, before social media could
make a star out of nothing, andcracked into right-center, left-cen-
ter, wherever there’s open grass —
to rev an offense for a few extra
weeks. And there was the celebra-
tion after Washington advanced to
the World Series late Tuesday
night, with the 36-year-old Kend-
rick clutching the NL Champion-
ship Series MVP trophy.
“I feel like being around this
long, I wouldn’t change anything
about the past,” Kendrick said af-
ter the Nationals earned their title
shot. “Because this is just... I
mean, it's unbelievable.”
He helped by doing what he has
always done. He has hit and kept
hitting, driving in nine runs across
10 postseason games, until the Na-
tionals got to where they have
never been. He is in the process of
capping a career, 14 years in the
game, a life that could have gone in
so many other directions. Kend-
rick wasn’t recruited out of West
Nassau High. He tried out for al-
most a dozen junior colleges, was
cut by two and, when hope was
slipping, considered joining the
Navy SEALs.
But Kendrick waited a bit lon-
ger, testing fate, until he landed at
St. John’s River Community Col-
lege between Jacksonville and Or-
lando. He was soon drafted by the
Anaheim Angels in the 10th round
of the 2002 draft. He earned a
reputation as a “professional hit-
ter,” joined the Nationals via trade
two summers ago and would have
retired after tearing his right
Achilles’ tendon last season. Yet
there was one year left on his
contract, and he wanted to finish
it.
Now he will play in Game 1 of
the World Series against the As-
tros in Houston on Tuesday night.
Now, somehow, Kendrick is a rea-
son the Nationals won a pennant
and have a chance at more.
“It’s hard not to think about
how different things could have
gone if he’s never seen,” said Torii
Hunter, Kendrick’s longtime
friend and former Angels team-
mate. “But you have to understand
that Howie is who he is, he’s still
going, because of everything along
the way.”
One call changed everything
They called him “Sloppy” as a
kid because he still had baby fat
and his clothes never quite fit.
He would spend afternoons in
his grandmother’s driveway, the
Florida sun cooking the pavement,
tossing rocks into the air before
whacking them with a stick. But
one day Ruth Woods told him to
run on down to the Little League
field. Kendrick grew up with her
because his mother was in the
army and deployed overseas. He
KENDRICK FROM D1
WORLD SERIES SCHEDULE
Game 1: Tomorrow, Washington
at Houston, 8:08, Fox
Game 2: Wednesday, Washington
at Houston, 8:07, Fox
Game 3: Friday, Houston
at Washington, 8:07, Fox
Game 4: Saturday, Houston
at Washington, 8:07, Fox
Game 5: Sunday, Houston
at Washington, 8:07, Fox*
Game 6: Oct. 29, Washington
at Houston, 8:07, Fox*
Game 7: Oct. 30, Washington
at Houston, 8:08, Fox*
* if necessarybaseball
BY JACOB BOGAGEIn the middle of the summer,
as the Washington Nationals
were turning around their sorry
start to the season, John Colwell
of New Brunswick called up his
daughter and swore up and down
that this was the team’s year for a
World Series run.
He repeated the claim over
and over until the Nationals
came within mere outs of clinch-
ing the National League pennant,
when his daughter, Abby
Northrup, finally asked, “Well,
are we going to go?”
The Montreal Expos may have
left Canada for Washington in
2005, but a small cohort of their
fans never abandoned the ball-
club.
“When I throw on the [Nation-
als] hat and the jersey — because
I’ve got everything and my son
has everything — people ask me,
‘How could you?’ ” said Montreal
resident and Nationals fan Fred
Corey, 43. “I say: ‘I was a fan of
the players on the team. They’re
not the ones who moved the
team. We didn’t have anyone who
stepped up to own that team in
the community. I can’t be mad at
the players.’ ”
But plenty of other Montreal-
ers can, or at least can actively
not pay attention to the team
they once called Nos Amours
(Our Loves). And as Montreal’s
former team prepares for its first
World Series — leaving the Seat-
tle Mariners as the only active
franchise never to make the Fall
Classic — baseball fans in that
city are variously proud, insulted
or indifferent.
“There’s certainly a small
hardcore base that feels spurned
and hurt that the Nationals are
being linked to the Expos,” said
Matthew Ross, president of the
ExposNation Committee, a non-
profit that promotes Montreal as
a site for a future expansion
team, as well as a host on TSN
690, one of the city’s sports radio
stations. “There’s a group that
feels pride that Montreal is
linked every time the Nationals
play a playoff game. But the
biggest group is apathy. I think
the first few years [after the
Expos left], people reveled in
how poorly the team did, but
when the players who used to be
here dissipated, the interest
waned and fell off.”
Many Nationals fans share the
conviction that this team should
be divorced from its Montreal
past and want the Nationals
instead linked to Washington’s
lengthy baseball history, regard-
less of franchise timelines. Oth-
ers, though, can’t forget the past.
And so a contingent of Montreal
fans, including Colwell and
Corey, traded in their tri-color
Expos hats and powder blue
jerseys for curly W paraphernalia
and figured out how to follow a
baseball team from 600 miles
away.
Now that their team has finally
reached the World Series, even if
it is in another country, it’s time
for them to celebrate. (The Expos
famously had the best record in
baseball in 1994 before a strike
wiped out the season.) Northrup
has spent the days since Wash-
ington defeated the St. Louis
Cardinals in the NL Champion-
ship Series planning a father-
daughter trip to the District tosee the Nationals’ home games in
person.
On Saturday, she secured a
pair of tickets to Game 3. How?
She bought 2020 season tickets
online because the team was
giving season ticket holders first
crack at seats.
Colwell, 64, learned his love of
the Expos as a teenager while
accompanying his father on busi-
ness trips to Montreal from rural
New Brunswick. And though the
team for generations was thor-
oughly rotten, Colwell could nev-
er quit rooting it on. Northrup
remembers hearing roars com-ing from her father in the other
room as he watched Montreal
squander another lead or crater
down the stretch and miss the
playoffs.
“His mood would depend on
how his team did, so you could
imagine the silent treatment in
the house when the team was
losing,” she said.
And even when the team
moved to Washington, he
couldn’t give it up. A youth
baseball team he helped coach
around that time gave him a
Nationals hat for his birthday. He
could never break the habit ofcalling the Nationals “we.”
That kind of reaction mostly
elicits disdain from Montreal
sports fans, Ross said. When the
Nationals arrived in the District,
they spent years trying to dis-
tance the franchise from the
memory of Montreal.
The team waited years to hon-
or past Montreal players and
franchise heroes, while its new
fans asked why those heroes
should be honored at all. The
Expos had retired jersey Nos. 8,
10 (twice) and 30, in honor of
Gary Carter, Rusty Staub, Andre
Dawson and Tim Raines, respec-tively. By the Nationals’ second
season, all three numbers were in
use.
“After the first few years, they
did everything they could to
erase the Montreal brand, and
then after a few years of losing,
they trotted the Expos back out
for marketing,” Ross said. “It’s
never felt sincere.”
Montreal fans aren’t necessar-
ily mad about that, at least ac-
cording to Ross. Philippe Cantin,
a sports columnist at La Presse,
Montreal’s French language
newspaper, reinforced that no-
tion by publishing a column
Thursday with the headline, “The
Nationals: nothing to do with the
Expos!”
Most Montrealers have accept-
ed that the team that was former-
ly their Expos belongs to another
city now, Cantin said in an inter-
view. When the Nationals wore
Expos throwback uniforms for
one game this summer, it was fun
to see the old logo again, they
thought, but not a meaningful
statement about embracing the
franchise’s history. It’s past time
for Montreal and the Nationals to
move on.
“It’s a new team. They need
their new traditions,” Cantin
said. “And for me, the essence of
pro sports is to build bonds with
the city where you play. And how
is that built? It’s over years. It’s
championships. It’s great games.
It’s memories and souvenirs that
last a lifetime. But it’s also built
on terrible memories and disap-
pointment and frustration.”
Those, at least, are things Ex-
pos and Nationals fans have in
common.
[email protected]The former Expos are in the World Series, and Montreal isn’t sure what to think
JOHN MCDONNELL/THE WASHINGTON POST
The Nationals’ Juan Soto, Adrián Sanchez and Victor Robles pose with Expos great Vladimir Guerrero.Nobody is
overlooking
Kendrick
these days
JOHN MCDONNELL/THE WASHINGTON POST
Howie Kendrick yelled as he circled the bases after his 10th-inning grand slam finished off the Dodgers on Oct. 9. At 36, his career is winding down in style in Washington.