May 9, 1969: What’s French for ‘ejected’? Dave Bristol gets MLB’s first thumbing in Canada

When Cincinnati Reds manager Dave Bristol got in the face of third-base umpire Bill Williams on May 9, 1969, at Montreal’s Jarry Park, he wasn’t just making a complaint about Williams’s umpiring.1 He was making an obscure bit of major-league history.

Williams’s ejection of Bristol during a fifth-inning argument made Bristol the first person ever ejected from a major-league game played in Canada.2 Bristol’s departure didn’t seem to hurt the Reds, who already had all the runs they needed to cruise to an 8-5 win over the Montreal Expos in a game limited by rain to 6½ innings.

The Reds entered the day 12-15, six games back in the National League West Division, while the first-year Expos were 10-16, 7½ games out of first in the NL East. That said, the teams are better summarized in terms of where they were headed, rather than where they had been.

Cincinnati’s lineup included many of the players who went on to capture the 1970 NL pennant, including Pete Rose, Tony Pérez, Johnny Bench, Bobby Tolan, Lee May, and Tommy Helms. Rose, Pérez, and Bench served as core members of the “Big Red Machine” that reached four World Series between 1970 and 1976, winning two. Bristol, Cincinnati’s manager since the 1966 All-Star break, wouldn’t be part of the ride: After an 89-73 finish with one tie in 1969, the Reds fired him,3 replacing him with Sparky Anderson. (Bristol’s subsequent jobs included serving as the Expos’ third-base coach from 1973 through 1975, as well as the team’s interim manager for a day in September 1975.)

Gene Mauch’s Expos had taken the field for the first time one month earlier, as one of four major-league expansion teams in 1969. In fact, the May 9 game was the Montreal franchise’s first game against the Reds. The fledgling Expos went 4-8 against Cincinnati in 1969, winning four of six games at Jarry Park but losing all six matchups at Crosley Field.

The Expos finished the 1969 season in last place with a 52-110 record, and would not be truly competitive until the late-1970s emergence of homegrown stars like Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Larry Parrish, and Warren Cromartie.4 No one knew it on May 9, but a 20-game losing streak loomed for the Montrealers, beginning with a 10-3 loss to the Houston Astros on May 13 and not ending until a 4-3 defeat of Los Angeles on June 8.

The Reds gave the start to righty Tony Cloninger, who had taken the loss in four of his first five starts before rebounding with a two-hit shutout of the NL’s other first-year team, the San Diego Padres. Montreal tapped righty Jim “Mudcat” Grant, The Sporting News’s American League Pitcher of the Year four seasons before with the Minnesota Twins. The Expos had made Grant the 36th overall pick in the October 1968 expansion draft, claiming him from the Dodgers. Grant had thrown eight scoreless innings against Cincinnati in a spring-training start, and had also been Montreal’s Opening Day starter.5 In regular-season play, he entered with a 1-2 record and a 4.33 ERA in six starts.

Playing on a soggy field, both teams came out swinging in front of a Friday-night crowd of 11,828 fans. The Reds opened with four straight hits – a double to left field by Rose, a single to center by Tolan, a single to left field by Alex Johnson, and a double to right by Pérez. At the end of the barrage, they held a 2-0 lead and had runners on second and third with nobody out. Grant retired May, Bench, and Helms to prevent further damage.

In the bottom half, Maury Wills legged out an infield single and took second on a groundout. Rusty Staub walked. A wild pitch moved the runners to second and third. Mack Jones, whom the Expos had claimed from Cincinnati as the fourth overall pick in the expansion draft, singled home both runners to tie the game, 2-2. Donn Clendenon and Coco Laboy struck out to end the inning.

The Expos couldn’t hold the tie. Cincinnati’s eighth-place hitter, Darrel Chaney, led off the second with a single and stole second. After Cloninger’s failed sacrifice attempt, Rose walked and Tolan boomed a triple past Expos center fielder Don Bosch to bring home both runs.6

Mauch pulled Grant in favor of 41-year-old reliever Elroy Face, appearing in his sixth game with Montreal after signing with the team on April 27.7 Face retired Johnson on a grounder and struck out Pérez looking to hold the score at 4-2. Montreal got runners to first and second with one away in the bottom half, but Wills and Gary Sutherland could not advance them any farther.

After Face’s two-out outing, Mauch pinch-hit for him in the bottom of the second, and lefty Larry Jaster came in for the third. May greeted the new pitcher with a leadoff homer into the left-field bleachers8 for a 5-2 Cincinnati lead. Jones riposted with his own solo shot in the bottom half, his sixth homer of the young season and the 100th of his career,9 to keep Montreal within two runs.

The fourth passed without any scoring – the first inning of the game to involve goose eggs on both sides. The calm lasted only one inning. In the top of the fifth, Perez led off with a double to left field off Jaster. After two groundouts and an intentional walk to Helms, Chaney singled to left, scoring Pérez for a 6-3 lead.

Rookie righty Jerry Robertson, in his sixth big-league game, replaced Jaster. He got Cloninger to ground to third base, where Laboy bobbled the ball but recovered it in time to force Helms for the third out – or did he?

Manager Bristol insisted Laboy didn’t have a firm grip on the ball when he stepped on third, and he came out to argue. After throwing his cap,10 Bristol finally drew Williams’s historic heave-ho. The Cincinnati skipper had tied for the lead among major-league managers with five ejections in 1968 and tied Baltimore’s Earl Weaver and the Chicago Cubs’ Leo Durocher for the 1969 lead with another five.11

Montreal rallied in the bottom half, costing Cloninger his chance at a win. With one out, Staub walked, Jones singled to right, and Clendenon singled to left, driving in Staub to make the score 6-4. George Culver, who had thrown a no-hitter for the Reds the previous season, came in to replace Cloninger. He got Laboy to ground into a 6-4-3 double play to end the inning.

The Reds kept piling on against Robertson in the sixth. Rose reached on a leadoff bunt single to third, and Tolan hit an “enormous” homer to right field off a high fastball,12 bringing him to three hits and four RBIs in the game and making the score 8-4. Tolan, who had just 17 RBIs in 92 games in 1968, moved into the NL lead with 26.13 Robertson then got Johnson, Pérez, and May on three straight groundouts.

The never-say-die Expos replied by piecing together a run. John Boccabella reached first when third baseman Pérez made an error on his grounder.14 Bosch singled Boccabella to second. One out later, Wills reached on an error by Culver15 as Boccabella came around to score an unearned run, bringing the score to 8-5. Culver got Sutherland to ground into a force and struck out Staub.

Dan McGinn, another of the Expos’ selections from Cincinnati in the expansion draft,16 entered to pitch the seventh. The lefty was a bullpen mainstay for the 1969 Expos, leading the team with 74 appearances, all but one in relief.17 He turned in the Expos’ second shutout inning of the night: After a walk to Bench, Helms flied to right, and Chaney grounded into an around-the-horn double play.

The Expos, however, did not get another chance to chip away at Cincinnati’s lead. The umpiring crew halted the game for rain at 10:14 P.M. and called it about an hour later.18 Culver earned the win and Grant took the loss. He went only 1-6 with a 4.80 ERA in 11 games before the Expos traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals on June 3.19

As a postscript, another future Canadian baseball trailblazer was also occupied in the NL on the night of May 9, 1969. Former big-league infielder Roy Hartsfield was a first-year member of Los Angeles Dodgers manager Walter Alston’s coaching staff, after spending 11 seasons as a minor-league manager in the Dodgers’ system.

Hartsfield spent the evening of May 9 at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, watching the Dodgers swamp the Pirates, 13-3. On June 19, 1977, Hartsfield – managing the expansion Toronto Blue Jays – became the first person ejected from an American League game played in Canada.20

Author’s note and acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Incidentally, SABR member Philippe Cousineau says there are two ways to say “ejected from the game” in French: “renvoyé du match” or “expulsé du match.” The author, whose long-ago Advanced Placement French classes did not cover this important subject, thanks Philippe and Gary Belleville for linguistic support.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team, and season data, and the box scores for this game:

www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/MON/MON196905090.shtml

www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1969/B05090MON1969.htm

 Image of 1969 Topps card #234 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 A wire-service photo of Bristol dramatically jabbing his index finger at Williams’s face ran in various Canadian newspapers the next day, including the Ottawa Journal, May 10, 1969: 11.

2 Based on Retrosheet’s list of major-league ejections for 1969, accessed January 2, 2023. The 1969 season was the first with a Canadian team in the majors, as the expansion Montreal Expos began play in the National League. Montreal’s voluble manager Gene Mauch was ejected from games on April 22 and May 7, but the Expos were playing on the road on both occasions. Mauch became the first Expo to be ejected from a game played in Canada on May 18, 1969.

3 Bob Hertzel, “Bristol Fired; He Didn’t Win,” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 9, 1969: 47.

4 In the unsettled 1973 season, when no team staked a strong claim to the NL East title, Montreal was not officially eliminated until the last game of the season. However, the Expos’ contention for the division title was mostly theoretical, as they never held first place.

5 “Cincinnati Outslugs Montreal 8-5,” Montreal Gazette, May 10, 1969: 13.

6 Dan Rosenburg, “Tolan Tower of Strength Before Rain Stops Action, Reds Rout Expos Easily,” Montreal Star, May 10, 1969: 16.

7 At the time of his signing, Face held several National League records, including games pitched (802), games pitched in relief (775), games finished (547), and relief wins (92). Gary Gillette, “Elroy Face,” SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/roy-face/, accessed January 18, 2023.

8 Earl Lawson, “No Bows for Tolan, Not Yet,” Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, May 10, 1969: 10. The Montreal Star’s game story, cited below, has May homering to right field. As a tiebreaker, this story turned to Baseball-Reference, which also has May’s homer being hit to deep left field.

9 Earl Lawson, “Jones Bathers Hazard,” Cincinnati Post and Times-Star, May 10, 1969: 10.

10 Rosenburg, “Tolan Tower of Strength Before Rain Stops Action, Reds Rout Expos Easily.”

11 Larry Shepard of the Pittsburgh Pirates was also ejected five times in 1968. In 1971 Bristol once again led the major leagues with five ejections while managing the Milwaukee Brewers.

12 Rosenburg, “Tolan Tower of Strength Before Rain Stops Action, Reds Rout Expos Easily.”

13 Bucky Albers, “Tolan Powers Reds Over Expos 8-5,” Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald, May 10, 1969: 20. Tolan finished the season with 93 RBIs, good for ninth in the league. Willie McCovey of the San Francisco Giants led the NL with 126.

14 Contemporary news accounts, Retrosheet, and Baseball-Reference do not specify whether Pérez made a fielding or throwing error, or whether wet field conditions contributed.

15 Culver’s error on Wills’s groundball is not specifically described as a fielding or throwing error.

16 McGinn was the 27th pick overall in the draft. He’d pitched 14 games for the 1968 Reds.

17 McGinn was second in the NL in appearances, trailing only Wayne Granger of Cincinnati, who had 90. Less optimally, McGinn’s six errors tied Jaster for the lead among NL pitchers in 1969.

18 Albers, “Tolan Powers Reds Over Expos 8-5.”

19 The Expos received pitcher Gary Waslewski in return. Waslewski wrote his name into team history on July 6, 1969, when he threw a one-hitter against Philadelphia in 1 hour and 36 minutes – still the shortest nine-inning game in Expos/Nationals franchise history as of the end of the 2022 season.

20 Based on Retrosheet’s list of 1977 ejections, accessed January 5, 2023.