Montreal Expos: Carl Pavano, can’t help but think you let me down

For many Montreal Expos fans, Carl Pavano was supposed to grow into the person whom the team traded away to get him. It never happened.

He was recently awarded the Cy Young Award after winning 17 games and pitching to the tune of a 1.90 earned run average. Like many before him, Pedro Martinez was traded because the Montreal Expos couldn’t afford to pay him. What the team received in return was what many Expos fans thought would be another Cy Young caliber pitcher, in Carl Pavano. We were wrong.

While Pedro Martinez went to the Boston Red Sox and won two more Cy Young Awards as well as a World Series, many hoped Pavano would blossom into a top-of-the-line starter in the rotation Martinez vacated.

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Having Martinez leave was no surprise. Expos fans were used to seeing their best players traded for prospects over the years. Pedro was on the other end just a few years earlier, when the team jettisoned high priced (according to Expos management) Delino DeShields for a hard-throwing, skinny, right-hander in Martinez.

Now Martinez was on the move with two young kids coming back in return, Carl Pavano and Tony Armas Jr. Pavano was the centerpiece of the trade. In fact, Armas Jr. was a player to be named later.

Essentially Martinez, coming off a Cy Young season was traded straight-up for Pavano, who had only 23 games above Double-A under his belt.

Pavano was highly coveted by the Red Sox. After winning 27 games in two years between AA-AAA, with an ERA in the low 3s, he became the jewel of the Expos eyes.

Called up in mid-May of 1998, the Expos won Pavano’s first five starts with the big club. He pitched seven innings in three of those starts and the Expos thought they had the man who would ultimately replace Martinez.

The Expos would precede to lose twelve of the next fifteen starts Pavano would make. He’d give up five or more runs five times in those games.

The following year Pavano began to battle the injury bug, something which would plague him his entire career, and his ERA rose to 5.63.

In 2000 the Expos began to see signs of the arm they traded for, when Pavano pitched to an 8-4 record, lowering his ERA to 3.06. Injuries had again set in as he was only able to toe the rubber fifteen times.

Those were the best of times for Pavano in an Expos uniform. His next two years he made twenty-two starts for Montreal, won four games, and had an ERA over six. Expos fans had stopped caring by this point and were happy to see him shipped away as part of a package that brought Cliff Floyd back to town.

Pavano would win a World Series with Jeffrey Loria’s Marlins, pouring salt into the open Expos wound, and win 17 games later with the Minnesota Twins.

Some will say he was forced to play at the big league level before he was ready because the Expos rotation was depleted and rebuilding. Others will say he didn’t have the proper mentor, a veteran pitcher to take him under their wing.

Regardless of how others try to spin it, I think Carl Pavano was a joke during his time in Montreal.