Cool trip down memory lane, Patrick! And, this from a guy who was a fan of the Colt .45s, and was 7 when he saw his first game at Colt Stadium (now remembered with a home plate-sized plaque where home used to be at its original now-Dome-parking-lot site)!
I'm currently wearing (it's a freezing Panera Bread dining room!) a vintage Houston Oilers NFL Quarterback Club/Warren Moon jacket from the late '80s! The inside pocket has Moon's replica signature stitched on it! I tell people it took Warren 2 hours to sit there and stitch it in there!!!😁
One Expos story from my youth: In '69 (I was 14), my family travelled from our Houston home to L.A. for a week. At an Angels game, the giveaway was a Strat-o-Matic computer-card and dice game! My bro, Dad and I couldn't be torn from that game for years!
We'd try to keep the teams as realistically represented as possible, but for some reason, we saw fit to implement "the rape of the Montreal Expos" (seriously, that's what we called it!) sometime in the early '70s....I guess we felt it necessary to spread the team members around to the other teams...thru trades, and maybe, using Monopoly $$, buying free agents)!🤣Great fun, overall, and it brought me, my bro, and Dad together like nothing else did!!
So yeah, basically your family was treating the Expos the way Expos management treated the team. Seems realistic to me.
Also, I'm very jealous of the Warren Moon jacket. I miss the Oilers. They had the coolest look of any NFL team. I know it wouldn't be quite the same, but I wish the Texans could have gotten the rights to that stuff and just become a second version of the Oilers, sort of like what Cleveland did with the Browns.
I had family in the Houston area when I was a kid, and they would always bring me Oilers, Astros, and Rockets stuff when they came to visit. That's how I got the Oilers wallet. They tried on several occasions to get me a Nolan Ryan autographed baseball, but it never quite worked out. I never made it down to see a game in the Astrodome either. Oh well. One of my life's regrets, I suppose.
Well, do I have stories! In the late '70s, when the league OK'ed tearaway jerseys for 5 minutes, they ultimately opened up to the public (when the league knee-jerked a rule suddenly outlawing them...I'm sure you've seen the Earl Campbell highlight of him running out of a tackle with several feet of jersey material flapping behind!) the selling of those tearaways!
Needless to say, Earl's home (1st) and road (2nd) sold out first, but I went down and picked up a road Ronnie Coleman (RB) jersey! Can't remember the price. I was also present for the '79 post-AFC Champ game loss to the Steelers in the Dome....50,000 loud'n'rabid fans screaming their heads off for a team that just lost and were going home instead of to the Super Bowl!!
A quizz question for all you hard core Spo's fans. The Spo's had a second baseman for a couple of years, that Rock named him the fastest "white" guy he had ever seen. Can you name him??
Cool trip down memory lane, Patrick! And, this from a guy who was a fan of the Colt .45s, and was 7 when he saw his first game at Colt Stadium (now remembered with a home plate-sized plaque where home used to be at its original now-Dome-parking-lot site)!
I'm currently wearing (it's a freezing Panera Bread dining room!) a vintage Houston Oilers NFL Quarterback Club/Warren Moon jacket from the late '80s! The inside pocket has Moon's replica signature stitched on it! I tell people it took Warren 2 hours to sit there and stitch it in there!!!😁
One Expos story from my youth: In '69 (I was 14), my family travelled from our Houston home to L.A. for a week. At an Angels game, the giveaway was a Strat-o-Matic computer-card and dice game! My bro, Dad and I couldn't be torn from that game for years!
We'd try to keep the teams as realistically represented as possible, but for some reason, we saw fit to implement "the rape of the Montreal Expos" (seriously, that's what we called it!) sometime in the early '70s....I guess we felt it necessary to spread the team members around to the other teams...thru trades, and maybe, using Monopoly $$, buying free agents)!🤣Great fun, overall, and it brought me, my bro, and Dad together like nothing else did!!
So yeah, basically your family was treating the Expos the way Expos management treated the team. Seems realistic to me.
Also, I'm very jealous of the Warren Moon jacket. I miss the Oilers. They had the coolest look of any NFL team. I know it wouldn't be quite the same, but I wish the Texans could have gotten the rights to that stuff and just become a second version of the Oilers, sort of like what Cleveland did with the Browns.
I had family in the Houston area when I was a kid, and they would always bring me Oilers, Astros, and Rockets stuff when they came to visit. That's how I got the Oilers wallet. They tried on several occasions to get me a Nolan Ryan autographed baseball, but it never quite worked out. I never made it down to see a game in the Astrodome either. Oh well. One of my life's regrets, I suppose.
Well, do I have stories! In the late '70s, when the league OK'ed tearaway jerseys for 5 minutes, they ultimately opened up to the public (when the league knee-jerked a rule suddenly outlawing them...I'm sure you've seen the Earl Campbell highlight of him running out of a tackle with several feet of jersey material flapping behind!) the selling of those tearaways!
Needless to say, Earl's home (1st) and road (2nd) sold out first, but I went down and picked up a road Ronnie Coleman (RB) jersey! Can't remember the price. I was also present for the '79 post-AFC Champ game loss to the Steelers in the Dome....50,000 loud'n'rabid fans screaming their heads off for a team that just lost and were going home instead of to the Super Bowl!!
Very cool!
A quizz question for all you hard core Spo's fans. The Spo's had a second baseman for a couple of years, that Rock named him the fastest "white" guy he had ever seen. Can you name him??