THERE IS ONE SURE SIGN BASEBALL MAY NOT BE TOTALLY DEAD IN MONTREAL: THE PRESENCE OF SCALPERS OUTSIDE OLYMPIC STADIUM ON A MONDAY NIGHT. Not just one or two offhandedly offering a spare ticket, but enough that I felt I was running a gauntlet walking from the Pie-IX Metro stop to the ballpark. The scalpers were loud and aggressive -- with the inevitable cigarette hanging out of the side of their mouth -- but their presence reassured me of baseball interest in Montreal. Especially on a Monday night, a night that poses attendance problems for every major-league team.

SCALPERS OPERATE ON A VERY RUDIMENTARY ECONOMIC LEVEL: if there is demand, they are there to supply. (Yes, the laws of supply and demand even apply to Canada.) And if there's demand, that means that enough Montrealers haven't totally given up interest in the team. The long-term future of baseball in Montreal is in serious doubt, and I think MLB is serious about its plan to move the team to a new city in 2005; my doubts concern MLB's competency, not its intentions. In the meantime, the Expos and their fans are stuck with each other, the scalpers and a set of uncaring absentee owners.

IN TOWN TO DO SOME BOOK RESEARCH I ended up taking in Sunday afternoon and Monday evening Expos games, both of which were memorable in different ways. Sunday saw 21,000 fans descend on Olympic Stadium for the Jose Vidro bobblehead day, an attendance figure that was better than the crowds that day in Toronto, Pittsburgh, Cleveland (!), Texas, Florida and Detroit. (The lesson: promote the Expos and the city will respond. It takes more than just hanging out a shingle and waiting for the crowds to father.) The crowd was loud and raucous, and the Expos gave them many reasons to cheer. Those funky metal seats in the bleachers and the back of the grandstand sure do make a racket when they're being slammed repeated by fans.

AND VLAD GUERRERO GAVE THEM A GREAT REASON TO CHEER, PUTTING ON AN AMAZING BATTING DISPLAY IN HITTING FOR LE CARROUSEL. I'm used to seeing amazing things from Vlad -- the first time I saw him live in 1999 he took a pitch around his shoelaces and launched it 400 or so feet into the left-field bleachers in the blink of an eye. Sunday was the first time he had hit for the cycle, and he did it the hard way: he tripled and homered in his final two at-bats. However, one should put an asterisk next to this accomplishment: Guerrero's triple came after Mets right-fielder Roger Cedeno totally botched his long fly ball to the fence. A better right fielder might have caught the ball or at the worst grabbed it on the ricochet and limited Guerrero to a single or double. Cedeno not only missed the ball, he let it bounce around before tossing it back to the infield.

FIVE YEARS AGO GUERRERO MIGHT NOT HAVE NEEDED THE HELP FROM CEDENO, but he does now. Guerrero missed a chunk of this season with a herniated disk in his back, and you can tell it still bothers him: he doesn't run out routine grounders any more, and his movements in the field are awkward at best. Back problems don't just go away, and if someone signs him to a huge contract in the offseason, they had best be prepared to take a chance on his back never totally healing.

THE CROWD RESPONDED TO GUERRERO'S HEROICS WITH AN EXTENDED STANDING OVATION. It was amazing that most of the crowd actually stayed through the seventh inning. In some cities, bobblehead giveaways are a nonevent within the ballpark: in Minnesota, for instance, fans don't actually need to physically enter the ballpark to claim their bobbleheads, and many of them don't bother attending the game after claiming their booty. The Expos handled things slightly differently. When you entered the ballpark, you were given a small form that told you what you won -- a bobblehead, a 2-for-1 ticket coupon, a free drink or a free bag of chips. But you needed to actually be in the ballpark to claim any of them. Heck, so many people stuck around that the Expos actually opened up the top deck of Olympic Stadium.

WHICH WAS STILL PRETTY MUCH A GHOST TOWN. It gets kinda creepy wandering around the upper reaches of Olympic Stadium; creepy sad because once upon a time even the top deck was crammed with cheering Expos fans, and creepy weird because there are so few folks around and all the concessions stands save one on the entire level are closed. If I wanted to get away from the world, I'd buy a general-admission seat to an Expos game and head for the top of the stadium, where you could probably go for weeks without seeing another human soul.

SADLY, A CROWD OF 21,417 DIDN'T COME CLOSE to half-filling the stadium. It's huge and not designed for baseball. Olympic Stadium gets a lot of bad publicity -- some warranted and some not -- because most sportswriters don't understand that it's basically a European-style stadium adapted for an American game.  Almost everything about the stadium is unique, ranging from those funky yellow and blue seats with a single armrest to the strange Mylar roof. The hallways are either wide and cavernous or small and smoky, and the rotunda is just depressing: it might have been a good idea at the time, but today it's dark and depressing. Brutalism is an architectural style that went out of style in the 1970s, but not before Olympic Stadium was designed.

WHICH IS WHY BASEBALL IN MONTREAL HAS ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING MISUNDERSTOOD BY HARDCORE BASEBALL PEOPLE. For starters, brutalism as an architectural style never really caught on in the States, so it's a look you just don't see everyday. Plus, the citizens of Montreal just don't play by the same rules we do in the States. They openly smoke right in front of the no-smoking signs, they eat smoked meat, and they demand that games be announced in both French and English. Truth be known, most people there don't really care about the Expos, as far as I can tell: the sports talk in Montreal these days centers around the Montreal Canadiens and whether Bob Gainey is indeed the Second Coming, and to a lesser extent the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League.

WHICH IS WHY MONTREAL WILL BE A GREAT CLASS AAA CITY IN ABOUT FIVE YEARS. Here's a (not-so-bold) prediction: The Expos will move to D.C. in 2005, there will be a groundswell to bring baseball back to Montreal by 2007 and eventually a modest Class AAA ballpark will be built somewhere in the city. Montreal is just too good a market to be ignored by baseball, and there are definitely 8,000 souls in Montreal who genuinely care about baseball.

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