Would The Expos Have Won The 1994 World Series?

On the 25th anniversary of the playoffs that weren’t, we reconstruct what might have happened.

Could Larry Walker have put the Montreal Expos over the top in 1994? (Getty Images)

As soon as New York Yankees reliever Bob Wickman heard the ball leave Larry Walker’s bat, he knew it was trouble. Walker, the Montreal Expos’ 27-year-old right fielder, had been hitting well enough in the World Series before the bottom of the 11th inning in Game 7. But he’d also been held homerless until coming up in this crucial spot, with two runners on base in the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7. As the championship hung in the balance, one swing changed everything. A year after Joe Carter won the 1993 World Series for another Canadian team with a walk-off home run, Walker crushed Wickman’s pitch over the wall in right for a title-clinching blast of his own. As he circled the bases at Stade Olympique, confetti raining down, Walker relished in knowing he had created one of the most indelible feel-good moments in the history of the game.

The Expos were 1994 World Champions.

None of that actually happened, of course. When the team formerly known as the Expos — now called the Washington Nationals, after moving from Canada to D.C. back in 2005 — took the field in Tuesday’s World Series Game 1, it was the very first Fall Classic appearance in franchise history, regardless of home city. But fans of the club’s earlier incarnation, Les Expos, will always wonder about the one that got away 25 years ago. The 1994 baseball season ended with a players’ strike on Aug. 12, and with that, countless what-ifs were launched. So let’s talk about them. What if the season hadn’t ended? What if, instead, ’94 had been allowed to play out as scheduled? Would Roger Maris’s home run record have been broken early? Would Tony Gwynn have hit .400? Would the Expos, owners of an MLB-best 74-40 record when play ceased, have actually won the World Series?

To help find the answers, we reached out to the makers of Out Of The Park (OOTP), a baseball simulation game we’ve partnered with before on such topics as Bryce Harper’s free agency and designated hitters in the National League. This time, we asked them to run a bunch of simulations of the 1994 season, from the moment of the strike through the end of the World Series, and track how often various significant individual and team accomplishments happened. (For example, the Walker home run from above came from Simulation No. 55 of the World Series matchup between the Expos and their most common World Series simulation opponent, the Yankees.)

If the 1994 season couldn’t exist in reality, at least many versions of it can play out on the virtual diamond. What follows is a rundown of what OOTP thinks was most likely to have happened in an alternate universe where the season could be played to completion.