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Five years after the team left Montreal, the Expos Diaspora is no longer in evidence as much as it used to be. Yeah, there’s still Vladimir Guerrero and a few players from that final year in Montreal when the club was operated as a ward of the commissioner’s office – and Cliff Lee was traded out of the Expos’ minor-league system. All true.

But I’m talking about the players who fought the good fight and at times raged against the slow, strangulation of the franchise. The players who were part of the last, best chance – the 1994 club and the often-forgotten 1996 team that flirted with the wild-card spot up to the last weekend – and all the others who were part of the year-late, dollar-short brigade. The players that Marquis Grissom still refers to as “maximum for minimum” guys, as in maximum effort for minimum pay.

They don’t play major-league baseball in Montreal any more. But my guess is tonight’s second game of the World Series holds special interest for baseball fans in Montreal, because you can make the case that Pedro Martinez was the most beloved pitcher in Expos history, and tonight he will try to squeeze another six or seven innings of magic out of his 37-year-old arm in Game 2 of the World Series in the Bronx.

Making it all the better is that he is facing A.J. Burnett of the New York Yankees and you can make the case that, as beloved as Martinez is in Montreal, so is Burnett detested in Toronto for opting out of his contract at the end of the 2008 season.

Martinez symbolized the post-1994 Expos. He won a Cy Young Award in 1997 with a not-very good team, and then was traded to the Boston Red Sox.

He was the self-described “little man on the mound,” whose skinny frame generated frightening power and whose tendency to hit opposing batters made him a larger than life personality on a team that too often seemed smaller than life. He was a Jheri-curled underdog who found the city suited his Latino sensibilities – and who returned to the city frequently during the off-season long after his career took him to Boston.

And tonight he’s back in the Bronx. He will pitch in a new Yankee Stadium, but when Martinez’s book is written rest assured that old Yankee Stadium will figure prominently. That’s where Grady Little decided to leave him in the deciding game of the 2003 American League Championship Series, with a 5-2 lead and five outs remaining. The Yankees tied the score and eventually won the game. It was in Fenway Park where he tossed Don Zimmer to the ground. It was where he coined the phrase, “The Yankees are my daddy.”

“I don’t know if you realize this, but because of you guys in some ways, I might be at times the most influential player that ever stepped in Yankee Stadium,” Martinez said yesterday, in an at-times rambling news conference. “For some reason with all the hype and different players that have passed by ... maybe because I played for the Boston Red Sox is probably why you guys made it such a big deal every time I came in, but, you know, I have a good bond with the people.

“I had the great honour to pitch one of the biggest games that a player has ever played in the whole stadium.”

It’s clear that he views New York through the lens of a Red Sox player, even though he pitched for the New York Mets later in his career. Martinez spoke about how, as a “Christian man,” he was unnerved to see him portrayed in devil’s horns in the tabloids. He spoke about the “tweak” that coloured the story of his altercation with Zimmer.

“I remember the quotes in the paper: Here Comes The Man New York Likes To Hate,” Martinez said. “Man? None of you have probably ever eaten steak with me or rice and beans with me to understand what the man is about.”

But we know all about the competitor. Martinez will approach this like the last start of his career – because it might be.

“I know what he’s all about,” Burnett said of Martinez, smiling. “He’s going to bring a lot of excitement. I think everybody in the world knows what he can do in the postseason.”

Do not put it past the little man on the mound to remind us of that once again.