Frank Robinson swears he will not manage again after this season. He declares that the Montreal Expos are doomed as a concept, no matter what they may do on the field. Come watch the dinosaur flail in the tar pit, he seems to be saying.

That ought to make the Manager of the Year award presentation a real hoot:

	Frank Robinson has the Montreal Expos fired up and in the hunt for the playoffs.

"Thank you for this, well ... honor. I'll cherish it next to my, er, uh, laundry hamper. It will hold a place of importance, um, keeping my back door open on windy afternoons. ... Can I get my parking validated?"

Much has been said of F. Robby's mastermindery as regards the precocious Expos, free as they are of the gruesome presence of owner Jeff Loria as well as the burden of planning for the long term. He has done far more with a corpse than most medical examiners could imagine -- everything, it seems, except hide the murder weapon.

But because baseball is in a particularly unromantic mood these days, charm does not pay off at the window the way it once did. Unlike, say, the '44 Browns, '69 Mets, or more recently the '95 Mariners and '00 Athletics, the '02 Expos are merely being fattened for market, and all the folks who have sworn they have a new love for the gutty little faux Quebecois are doing so knowing they won't have to invest their hearts for more than this year. They are along for the ride, but always with a foot hanging off the bandwagon for easy egress.

Oh, they have their arguments for the moment -- "Wouldn't it be great if the Expos got into the playoffs and ruined the owners' grand plan?," or "Go Expos, and never mind the Brewers!," or even "How about Twins-Expos in the World Series That Never Was?"

But they don't truly believe, nor do they care that you realize it. They're window-shopping for a feel-good story, and there sits Frank Robinson, graying, squinty-eyed, smiling that I'm-on-to-you smile and as sharp as the day nearly 50 years ago he left Oakland to make the Cincinnati Reds and Baltimore Orioles real teams.

How he managed to convince his players to ignore the waste of a good upper deck at Stade Olympique, how he showed them that winning can be its own reward, how he taught them the value of American currency in Canadian stores. All this at a time when most men are trying to decide between that late-model Oldsmobile and that hip replacement.

Indeed, whatever else you may want to say about the Expos (mostly, that they are being cruelly used by the owners to prove the point that criminally venal and/or stupid ownership trumps all other considerations), these are the real lessons:

1. To quote Richard Pryor, "Nobody ever got old being no fool." Frank Robinson knows more baseball than any other person in baseball's hierarchy, even with half his brain tied behind his back, and even if the effort was insincere, someone in baseball needs to be credited with the idea of having him make the Expos a real boy. We've decided to go with the night janitor.

2. There's no such thing as a bad baseball market, only bad operators. Montreal, even abandoned for dead as it has been, could succeed if one owner could show enough money, care and smarts to make a real go of it. As ridiculous as this sounds, Major League Baseball's fax machine has been the best owner the Expos have had in nearly two decades.

It almost makes you wish someone would do that very thing, some civic-minded Quebecois multi-billionaire (or the Canadian money equivalent) who sees the value in a baseball team and can tap into the emotions that were there in Montreal in 1980 and 1987 and 1994.

You wish he or she would walk in, plunk down his money, and talk Frank Robinson and Omar Minaya into staying on to finish the work that otherwise would go on in Washington, D.C., or another equally undeserving dump.

But then the Expos wouldn't be charming any more. They'd be just another team 9½ games behind the Braves and six games out of the wild card. They'd be just another ball team trying to actually win games, hearts and minds rather than the attentions of the luxury tax fairy.

So you take what you can get, and what we can get today is Frank Robinson, your 2002 Manager of the Year. He's the one with the black armband and the "HMS Titanic Athletic Club" sweatshirt.

And doesn't he look charming?

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.