William James Fanning (September 14, 1927 – April 25, 2015) was an American-Canadian catcher, manager and front office executive in Major League Baseball. Often called "Gentleman Jim", Fanning was the first general manager of the Montreal Expos of the National League (appointed in August 1968), and served the Expos in a number of capacities for almost 25 years. As their field manager in 1981, he guided Montreal into the playoffs for the only time in the 36-year history of the franchise. Playing and early front office career Born in Chicago, Fanning grew up in the now unincorporated community of Moneta, Iowa, and attended its school, graduating with nine classmates in 1945. He played baseball for the Moneta Bulldogs and they earned a state runner-up title his sophomore season to Corwith. He later attended Buena Vista College in Storm Lake. In his professional playing days, he was a catcher who played most of his career in the minor leagues. He spent the 1957 season and parts of three others with the Chicago Cubs between 1954 and 1957, compiling an anemic batting average of .170 in 64 career games played, with no home runs and 24 hits. On Sep 14, 1957, in the second game of a double-header against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Fanning caught Cub pitcher Dave Hillman, playing on their shared 30th birthdays, the only known instance of a battery sharing the same birth date (that game, though, is more famous for the three home runs hit by Chicago's star shortstop Ernie Banks). Fanning then became a manager in the minor leagues, eventually joining the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves organization, where in the middle of the 1960s he was promoted to the positions of Director of Minor League Operations and assistant general manager. Fanning was briefly listed as a coach for the 1968 Braves, but before the season began he resigned to become the first director of the Central Scouting Bureau. Just months later, when his old Milwaukee boss, John McHale, became the first president of the expansion Expos, Fanning accompanied him to Canada as the Expos' general manager. Fanning and McHale built the Expos from scratch; in those days, prior to the era of free agency, newly formed clubs could only rely on expansion and amateur drafts and trades to build their talent base. Building the expansion Expos In the 1968 NL expansion lottery, Fanning drafted veterans such as Jesús Alou, John