After the introductory edition of this column appeared last week, I received a couple of messages from–if Star Trek fans are “Trekkies,” what are BP fans? Beepies? Beppies?–readers asking why we were bothering to take notice of the 20th anniversary of the 1984 baseball season, with a week-long series no less. Nothing special happened that year, they said. Actually, 1984 was a case study in baseball problem solving, as executives were faced with difficult decisions, like, “If my entire starting rotation retires at once, what do I do?” “How do you react to an aggressively restructuring team who happens to be leading you in a close pennant race?” “If one-10th of my 40-man roster is arrested for attempting to obtain illegal drugs, how many of them should I retain?” and many more. Call the year a Choose Your Own Adventure book for managers and GMs, not to mention little pubescent proto-sabermetricians and performance analysts nationwide.
This is the very first installment of You Could Look It Up. The title, with its
old-time, pulp feel, is meant to evoke a portal to anywhen in the history of baseball, to flannel times and polyester times, lilywhite Washington Senators uniforms, rainbow-striped Houston Astros uniforms, all coming together, a great overlap of Ruths and Ryans and A-Rods. You Could Look It Up is a gateway to varied, hectic, multihued yesterday, a vantage point from which we might discern truths that have been lost to common knowledge, human stories that still evoke laughter or tears, and unrestful ghosts in black and white photographs who still haunt our own forcibly uncomplicated, Manichean times.
Hey–don’t turn away just yet. We ain’t talking any of that mushy “Field of Dreams” poetastry. Ray Liotta’s right-hand-hitting, city-slick Joe Jackson is not to be found in these pages. But it’s here that on any given day you might find Shoeless Joe, hand extended for a dollar or a fly ball, as Leo Durocher steals grounders and his teammates’ watches, all the while trying to do his best imitation of Rabbit Maranville, whose beltline basket catch was necessary because the sheer whiskey content of his exhalations could divert the flight of the ball above chest level. There’s Joe McCarthy, a manager who never ripped a player in public…until the day he did; Casey Stengel, who always ripped his players in public and ripped them in private too, but was given to numerous, unpublicized sentimental gestures; and his protégé, Billy Martin, who said that a winning manager knew that some ballplayers were mules and some racehorses, and you could beat the mules all you wanted and they would never be racehorses–yet beat both the mules and the racehorses. All of these people have something to say to us, because of what they did, and, as importantly, who they were.
Elsewhere on this Web site, Joe Sheehan has often promoted TINSTAAPP, or “There Is No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect.” To this we must add a second acronym, TINSWTBAPS–There Is No Sure Way To Build A Pitching Staff. Even just decent pitching staffs require an element of luck to come together. The 1984 Tigers required Willie Hernandez to pitch approximately twice as well as he had in any other season to make up for almost every other pitcher on the staff being just average. The 1933 Yankees had two Hall of Fame pitchers, Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing, at the peak of their careers, plus a couple of other very good starters in Johnny Allen and Danny MacFayden. They were terrible. When Joe Torre put Mariano Rivera in the bullpen in 1996, he had no idea that the skinny righty would be one of the most valuable pitchers in the American League that season. You cannot plan these things.
Continuing the bill of indictment chronicling the Pirates’ trading habits over the last century. In this fourth and final installment, four more bad trades and 12 good ones.
In part one of this series on the roster-building woes of the Pirates–most of them self-inflicted as the organization careens from crisis to crisis like an inebriated pachyderm with a stuttering problem pirouetting through a mine field while trying to recite key scenes from Finnegan’s Wake–it was alleged that the Pirates have a long history of making disastrous trades, and that in fact the list of good trades barely existed. Herewith, the evidence.
Only twice during the free agent era have the Pirates signed a player of sufficiently high profile to warrant draft compensation to the team he departed (although why this was the case with 1979 signing Andy Hassler is unclear. He had no profile). Until 1998, Pittsburgh free agent signings were of the superannuated veteran, high-risk/low upside variety. As such, the Pirates paid for the last 53 games of Gene Tenace’s career, the last 40 games of Amos Otis, and the last 72 games of Sixto Lezcano. Only the 1979 signing of outfielder Lee Lacy, an undistinguished part-timer with the Dodgers from 1972, paid dividends. Lacy was not blessed with great power or plate judgment, but in six Pittsburgh seasons he was a consistent .300 hitter. Even he, though, must be marked with an asterisk as he was, allegedly, one of the narcotics abusers infesting the Pittsburgh clubhouse at the time. Then again, drugs in the clubhouse didn’t bother anyone in Pittsburgh at the time, so perhaps it isn’t worth mentioning.
In both the 1997 and 1998 off-seasons, the club once again sallied into the free agent market. Pitcher Mike Williams was signed after going 6-16 with a 5.52 ERA from 1996-1997. The following winter, Mike Benjamin, a utility infielder with one of the all-time weak bats (.224/.275/.337 in 507 games through 1998) to a four-year, $3.25 million contract. For a franchise that claimed to have limited resources, Benjamin was a disastrous addition and a clear sign that the owner and his general manager (still Bonifay) did not understand that baseball had entered the age of the two-way infielder.
In the July 25 edition of Transaction Analysis, Chris Kahrl critiqued the trade of reliever Mike Williams from the Pirates to the Phillies: There are other cranky topics, particularly the re-failure to acquire talent for Mike Williams in this year’s Williams deal. Certainly, if it reflected any new appreciation for the interchangeability of closers beyond the top few personalities in the field, that would be nifty, but instead, it seems that people (appropriately) don’t take Williams particularly seriously as a commodity, so the Pirates got things bad both ways, in terms of plugging in a replacement-level talent in the job, enriching him, and then not enriching themselves when the time came to deal him. Kahrl’s analysis could be applied to the entire trading history of the Pirates franchise, a three-handed process in which the hometown GM extends a good player with one hand, accepts his return with the another, and pinches his nose shut with the third. The top 10 list of best trades in the history of the franchise remains virgin territory, while the worst-10 list provides for an overstuffed buffet of empty calorie choices. This article is a compendium of self-inflicted wounds suffered since the acquisition of the franchise by Kevin McClatchy. After the institution of the amateur draft in 1965 democratized (at least on paper) talent acquisition, a broken franchise, particularly an impoverished broken franchise, could right itself through a combination of smart trading, free-agent signings, and the rewards offered to losing teams by the draft. Over a long span lasting at least since the waning days of Barry Bonds as a Buc, the Pirates have consistently failed at all three.
In honor of the Mets’ rethinking their philosophy on Roberto Alomar, the corresponding White Sox dump of D’Angelo Jimenez, and that inevitable day in the future when Alfonso Soriano plays a bad center field for the Mets, here is a top 10 list of 11 trades and transactions involving some of the best keystone commandos ever to play the game. Note that most of these moves are spectacularly lopsided; apparently it’s a rare thing to come up with a two-way second baseman, but rarer still to recognize what you have, or know how to hold on to him.
In part one of this review inspired by the Mets’ excision of Roberto Alomar from their midst–call it a celebration if you must–we stumbled over the desiccated remains of transactions involving Frankie Frisch, Rogers Hornsby, Eddie Collins and others on the way to a subjective ranking of the most misguided second baseman swaps in history. Part two revisits the five most self-destructive acts of abnegation by teams that had the goods but let them get away.
BP correspondent Steven Goldman sees the Twins messing with top young players Johan Santana and Bobby Kielty and reflects back on Casey Stengel’s handling and mishandling of young players.
Steven Goldman takes on the Tigers’ and Padres’ flirting with a .300 winning percentage with a history lesson on some of baseball’s most renowned losing clubs.