THINKS THE EAGLES STOLE ONE
When it comes to trade deadline deals, everyone has their favorite cautionary/prodding tales. Mine concerns Frank Viola and David West.
The year was 1989, the season after Viola won a Cy Young Award with the Twins, two years after he was the MVP of the World Series. Frank was an innings-eating, lefthanded horse, but he was headed to free agency and was going to cost the Twins too much to keep.
I was writing for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk at the time. Pitching for the Mets Triple-A farm team, The Tides, David West was the greatest young lefthander to come along since Sandy Koufax (sound familiar?). Each week in 1988, someone from one of the New York dailies or the big sports magazines came down to write about him. Dominating for the Mets Triple-A farm team, there were constant pleas in New York to simply promote him and keep him, rather than mortgage the future, and the Mets did showcase him a few times. But the Mets had much of the core that won a World Series in 1986, and should have been there in 1988, if not for the miracle work of Dodgers ace Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson.
Adding Frank Viola to that team, to a staff that already included David Cone, Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez (Dwight Gooden was hurt) seemed a no-brainer.
So West went to the Twins, along with middle reliever and occasional starter Rick Aguilera, and Kevin Tapani, who was at about the same juncture in his career as J.A. Happ is now. Viola gave the Mets 12 good-to-great regular-season starts, but the Cubs won the National League East by six games. Viola finished third in the Cy Young voting the following season – Houston’s Doug Drabek (Kyle’s daddy) won it – but the Mets again finished second, four games behind the Pirates.
The Twins? Thought you’d never ask. West never became Sandy Koufax, serving as a middle reliever for most of his career, including for that 1993 Phillies National League championship team. But Rick Aguilera developed into one of the game’s premier closers, and Tapani developed into a steady starter who won 19 games once and 16 games twice. Most importantly, the Twins reached the postseason again before the Mets did, winning another World Series in 1991. Aguilera collected two saves, a victory and a loss in their seven-game battle with the Braves. Tapani won a game, lost a game. West was a crucial middle relief piece.
The Phillies are feeling good about repeating as World Champs and Roy Halladay seems a no-brainer, even at the talent cost discussed. But understand: One of those guys they give up is likely to be a star.
If three or four are, well, ouch. And if the Phillies don’t win another title, well ouch again.
Amid the giddiness of Sunday’s shutout and sweep of the Marlins, I typed this into my Facebook page:
``Happ or Halladay?’’
When I went to the page this morning, I found about two pages of responses, and the count, as I write this, is 10 for making the much –talked about trade, and 10 against.
What I found even more interesting was the timing of the comments. The first 10 people urged restraint, arguing that Happ was worth keeping and mortgaging the farm was a bad idea for a 32-year-old arm signed through next year.
The next 10 however spoke about making the team great for this season, making a chance at repeating as world champions worth the price and the risk. There was no back and forth. First 10 yeah. Next 10 nay.
Pushing aside for a moment the anxiety over losing a potentially dominant player like Michael Taylor (remember how close this team was to trading Ryan Howard?), I am curious over one thing. If this is about winning right now, then why is Kyle Drabek less expendable than Happ? If you give me the choice between a rotation, right now, of Halladay, Hamels, Blanton, Happ and Moyer/Martinez/Lopez, or one that simply switches Happ and Halladay, why wouldn’t I want the former? And if this is about winning right now, and maybe next year too, then why is Drabek untouchable and Happ not?
Because he might be the next Tom Seaver? What if he’s not. And by the way, Seaver was an uninjurable, inning-eating horse for the first part of his career. Drabek already has an injury asterisk attached.
And what if Happ is Tom Glavine for the next five years?
Happ is old for a rookie, no doubt. But as he showed in escaping that no-out, bases-loaded jam Sunday, that’s not all bad. Again, if we’re talking now, and if the Blue Jays would really take Drabek over Happ, then what’s the haggle?
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A moment in Wednesday’s Pedro Martinez press conference brought it all home to me, how long he’s been around, how much more our paths had crossed then I realized. He told a colleague, ``You’re probably too young to remember,’’ and although the reporter responded that ``I’m older than you think’’ I got to thinking: Nope, he’s not that old.
The year was 1994, Martinez’s first as a starter after a torridly successful previous season as a Dodgers setup guy. He was swapped in the offseason for Expos second baseman and Delaware native Delino DeShields, the first of many cost-cutting moves that sabotaged what might have been the decade’s most dominant team otherwise, supplanting the Yankees.
This is fact: when the baseball strike occurred after the games of Aug.11, 1994, Montreal had the best record in baseball, 74-40, and as importantly, had finally captured interest in their hometown. A mid-June series with the National League champion Phillies twice drew crowds of about 30,000 to vacuous Olympic Stadium, and a later series with the Braves averaged over 40,000. Because they had a miniscule season ticket base (under 6,000 as I recall), these numbers represented all single-game and walk-up sales.
They were an all-star team. Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom and Moises Alou were in their prime, or nearing it. Cliff Floyd was the first baseman. Wil Cordero was the shortstop. The rotation included Martinez, Ken Hill, Kirk Reuter and Jeff Fassero. Like Martinez, each went on to other teams and had great success, and most made at least one all-star team.
John Wetteland, their closer, helped the Yankees get over the hump two years later.
Their last game that season was August 4 against the Cardinals. They drew 39,044. when baseball finally returned, Walker was gone, Grissom was gone, Hill was gone, Wetteland was gone. So were their embittered fans, forever. Martinez stayed through 1997, won his first of three Cy Young awards, then signed with the Red Sox as a free agent.
The franchise eventually left too, becoming the Washington Nationals, where despite the new park that the Expos never got, attendance is already an issue. To this day, I wonder what would have happened had 1994 been played. To this day, I think this was the most vicious and lasting parts of both Bud Selig and Don Fehr’s legacies.
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.Michael vs. Michael?
Have to admit, when I read this headline the other day in the Wall Street Journal, I thought it was a comparison of icons. Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan?
It wasn’t, so permit me to introduce the debate on this blog, with these parameters: Which of these two has affected the world more? Remember, it’s the world, not the United States, and it is not simply a music or sports debate.
People who think Jordan spread his sport to the four corners tend to be young, or don’t remember the Dream Team in Barcelona very well. The headliners that Olympiad were Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, and already by then there were professional leagues throughout Europe, in places like Spain and Greece.
But there is no question Jordan took that ball and ran with it. Shoes, clothes, movies, commercials – the silhouette of him with the ball over his head is still nearly as recognizable as the swoosh.
Jordan never used that power to champion a cause, to become the face of something like Jerry Lewis is the face of MS. Jackson did that to a degree. Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats should always be credited with igniting the campaign to stamp out hunger and Aids in Africa, but Jackson’s ``We are the world’’ song became its identity. Quincy Jones called it his best song (I’ll take anything from ``Off The Wall’’ over it.)
Jones wrote this on his blog the other day: ``Shortly after "Thriller" came out and simply chewed up everything in its way, I went to see Count Basie at the Palladium with Benny Carter and Ed Eckstine. Basie was like a father to me, having kind of adopted me when I was 13, and he wasn't in the greatest shape. He was in a wheelchair and when he saw me, he said with a sense of pride, `Man, [what] you and Michael did, me and Duke would never even dream about nothin' that big. We wouldn't even dare to dream about it.’ You can't imagine how proud I felt, hearing that from one of my idols, not realizing that it would be the last time that I'd see him alive.''
Jackson shut places down everywhere he went. Japan. Africa. Europe. I was in Ireland in 1988, doing the the bed and breakfast travel routine with my wife, and he was performing the next day in Cork. We were an hour from there, but we needed to get an hour further away to find a B&B that wasn’t full.
No doubt Jordan can and does create a stir. And today, he no doubt creates a more positive reaction.
My vote is for Micahel Jackson. I just think he cast a huger shadow over the entire world, owned an incredibly diverse fan base in his heyday.
But I could argue both sides.
Your thoughts?
The other day in the Phillies clubhouse, televisions were tuned to a replay of the fifth and deciding game of the 2008 World Series. ``Here it comes,’’ Ryan Howard said, just before Chase Utley made his incredible pump-fake play to the plate to nab Bartlett. He stopped, he watched, and then he continued on the business of preparing for that day’s game against the Mets.
At another time – hell, even a month ago – the airing of that game might have carried with it all sorts of implications. One of the pet theories of the Phillies struggles at home, after all, is that they were too eager to please, were reminded too often about the season that passed.
It might have even been taboo to air that game before an actual ’09 game.
But on this day, the feel was much, much different. Players passed by the television and barely looked. When some did, there was a sense of distance to it, like watching an old movie whose lines have long since been memorized. Or any World Series game from the past.
The Phillies may not repeat as world champions, National League Champions or even East Division winners. But at 43-37, ahead by two games after the games of July 6, they have clearly moved on.
Who knows, maybe that’s why they’ve won four straight at home.
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