July 26, 2025 • 47 mins
In a Yankees-centric episode for deadline week, we revisit a rare homegrown Yankees third baseman at a moment he refused to sit down even as injuries ate him alive. Then we take another look at the Buhner-Phelps deal. The Yankees could hardly have done worse... But could they truly have done better?
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Due to breaking news, a history oriented podcast has to
throw out its notes and start over. Let me adjust
what I was going to say, And no, I'm not
referring to Nick Kurtz's line for Friday Night. Holy Moly,
what a performance. As we korene towards the twenty twenty
five trading deadline, the New York Yankees were until this
(00:22):
moment in need of a third baseman. They may or
may not have addressed that issue today as I speak
these words, it is in fact today or the day
that this news broke by picking up Ryan McMahon from
the Colorado Rockies. McMahon is a left handed hitter with
some pop and is a good glove, but also strikes
out a ton and is a career two sixteen three
(00:43):
h two three sixty two hitter away from Denver. At home,
he's hit two sixty three with a three forty three
on base percentage and a four to seventy six slugging percentage.
But it seems kind of unlikely he'll get to put
that in a suitcase and take it with him. Some
Rockies hitters have, but we won't know until he unpacks
(01:04):
that the Yankees needed help at third wasn't news. They've
been in need of a third baseman for years, at
least since the unlikely three year run of half decent
seasons at the position by Miguel Andrew Harr and gioe Urschella.
More broadly, they haven't had much stability at the position
since the decline of Alex Rodriguez. This year, Yankees' third
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basemen are hitting two fourteen with a two ninety two
on base and a three point fifty four slugging percentage,
which is not good, although it's also not the worst
performance in the league. About a half dozen teams just
haven't been able to get anything going at the hot corner,
and that includes contenders like the Mets, Tigers, and Cubs.
There are other teams suffering even more at other positions.
(01:48):
The Rangers, on the fringes of wild card contention have
seen their designated hitters average one sixty six with seven
home runs. Jock Peterson just didn't work out, and then
he got hurt, and thus they have made the name
of the position a lie. And Royle's right fielders have
been even worse than that, primarily because they've given one
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hundred and sixty played appearances to Jock Caglione, a highly
prized prospect, former first rounder, who while he's hitting one
forty eight two O six two eighty two, so it
seems like he's not ready. He's had a lot of
strikeouts and hit a lot of grounders, and as you know,
it is very hard to homer on a ground ball.
But hey, at least they have a prospect in Caglion.
(02:32):
The last time the Yankee succeeded in establishing a homegrown
third baseman was nineteen eighty four, when they finally gave
in to playing a kit This only after Greg Nettles
had been sent to San Diego in a Spike trade,
and then the veterans Toby Harra and Roy Smalley had failed.
They promoted the player Baseball America had ranked as their
(02:55):
eighth best prospect at that moment. Don't get too excited,
because John Elway was number one. Mike Paliarulo. Pegs held
the job for four full seasons and parts of two more,
the back half of nineteen eighty four, his rookie year,
and the first half of nineteen eighty nine, at which
point he was traded to the Padres for the Immortal.
(03:16):
While terrell I wrote about Pali Rulo at Baseball Perspectus
this week, and in brief I will say here that
he was a decent player, undone in part by platoon issues.
He was a left handed, low average power hitter, but
he could barely touch same side pitching, a problem so
acute that in one game Billy Martin sent him up
to bat right handed, even though he wasn't really a
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switch hitter. Since the Yankees, despite trying a half dozen
different right handed hitters to pair with him, couldn't come
up with a solid partner, it just remained a vulnerability
that wasn't on him but on the team. What was
on him, perhaps was poor judgment about injuries. He began
his term in New York with good power and a
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decent clove, but by nineteen eighty nine he just couldn't
hit anymore now once he left. He did rally to
have a fairly unexpected three hundred season as a part
timer for the Twins and Orioles in nineteen ninety three,
but that was a one off and his home run
power he had hit as many as thirty two, albeit
that total coming in the rabbit ball season of nineteen
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eighty seven, but it never did come back. When I
say that he had poor judgment about injuries, I don't
mean that he went off road bull riding in his
free time. I mean that he tried to play through
pain when he should have just sat down. In his
rookie year, he hit two thirty eight with a two
to eighty eight on base percentage and a four to
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forty eight slugging percentage, which made him pretty much Nettles Junior,
which is like peak Nettles minus a third of the value.
In nineteen eighty five, he was platooned with Dale bra
and Andre Robertson and hit two thirty nine with a
three twenty four on base percentage and a four to
forty two slugging percentage. He was twent twenty five. It
wasn't half bad for that era, especially when you take
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out the helpless at bats he still had against lefties.
He hit two fifty two three thirty three four sixty
eight against the guys he was supposed to hit, and
again played a decent enough third base, but that was
when he started making the aforementioned bad decisions. In nineteen
eighty six, he was hitting two fifty seven three thirty
one five twenty nine with twenty eight home runs as
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of the last week of August. He then suffered a
badly pulled hamstring. He decided to play through it, and
the Yankees let him play through it. He hit one
fifty six with no home runs the rest of the
way over thirty games. In nineteen eighty seven, he played
through an elbow injury so bad that he could barely
straighten his arm and couldn't throw without pain. At the
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end of July, he was hitting two forty two three
thirty one four eighty three, but he hit only two
twenty one, two fifty nine four seventy two the rest
of the way, which is to say that he just
kept hitting home runs at a healthy rate because again,
it was a rabbit ball gear and if the hitter
made contact there was a good chance that it would
go out. Everything else, though, fell away. He finally had
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surgery in the off season, and in nineteen eighty eight,
maybe he was still in recovery, but he just couldn't hit,
and the Yankees finally gave up on him. As I said,
he had some sporadic success as a part time third
basement for the Twins in the early nineteen nineties, was
on a championship team with them, but those injuries not
sitting down, which both ruined his numbers and seemed to
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have had a deleterious effect on his performance, seemed to
have made the difference between a long career as the
longside of a platoon and the peripatetic career that he
ended up having. In a nineteen eighty eight interview, he said,
with regards to his resistance to giving in to his injuries,
and I'm not going to do his strong Medford, Massachusetts accent,
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sometimes it's tough to be humble. I've just got a
lot of pride in me, a lot of debt ication.
I want to play every day, and I don't want
to let anybody down. I don't ever want to hear
anybody say that I didn't go out and do the
best that I could. Here, I experience a bit of
cognitive dissonance because his dedication is actually or was anti dedication.
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It seems to me that if your arm hurts so
badly that it's affecting your throwing and you've stopped hitting,
then you're not doing the best that you can because
you're incapable of doing it. You may intend to, which
is an honorable thing, but you can't, and so your
intentions are vexed. They are counterproductive. The best part of
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pride might be the Joe DiMaggio part, the part where
you can be the bigger man and get the hell
out of the way when you realize you're no longer
capable of doing the best that you could. If you
get an A plus for your intentions but an F
for your execution, then how has the team benefited? Speaking
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of the better part of pride being knowing when to
step aside. I once got to spend a long afternoon
in George Steinbrenner's office. I had seen it described many times.
In reality, it was drab and disappointing. He supposedly had
a sign or an embroidered pillow or something, and that
pillow said lead, follow, or get out of the way.
(08:23):
I didn't see that there, but it applied to the
Yankees' third basement. At that moment. He wasn't leading, but
he didn't know how to get out of the way.
As far as following. He was tuned into one particular wavelength,
the siren song that leads directly to the infinite inning. Well,
(09:17):
hello there, and Welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning
number three forty, Steven Goldman number three forty, as well,
your convivial host for this journey to the past on
a mission to better understand the present, the time machine,
the vehicle as always being mostly but not always baseball today.
I learned, or perhaps remembered I must have known this
at the time, that in nineteen ninety one Randy Johnson
(09:40):
balked a runner from second to third. Said runner later
scoring because the Mariner moose overthrew the peanut man. The
bag fell to the turf as he was winding up,
and he was so startled he stopped his delivery. Can
you blame him? Wow? I am still marveling over that
Nick Kurtz four home run line from tonight. I have
never been I don't think I've been at a three
(10:01):
home run game. I haven't been at a no hitter.
I saw someone hit into a triple play once. That
was Chili Davis. That was fun. I know I've been
to more than one two home run game. Heck, I
was at a Mark Biento's two home run game just
last fall. No doubt the Mets wish they knew where
he put that pair of pence when I said a
few minutes ago that the Mets are one of the
teams that has been struggling at third base, he is
(10:24):
a big reason why heading into the action the night
that I am speaking, he has hit two twenty four
two seventy nine three p fifty four with six home runs,
and as he has not known for his defense, what
you see is what you get, and here is the
part of the show where I ask you how you're
doing and whether you're satisfied with what you see or
(10:46):
what you're getting. So few of us are nowadays, but
we don't know how to go about repairing our vision,
at least not in a constructive way. I had to
laugh the other day because the President announced a tariff
agreement with the Japanese government, and part of the deal
supposedly was that the Japanese were going to invest something
like one hundred billion dollars in America, which there is
(11:09):
a downside to that. Paul Krugman pointed out the downside
because that's essentially one hundred billion dollars of exports that
we don't get to see. But I'm old enough to
remember when there was a huge panic in this country
about the Japanese buying things, buying the empire, state building,
taking over. This is when they had a really hot
economy for a while. It's been pretty much in neutral
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or rolling backwards ever since. But you might recall there
was a Michael Crichton novel or a film both with
I think Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes's detectives teaming up
to combat the perfidious, rapacious Japanese, which they weren't. They
just had a lot of cash and they were trying
to put it in places where it would become more
cash but more benignly. There was an anodyne or mostly anodyne,
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as I recall it, Ron Howard comedy starring Michael Key,
about the Japanese buying a Detroit auto factory. Now, the
Japanese had been eating our lunch in terms of car
manufacturing for decades at that point, but they decided to
do this culture clash story. And one of the tropes
that they leaned on in that story, and I think
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it was a trope both outside the film and within
the film as well, And I'm not sure whether it
originated in that order or the other one. It's been
a very long time and I feel pretty certain that
it's not a movie worth seeking out and revisiting. But
the idea was that when something breaks culturally, the Japanese
want to know how to fix it, and Americans don't
(12:37):
want to know how to fix it. They want to
know who to blame. And that came to mind recently
because there's been a lot of commentary about the meaning
of pedophilic sex crimes related to Jeffrey Epstein and their
magnetic appeal to the right. As we go through this
current controversy involving the President of the United States and
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his long ago relationship with that feller, it seems like
the fixes in. I won't go down that line extensively
here except to say that I've seen various commentators point out,
among them Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo very articulately,
that the victims are never centered in the right wing
narratives about these crimes, because they're not that interested in
(13:19):
the victims. They're interested in getting licensed for vengeance, because,
after all, what would be out of bounds to do
in retaliation to those who would harm our children or
to protect our children, And if you were really lucky,
and there's a one to one overlap between those whom
you disagree with culturally or politically and those who turn
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out to be who are revealed as people who harm children.
Then you would be relieved of the obligation to negotiate
with them, to get done with or to dispense with
policies that you want or don't want. You could just
line them up against the wall and shoot them. So
there's this weird wish fulfillment thing going on, at least
(14:04):
for some of them. You want the children to be safe,
but not retroactively. Retroactively you wish that they suffered a
lot of harm, so long as it was the right
people who inflicted that harm, because then you not only
know who to blame, you know what to do about it.
You get what I'm saying, right, It's not necessarily intuitive
because everyone involved is talking about kids. But just imagine
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there's a turkey sub on the table in front of you.
I don't mean to compare children to turkey subs. I'm
just saying an abstract kind of problem. Well, Bob needs
a turkey sub wants a Turkey sub, and Jim needs
and wants a turkey sub, and they pretty much have
equal rights to that turkey sub and the best solution
would be for them to share it. But they don't
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like each other very much. They don't have the same
system of values in a lot of ways that have
nothing to do with children. They both love kids in
a wholesome way. They both would die for their kids,
protect their kids. It's not about children at all. It's
just the fact that they can't see eye to eye
on most matters, and so they can't agree to share
their turkey sandwich. However, if Jim is convinced that Bob
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is an evil man who does terrible things to kids,
then Jim is justified in doing anything that he might
do to get rid of Bob. And by the way,
now he gets to have the entire turkey sandwich to himself. Conversely,
if they could just set aside their differences and find
some middle ground and in the process agree to share
(15:31):
said sandwich, which they've been arguing about for a quarter
of a century now, or a half a century or
one hundred years, and it's long since gone off, but
it's the principle of the thing. If they could find
a way to do that, they might find that they're
not so different and their entire community might move forward.
But just like that Ron Howard Michael Keaton movie that
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came out of that Japanese panic back oh thirty years ago,
at this point or a little more, I think we
would rather have the easy release of knowing who to
be angry at, rightly or wrongly, then we would want
to do the hard work of solving the problem. And
in an episode of this show that is greatly about
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Yankees and prospects, well, that applied to George Steinbrenner too.
He'd rather get angry at a prospect for not being
prepared to play perfect Major League Baseball than understand that
perhaps his team, because he felt that way, was incapable
of training them up to the level that would have
(16:34):
met his demanding standards. You can't have it both ways,
and I'll talk more about that in a moment after
the break which is barreling down upon us, when we
talk about Jay Buner. You know one other note on
Mike pali Rulo. In the interview I just quoted, he
said something that to me borders on the incoherent. He said,
there are guys who play the game on good teams
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and guys who play the game on bad teams who
put up the numbers on good teams and guys who
put up the numbers on bad teams. How do you
tell them apart? I think you do it by seeing
how much heart they have. I stared at that quote
for a while. A guy hits three point fifty with
thirty home runs on a good team, and another guy
hits three point fifty with thirty home runs on a
(17:19):
bad team. But one of them has heart and the
other doesn't. So you tell them apart by the birthmark
on their left butteck, the functional difference is zero. They
still hit three point fifty with thirty home runs each.
Something perhaps got lost in the translation, but hopefully we
won't get lost during this break. So after this brief intermission,
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we will return to the Yankees in the nineteen eighties
and one of the most infamous trades of George Steinbrenner's
long reign of anti prospect terror. I'll see on the
other side. Okay, during that break, I stepped out for
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a minute and my wife said, Hey, the Mets got
an Oriole as well, And I said, yeah, they got Gregorysoto,
the reliever from the Orioles. But what do you mean,
as well, and she said, didn't the Yankees get an Oriole?
I said, no, they got a Rocky, And I realized
I was just one syllable off from Charlie Brown's immortal
line of Halloween disappointment from the Peanuts Halloween Special. I
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got a rock I guess in Yankees baseball history that
would be I got a trout. Sometimes, while watching baseball,
I'm fascinated by how every play takes at least two
players to make a good thing good or a bad
thing bad. With the caveat that hitting looks much much
easier on television than it does at the ballpark or
(18:59):
if heaven, for you're facing live pitching yourself. Sometimes you'll
see a pitcher throw a meatball down the pipe and
the hitter either swings through it or takes it, and
you say, that was it. That was the one he
was going to get this hit bat. He missed his chance.
And I don't mean it would have been your meatball,
because you are not Aaron Judge. I mean, I shouldn't
speak for anyone but myself me. I am not Aaron Judge.
(19:21):
I am not even Johnny Lamaster. The point rather is
that even if television does make hitting look a lot
easier than it is by slowing it down dramatically. If
you've watched enough baseball, you learn to recognize a center
cut fastball as it heads for the plate. You learn
to see a slider that is breaking directly into the
sweet spot for a left handed power hitter. Similarly, if
(19:43):
you watch your favorite hitters long enough, you learn their
strengths and their vulnerabilities. You know that, say, a hitter
has a weakness for high fastballs, and that if the
pitcher sequences things correctly and then throws one somewhere a
little outside and at the height of say the batter's shoulders,
he's going to miss it. But then again, sometimes that
pitch goes out. Sometimes the slider that the lefty on
(20:05):
nine days out of ten would have pulled into the
seats gets tapped to the shortstop. And to exaggerate just
a wee bid, if a batter hits thirty balls three
hundred and ninety feet and Byron Buxton pulls all thirty
of them down at the wall, that hitter is in
a bad slump. He's oh for thirty. It just happens, though,
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that Byron Buxton was out there otherwise he's hitting on
all cylinders. So a bad pitch is only a bad
pitch if everyone cooperates, if the hitter takes advantage, and
a good pitch is only a good pitch if someone
swings and misses, and both might be moot if a
fielder gets in the way, but maybe there's a bad
fielder out there. In twenty seventeen, Jeff Samarga, pitching for
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the Giants, allowed twelve triples, which is tied with Ubaldo
Jimenez for the most three base hits given up by
a pitcher in a single season this century. He played
in a park, the Giants Park, that promotes triples, but
his center fielder was also Denard span who had been
a pretty good defensive outfielder, but by then he was
in his thirties and had undergone two hip surgeries, which
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tends to cut down on your movement. Statistically, that year
he was the worst defensive outfielder in the major leagues.
He played only one more season after that, and it
was in left so Marja had a four four two
ERA that year, but his fielding independent RA was only
three sixty one, which would have been the second best
full season mark of his career to that point. Unfortunately,
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you can't disentangle the player from his context, from his
team and give him credit for things that should have
happened but didn't. And if you want a theme for
this segment, it's that prospects are like that as well.
I bring this up at trade deadline time because I
want to look at one of the most infamous Yankees
trades of all times in a different way. I'm speaking,
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of course, of Jay bunif Ken Phelps. What you thought
I was going to bring up Urban Schocker with Nick Cullop,
Joe Geddy and Fritz Mazell, less Nonamaker and fifteen grand
to the Browns for Gettysburg, Eddie Plank and Del Pratt.
I suppose I could have. I mean, Urban Schocker was
a great pitcher until you know he inconveniently died. Pratt
(22:17):
was a pretty good second baseman for the Yankees, although
passed his peak, and well Gettysburg Eddy was a Hall
of Famer, but he retired rather than go to New York.
So yeah, not their best, far from their worst. For
the record, This one, which may have been that or
it's on the list, came on July twenty first, nineteen
eighty eight, and the Yankees got, as you know, the
veteran DH and occasional first baseman Phelps in return for
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outfielder Buner and pitching prospects Wreck Ballibon and Troy Evers
their nineteen eighty five first and second round draft picks, respectively.
Well sort of. In Ballaban's case, he was a compensation
pick due to an odd commissioner's ruling coming out of
the now defunct January Draft secondary phase. This was in
(22:59):
nineteen four. The Yankees selected pitcher Tim Belcher with the
first overall pick, but they didn't get to keep him
because of a procedural screw up. About a nanosecond after
he signed, the A's took him as a free agent
compensation pick, and that shouldn't have been allowed by the
commissioner's office. It was a paperwork mix up. But Booie
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Kune was one of the worst commissioners, which is not
saying much because all commissioners have been one of the
worst commissioners. You point me to a good baseball commissioner,
and I will point you to an imaginary story with
elves and unicorns in fast food that's healthy to eat.
I digress. On December twentieth, nineteen eighty four, the Pirates
made an awful trade of their own, with the Yankees
picking up used up outfielder Steve Kemp and infielder Tim
(23:40):
Foley in return for del Barra, Alfonso Polito, and Buner.
When the Yankees acquired Buner, he had just hit three
twenty three with a four to twenty seven on base
percentage and a five thirty seven slugging percentage as a
teenager in the New York Penn League. He continued to
slug as he climbed the ladder and had hit thirty
one homers for Triple A Columbus in nineteen eighty seven.
(24:03):
During spring training nineteen eighty eight, the Yankees listed him
with al Lighter, roberto' kelly and Hensley Bam Bam Muleins
as prospects they wouldn't trade, no matter how desperately they
needed pitching, and oh did they. Simultaneously, they had Buner
blocked because they had signed for no particular reason, just
acting spasmodically, Jack Clark to be there everyday DH They
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also had Ricky Henderson in left field, Dave winfield and
right field, and some combination of the veterans Claudelle Washington
and Gary Ward were going to handle center, but if
that didn't work out, Roberto Kelly had DIBs on the
spot because he was the one of the prospects you
could project as a center fielder. Buner was acknowledged to
have a great arm, but he wasn't going to play
center full time in the majors, and indeed that was
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not his destiny. And he had a hitch in his swing.
You heard that constantly, Oh God, that hitch in his swing.
How would he ever hit with that hitch in his swing?
And I swear it was coming from inside the building.
It was not opposition scouts were bemoaning the hitch in
the swing. It was the Yankees' front office and their
broadcasters got the word, and every time he came up,
(25:12):
it was, oh, that hitch in his swing. Just before
the Yankees sent him down for the final time, because
he spent parts of eighty seven and eighty eight riding
with the Mariners general manager later called the Henry Cotto
Shuttle up and down to Triple A Columbus. He struggled
quite a bit, striking out in over a third of
his hit bats, and at the moment of his last emotion,
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he was in the midst of a one for thirty
slump with fifteen strikeouts. Oh that hitch. The Yankees had
been trying, in fact, to trade him for a while.
They had offered him to Cleveland for Mel Hall, who
was on their mind for years, and they offered him
to Pittsburgh for Tommy greg All turned out to be
a bad guy on a few different levels, including in
the clubhouse, but he did hit from time to time
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in a platoon sort of way. I mean greg though
greg never hit in the majors, and if you look
at his minor league numbers, what they suggest is if
everything had gone right, he might have turned into sort
of a Dave Maggoten style first baseman. Ask yourself, if
under most conditions you would trade a good defensive outfielder
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with thirty home run power for that guy. That April,
the Yankees offered buner or Mulens to the Braves for
the lefty pitcher Zane Smith. The Brave said meet. They
offered him to the Orioles with Charlie Hudson and Bobby Meacham,
two players they were desperate to get rid of in
return for the second base prospect Pete Stanisek and the
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veteran right handed starting pitcher, former twenty game winner Mike Bodiker.
The Orioles were game, but they wanted to keep Stanasek
and have the Yankees ad Pat Clements, a lefty who
the Pirates had thrown into the Rick Rodin Doug Drebek deal.
Another nightmarish exchange for the Yankees did not happen. Bodicker
could give the Yankees a formidable right handed staffing Rick
(27:00):
Rodin and Rich Dotson in the rotation, wrote Michael Martinez
in The New York Times. Oh boy, was that could
doing some heavy lifting. And it did not require or
doesn't require the benefit of hindsight to have known that
at the time. Mike Bodiker, big curveball guy, former twenty
game winner, aler leader who was in his free agent
walk here. So the Yankees were willing to deal away
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all those guys to be fair, two of three of
them fungible, but for a past peak pitcher who would
not have made a difference in the race. Not enough
of one, I mean. Subsequently, at the deadline, the Oriole
sent Botiker to the Red Sox instead and got back
Brady Anderson and Kurt Schillings. So yeah, good judgment. Ohs,
that was GM Roland Hemand and kudos to him. In summary,
(27:43):
though the Yankees were begging Baseball to take Jay Buhner
off their hands, Lou Panella, who Steinbrenner was bouncing between
the general manager and manager's chairs at that time, later
said that George ordered him and Bob Quinn at that
moment the titular GM, to make the deal that ultimately
satisfied them. In that regard the deal for Phelps to
(28:04):
choose between Buner and Roberto Kelly as to who to
send away. I didn't want to give up either, young outfielder,
Penella said, but George liked to move people, managers, pitching coaches,
So Buner was picked and we made the deal. Now Phelps,
he was thirty three. He had been a late bloomer,
in part because he had come to the majors through
the Royals and Expos organizations, turf teams that built around speed,
(28:28):
not slow sluggers. When he finally found his way to
the Mariners organization via purchase from the Expos, the young,
still recent expansion team gave him his first solid chance.
This after hitting a total of one hundred and fifty
one home runs in the minor leagues, including forty six
one year for Triple A Wichita, and he proved to
(28:49):
be a pretty special hitter. He was limited, but in
a way that could help you. In five hundred and
twenty nine games with Seattle, spanning nineteen eighty three through
nineteen eighty eight, Phelps hit to U fifty five with
a three to ninety nine on base percentage and a
five forty one slugging percentage against right handed pitching. Over
two hundred and fifty players had at least one thousand
(29:11):
plate appearances against righties in those same years nineteen eighty
three through nineteen eighty eight, how many had a higher
slugging percentage than mister Phelps. Your mission, should you choose
to accept it? Three Darryl Strawberry, Don Mattingley, and George Brett.
As a Mariner, he homered once every thirteen point three
at batts. That's approximately thirty eight for every five hundred
(29:35):
times at the plate, and that's a huge total, especially
for back then. So it wasn't a bad idea to
acquire Phelps in and of himself. The Yankees have been
trying to do that since nineteen eighty five. The immediate problem,
as I've already hinted, was that they had nowhere to
play him. When Phelps got the word, he in fact
called Bob Quinn and said he was excited to be
(29:57):
a Yankee, but asked, what do you need me for again?
Clark the DH and he had played right field in
first base during his career, but he wasn't great defensively,
and he tended to get hurt as importantly, you couldn't
pinch Don Mattingley so he could play first base, and
you couldn't pinch Dave Winfield so he could play right field,
and you couldn't bench Ricky Henderson so he could play left.
(30:18):
Panella's solution was to argue that Mattinglee could play the outfield.
Mattingly said, no, I told Lou I gave away my
outfielder's glove this spring. He said, I didn't think I
needed it again. I haven't taken fly balls since nineteen
eighty four. Mattingly, by that time was a three time
Gold Glove first baseman, and putting aside the fact that
(30:40):
when you have a player who really is all that
on the fielding job, you don't move them if you
know what's good for you. Relocating Maddingly to the outfield
created the same problems that moving Clark would have caused,
namely that you would have had to bench one of
two future Hall of famers Henderson or Winfield. Argument was, well,
(31:01):
those guys could use the occasional rest, so we'll have
a bit of a rotation. He also said during the
rain delay the other night, I watched the highlights of
the Yankees sixty one World Championship team. They won the
championship with Johnny Blanchard and right field and Yogi Barra
in left. It didn't hurt them many. Besides, if ahead
(31:21):
of the game, you can always make a defensive switch. Now,
it is true that the Yankees off and had Yogi
Berra playing left field for a good chunk of the
nineteen sixty one World Series, he seems to have forgotten
that Roger Maris was the everyday right fielder. Blanchard made
only five starts in right, four of them late after
the race had been decided, and Mickey Mantle was hurt,
(31:42):
and so Maris played center, and yes, Mantle was unable
to go in the nineteen sixty one World Series, so
in that five game contest, yes, Maris played some center
and Blanchard played some right. That is what you call
a small sample problem, and one that Penela may or
may not have been able to get by with. If
(32:02):
the Yankees had made the nineteen eighty eight World Series,
the problem was they had to get there first, and
the nineteen sixty one Yankees were not so good that
they would have made it to the World Series without
Mickey Mantle hitting fifty four home runs over most of
the regular season. He did that very specifically because Hack
was intelligent enough and he was not the world's smartest manager,
(32:25):
but he knew not to bench him for Johnny Blanchard,
who really was kind of the Ken Phelps of the
nineteen sixty one Yankees. He hit really well, slugged six
thirteen in two hundred and seventy five played appearances, most
of them coming as one of the reserved catchers, because
the Yankees had bigger fish to fry in the outfield,
namely Mantle and Marris. I know this is obvious. I
(32:45):
will stop now. Clark did make the odd appearance in
the field after the Ken Phelps trade on July twenty fourth.
He played first base Mattinglee played left field and Phelps
was the designated hitter. This had the added bonus of
irritating Ricky Henderson, who has moved from left to center field,
which he felt was too hard on his legs and
led to injuries. That turned out to be a one
(33:07):
time experiment. Phelps started just twenty five of the sixty
eight games remaining after his acquisition. He made the most
out of his playing time, hitting two twenty four with
a three thirty nine on base percentage and a five
point fifty one slugging percentage, hitting ten home runs in
one hundred and seven at bats. It wasn't bad. It
was just redundant and disruptive, and of course, because folks
(33:28):
were more batting average oriented back then, they didn't necessarily
notice just how often he was killing the ball a
home run once every ten times up. And the Yankees
didn't win, not because they had been or were short
of left handed power, but because they were short of
right handed pitching, also left handed pitching and starting pitching
and relief pitching. You know the rest of the story.
(33:49):
With Buner. He played for the next dozen years and
hit three hundred and ten home runs, all for the
Mariners swatting forty or more every year from nineteen ninety
five through nineteen ninety seven. Was he a great player? No,
not necessarily. Was he a good one? Oh yeah? Did
he strike out a lot because he had a hitch
in his swing? Sure, but he had two fifty four
for his career, which, given power and walks and the
(34:12):
throwing arm was good enough. The TLDR of this story
is that you can't build a good team by giving
away twenty three year old top prospects for thirty three
year old platoon dhs. Everyone knew this except George Steinbrenner,
so there was a lot of agida about the trade,
including the famous rant given to Jerry Stiller on Seinfeld
(34:34):
that August Buhner came back to the stadium as a
visitor and hit a four hundred and fifty foot homer
into the centerfield bleachers in the old ballpark. Only five
hitters had done that since Yankee Stadium was renovated in
the mid nineteen seventies, and it was a bitter thing
for fans to watch. And yet we also have to
talk about what would have happened had Buhner stayed. My
(34:56):
guess is he wouldn't have been anything very much at all.
So in a sense, in trading him, the Yankees optimize
his value to them. And I know that's counterintuitive, but
I'll explain what I'm trying to say in making that
observation right after we take our second and final intermission
(35:16):
of this episode. You'll stick around, won't you. We've talked
(35:41):
about it on other episodes, so I'm not going to
spend half an hour or an hour or ten unpacking
all the examples of Steinbrenner disliking young players. The short
version is that he lacked the patience to let players
learn on the job and make mistakes, so he was
always saying integrating things about them and trading them away
(36:02):
for old guys. I don't think it's too much to
say that he hated young players. There were also definitely
players that he liked that he wanted to be friends with,
and some of them indeed may have come up through
the organization, but they had to succeed fast, otherwise he'd
say he's shown us who he really is. He spit
the bit, and the next thing that player knew he
(36:24):
was with the padres or while the Mariners as a
symbolic measure. I suggest that the Rookie of the Year
award was started in nineteen forty seven. The Yankees had
six of those awards before Steinbrenner came around. They picked
them up for Gil McDougald, Bob Grimm, Tony Kubeck, Tom Tresh,
Stan Bonsen, and Thurman Munson when George was alive and
(36:45):
running the team. They picked up two, one for Dave
Righetti in nineteen eighty one, which must have been some
sort of accident, and Derek Jeter in nineteen ninety six,
and they came very close to sending Jeter back out
to Columbus and trading for Felix for Mean. There's also
a direct correlation between this state of affairs and Steinbrenner's
(37:05):
free agent addiction, since the rule at that time was
that the signing organization forfeited its first round pick to
the organization that lost a team. The Yankees had one
regular first round pick in eleven years from nineteen seventy
nine to nineteen eighty nine. They lost their seventy nine
pick for signing Tommy John in nineteen eighty they forfeited
(37:28):
it for Rudy May nineteen eighty one, Dave Winfield nineteen
eighty two, Dave Collins nineteen eighty three. They lost their
picks in the first three rounds for, respectively, Steve Kemp,
Bob Shirley, and Don Baylor. Nineteen eighty four, they somehow
actually retained their pick, but they missed on it, selecting
a pitcher named Jeff Prize. In eighty five, they lost
(37:51):
their first round pick for signing Ed Whitson, but they
picked up Ballabon for the reasons I already mentioned. In
eighty six. They gave it up for Al Holland, in
eighty seven for Gary Ward, in eighty eight for Jack Clark,
and in nineteen eighty nine for Steve Sachs. Not only
were some of these signings disastrous and on the face
of them, not worth paying the penalty, they are why
(38:15):
they had no pitching. You can sometimes find decent position
players in the later rounds of the draft. Mattingly was
a nineteenth rounder. Ricky Henderson was a fourth round pick,
not theirs of the A's but still incredible as that seems.
They picked pali Arulo in the sixth round. Phelps, who
was drafted a bunch of times before signing out of Arizona,
State was a fifteenth round pick. Pitchers with live arms,
(38:38):
they're largely not down there, and if the Yankees had
found them, or found more than Al Lighter, a nineteen
eighty four second rounder, George would have traded them away. Heck,
they traded Al away too because of wildness and blisters,
and they needed Jesse Barfield for some reason. I liked
Jesse Barfield. Good player, even not hitting forty home runs
(39:00):
he did one time for the Blue Jays, he was
still a very good defensive outfielder, had some pop, took
his walks. I even talked to him one time and
he was very friendly and fun to converse with. But
you don't trade your one pitcher who's under thirty nine
and has a live arm for an outfielder who's been
a league average hitter over the last couple of years
(39:21):
in his cresting thirty. You just can't. You can't, that is,
but they did. And just as I mean no offense
to Barfield, I mean no offense to any of the
players who cost those draft picks. Some of them were really,
really good. Winfield is in the Hall of Fame, Tommy
John was close to that level. Clark might have gotten
there with better parks and a lot more durability, and
(39:42):
maybe it makes sense to trade a first round pick
for Winfield, a lottery ticket for Dave Winfield. But no
disrespect to All star reliever Al Holland, but you don't
trade away a first round pick to sign him. I
wouldn't do it for any reliever, and certainly no reliever
who you're not going to use in the highest leverage situation.
And they did not have that plan for Holland. Not
(40:03):
only that, but he was thirty three and ended up
pitching only twenty eight games for them. The player they
might have selected with that pick could have been with
them for ten years. I'll give you an example of that.
Although it's admittedly an outlier. This doesn't happen often with
compensation picks or any picks. But remember I said the
Yankees lost their first three picks, picks one, two, and
(40:26):
three in the nineteen eighty three draft due to free
agent signings. The Angels got their third rounder for losing
Don Baylor. Good player, Don Baylor, also nice guy in
my experience. They picked Wally Joyner with that selection, and
so the Yankees got three seasons from a thirty something
designated hitter, two of them pretty good. Conversely, the Angels
(40:49):
got Well, a super popular kid who then went on
to have sixteen major league seasons in front of him.
But then the Yankees wouldn't have known what to do
with Joiner either. He would have been another Al Morris
stuck behind Mattinglee traded for Tim Leary or the equivalent
Rick Ballaban, the pitcher thrown in or one of the
two pitchers thrown in to the Ken Phelps trade was
(41:11):
interesting in that way. Actually, the Yankees had that compensation
pick for losing Belcher placed at the very end of
the first round of the nineteen eighty five draft. They
took Balaban out of high school. He was considered a
first round talent, but he fell that far because it
was understood that he would stick to a commitment to
attend Arizona State. The Yankees gave him a two hundred
(41:33):
thousand dollars bonus to change his mind. The first overall pick,
BJ Surhoff, in comparison, got one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
So Balaban signed and he was really good at first,
pitching to a one seven fort ar in seventy two
and a third innings for low A ONEANTA. But then
he had bone chips in his elbows or elbow singular.
(41:53):
I suppose it doesn't matter if he had bone chips
in his left arm, underwent surgery and was still trying
to come back when he was in luted in the
Buner deal. His RA in the Yankee system in nineteen
eighty seven was six point nine two. With the Mariners,
we're getting decent at developing the odd pitcher. Back then.
He worked to a two eighty five ERA in one
hundred and eighty innings in nineteen eighty nine and a
(42:16):
two ninety two RA in one hundred and seventy nine
innings in nineteen ninety Now would he have recovered from
the surgery in the same way with the Yankees. My
argument is no. They lacked the patients. Therefore they lacked
the experience, which means that no matter who is on staff,
they lacked the expertise. Now at that point, he seems
(42:36):
to have broken down again with the Mariners, and he
never did make the majors. In fact, he stopped pitching
all together at twenty four and I haven't been able
to figure out what happened exactly. He was from the
Philadelphia area, and it seems like he went home and
went back to college at that point. That was after
a rough start at Triple A in nineteen ninety one
that saw him demoted to Double A, and he seems
(42:58):
to have said okay, no more. His strikeout rate dropped
from eight and a half per nine in nineteen ninety
to five in nineteen ninety one, with a concomitant near
doubling of his walk rate. And that's why I'm inferring
that maybe his arm was unhealthy again. That could have
happened in any organization to any pitcher. Of course, my
point is that the Yankees might not have been able
(43:19):
to get him to that point. As I said, they
lacked the skill, they lacked the patients, and the same
thing applies to Buner and that hitch. That was the
pinstriped excuse. They would have kept him on the bench
for old guys and blamed that rather than trying to
coach him out of it. The Mariners needed to coach
him for a while as well, and they did, but
(43:40):
it took about four years. There were some injuries and
some slumps. He didn't fully escape Triple A Calgary until
June of nineteen ninety Given the trades the Yankees made
in that period, if his development had run along parallel lines,
they would have had to resist sending him out for
del Maahorsick or throwing him into the deal that sent
an unhappy Clark away to the Post, or for mel Hall,
(44:01):
who they finally got, for Tom Brookins, who they acquired
to platune with Pali Rulo, or is Steve Balboni the
return or John Habian or Walterrell I'll stop, But there
were zero chance he wouldn't have been included zero in
one of those deals, because as soon as he started
striking out, Steinbrenner would have soured on him. And all
(44:22):
of this is counterfactual, but it seems to be rooted
in truth. Buhner for Phelps was a terrible trade, but
at the same time, trading Buhner was the only thing
the Yankees could do to realize value in him. They
were incapable of finding that value if they held on
to him. Therefore, he had greater value to all other teams. Now,
(44:44):
what the Yankees really needed to do is address that problem,
which means they needed George to go away, and that
would be arranged shortly but so long as he was
in charge dealing Buhner was the right decision because they
were incapable of acting for the right reasons in the
right way. The wrong decision, the really wrong decision in
(45:05):
this story, was moving him for a player they didn't need,
who was a short timer in another delusional attempt to
win a division title despite their overwhelming weakness in other areas.
And so the moral of the story, one man's treasure
is another man's trash. If he's insistent upon it. It's
no fun, but it's true. I hope you don't mind
(45:29):
the Yankee centric story here on Trade Deadline week at
the Infinite Inning. Who knew we were going to do that?
Was it Aristotle, Socrates or Plato who said the unexamined
life is not worth living well? The planned life is
kind of a drag in my opinion, So I just
wing it subject for further research. Why did I feel
obligated to apologize for a Yankee centric episode? Should you
wish to explore the subject with me further, you can
(45:50):
do so at Stephgoldman dot Beskuy dot social or write us,
by which I mean me at Infinite Inning at gmail
dot com and They's still a Facebook group. Our own
bespoke website is a coming. As always, this show is
brought to you by its advertisers and its Patreon supporters,
and you know I appreciate you all. Should you wish
to support the show, I do hope you'll visit Patreon
(46:11):
dot com, slash the Infinite Inning, And on that note,
I would like to welcome Ben a board. Thank you
so much. Ben. Gear of rudimentary kind available at the
hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original
soundtrack available gratis at casual Observer Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with what the proverbial moment to spare,
(46:34):
please go to the podcast of your choice and rate, review,
and subscribe. And if your podcast or doesn't let you
do those things, go out and get yourself one of
those page boy haircuts like Louise Brooks wore in the
nineteen twenties. Let folks see you and see if the
style makes a comeback. Our theme song, which you're hearing
now and happen hearing throughout the episode, was a co
(46:54):
composition of myself and doctor Rick Moring, who says what
you call sin I call the Great Spirit of Life.
You're always so distant, and yet I fear nothing. Well,
if I can convince my umbrella to stop trying to
turn a frown upside down long enough to stay dry,
then I'll be back next week with more tails from
inside the Infinite Inning
Due to breaking news, a history oriented podcast has to
throw out its notes and start over. Let me adjust
what I was going to say, And no, I'm not
referring to Nick Kurtz's line for Friday Night. Holy Moly,
what a performance. As we korene towards the twenty twenty
five trading deadline, the New York Yankees were until this
(00:22):
moment in need of a third baseman. They may or
may not have addressed that issue today as I speak
these words, it is in fact today or the day
that this news broke by picking up Ryan McMahon from
the Colorado Rockies. McMahon is a left handed hitter with
some pop and is a good glove, but also strikes
out a ton and is a career two sixteen three
(00:43):
h two three sixty two hitter away from Denver. At home,
he's hit two sixty three with a three forty three
on base percentage and a four to seventy six slugging percentage.
But it seems kind of unlikely he'll get to put
that in a suitcase and take it with him. Some
Rockies hitters have, but we won't know until he unpacks
(01:04):
that the Yankees needed help at third wasn't news. They've
been in need of a third baseman for years, at
least since the unlikely three year run of half decent
seasons at the position by Miguel Andrew Harr and gioe Urschella.
More broadly, they haven't had much stability at the position
since the decline of Alex Rodriguez. This year, Yankees' third
(01:26):
basemen are hitting two fourteen with a two ninety two
on base and a three point fifty four slugging percentage,
which is not good, although it's also not the worst
performance in the league. About a half dozen teams just
haven't been able to get anything going at the hot corner,
and that includes contenders like the Mets, Tigers, and Cubs.
There are other teams suffering even more at other positions.
(01:48):
The Rangers, on the fringes of wild card contention have
seen their designated hitters average one sixty six with seven
home runs. Jock Peterson just didn't work out, and then
he got hurt, and thus they have made the name
of the position a lie. And Royle's right fielders have
been even worse than that, primarily because they've given one
(02:09):
hundred and sixty played appearances to Jock Caglione, a highly
prized prospect, former first rounder, who while he's hitting one
forty eight two O six two eighty two, so it
seems like he's not ready. He's had a lot of
strikeouts and hit a lot of grounders, and as you know,
it is very hard to homer on a ground ball.
But hey, at least they have a prospect in Caglion.
(02:32):
The last time the Yankee succeeded in establishing a homegrown
third baseman was nineteen eighty four, when they finally gave
in to playing a kit This only after Greg Nettles
had been sent to San Diego in a Spike trade,
and then the veterans Toby Harra and Roy Smalley had failed.
They promoted the player Baseball America had ranked as their
(02:55):
eighth best prospect at that moment. Don't get too excited,
because John Elway was number one. Mike Paliarulo. Pegs held
the job for four full seasons and parts of two more,
the back half of nineteen eighty four, his rookie year,
and the first half of nineteen eighty nine, at which
point he was traded to the Padres for the Immortal.
(03:16):
While terrell I wrote about Pali Rulo at Baseball Perspectus
this week, and in brief I will say here that
he was a decent player, undone in part by platoon issues.
He was a left handed, low average power hitter, but
he could barely touch same side pitching, a problem so
acute that in one game Billy Martin sent him up
to bat right handed, even though he wasn't really a
(03:37):
switch hitter. Since the Yankees, despite trying a half dozen
different right handed hitters to pair with him, couldn't come
up with a solid partner, it just remained a vulnerability
that wasn't on him but on the team. What was
on him, perhaps was poor judgment about injuries. He began
his term in New York with good power and a
(03:57):
decent clove, but by nineteen eighty nine he just couldn't
hit anymore now once he left. He did rally to
have a fairly unexpected three hundred season as a part
timer for the Twins and Orioles in nineteen ninety three,
but that was a one off and his home run
power he had hit as many as thirty two, albeit
that total coming in the rabbit ball season of nineteen
(04:20):
eighty seven, but it never did come back. When I
say that he had poor judgment about injuries, I don't
mean that he went off road bull riding in his
free time. I mean that he tried to play through
pain when he should have just sat down. In his
rookie year, he hit two thirty eight with a two
to eighty eight on base percentage and a four to
(04:41):
forty eight slugging percentage, which made him pretty much Nettles Junior,
which is like peak Nettles minus a third of the value.
In nineteen eighty five, he was platooned with Dale bra
and Andre Robertson and hit two thirty nine with a
three twenty four on base percentage and a four to
forty two slugging percentage. He was twent twenty five. It
wasn't half bad for that era, especially when you take
(05:04):
out the helpless at bats he still had against lefties.
He hit two fifty two three thirty three four sixty
eight against the guys he was supposed to hit, and
again played a decent enough third base, but that was
when he started making the aforementioned bad decisions. In nineteen
eighty six, he was hitting two fifty seven three thirty
one five twenty nine with twenty eight home runs as
(05:27):
of the last week of August. He then suffered a
badly pulled hamstring. He decided to play through it, and
the Yankees let him play through it. He hit one
fifty six with no home runs the rest of the
way over thirty games. In nineteen eighty seven, he played
through an elbow injury so bad that he could barely
straighten his arm and couldn't throw without pain. At the
(05:49):
end of July, he was hitting two forty two three
thirty one four eighty three, but he hit only two
twenty one, two fifty nine four seventy two the rest
of the way, which is to say that he just
kept hitting home runs at a healthy rate because again,
it was a rabbit ball gear and if the hitter
made contact there was a good chance that it would
go out. Everything else, though, fell away. He finally had
(06:12):
surgery in the off season, and in nineteen eighty eight,
maybe he was still in recovery, but he just couldn't hit,
and the Yankees finally gave up on him. As I said,
he had some sporadic success as a part time third
basement for the Twins in the early nineteen nineties, was
on a championship team with them, but those injuries not
sitting down, which both ruined his numbers and seemed to
(06:33):
have had a deleterious effect on his performance, seemed to
have made the difference between a long career as the
longside of a platoon and the peripatetic career that he
ended up having. In a nineteen eighty eight interview, he said,
with regards to his resistance to giving in to his injuries,
and I'm not going to do his strong Medford, Massachusetts accent,
(06:55):
sometimes it's tough to be humble. I've just got a
lot of pride in me, a lot of debt ication.
I want to play every day, and I don't want
to let anybody down. I don't ever want to hear
anybody say that I didn't go out and do the
best that I could. Here, I experience a bit of
cognitive dissonance because his dedication is actually or was anti dedication.
(07:18):
It seems to me that if your arm hurts so
badly that it's affecting your throwing and you've stopped hitting,
then you're not doing the best that you can because
you're incapable of doing it. You may intend to, which
is an honorable thing, but you can't, and so your
intentions are vexed. They are counterproductive. The best part of
(07:40):
pride might be the Joe DiMaggio part, the part where
you can be the bigger man and get the hell
out of the way when you realize you're no longer
capable of doing the best that you could. If you
get an A plus for your intentions but an F
for your execution, then how has the team benefited? Speaking
(08:01):
of the better part of pride being knowing when to
step aside. I once got to spend a long afternoon
in George Steinbrenner's office. I had seen it described many times.
In reality, it was drab and disappointing. He supposedly had
a sign or an embroidered pillow or something, and that
pillow said lead, follow, or get out of the way.
(08:23):
I didn't see that there, but it applied to the
Yankees' third basement. At that moment. He wasn't leading, but
he didn't know how to get out of the way.
As far as following. He was tuned into one particular wavelength,
the siren song that leads directly to the infinite inning. Well,
(09:17):
hello there, and Welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning
number three forty, Steven Goldman number three forty, as well,
your convivial host for this journey to the past on
a mission to better understand the present, the time machine,
the vehicle as always being mostly but not always baseball today.
I learned, or perhaps remembered I must have known this
at the time, that in nineteen ninety one Randy Johnson
(09:40):
balked a runner from second to third. Said runner later
scoring because the Mariner moose overthrew the peanut man. The
bag fell to the turf as he was winding up,
and he was so startled he stopped his delivery. Can
you blame him? Wow? I am still marveling over that
Nick Kurtz four home run line from tonight. I have
never been I don't think I've been at a three
(10:01):
home run game. I haven't been at a no hitter.
I saw someone hit into a triple play once. That
was Chili Davis. That was fun. I know I've been
to more than one two home run game. Heck, I
was at a Mark Biento's two home run game just
last fall. No doubt the Mets wish they knew where
he put that pair of pence when I said a
few minutes ago that the Mets are one of the
teams that has been struggling at third base, he is
(10:24):
a big reason why heading into the action the night
that I am speaking, he has hit two twenty four
two seventy nine three p fifty four with six home runs,
and as he has not known for his defense, what
you see is what you get, and here is the
part of the show where I ask you how you're
doing and whether you're satisfied with what you see or
(10:46):
what you're getting. So few of us are nowadays, but
we don't know how to go about repairing our vision,
at least not in a constructive way. I had to
laugh the other day because the President announced a tariff
agreement with the Japanese government, and part of the deal
supposedly was that the Japanese were going to invest something
like one hundred billion dollars in America, which there is
(11:09):
a downside to that. Paul Krugman pointed out the downside
because that's essentially one hundred billion dollars of exports that
we don't get to see. But I'm old enough to
remember when there was a huge panic in this country
about the Japanese buying things, buying the empire, state building,
taking over. This is when they had a really hot
economy for a while. It's been pretty much in neutral
(11:32):
or rolling backwards ever since. But you might recall there
was a Michael Crichton novel or a film both with
I think Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes's detectives teaming up
to combat the perfidious, rapacious Japanese, which they weren't. They
just had a lot of cash and they were trying
to put it in places where it would become more
cash but more benignly. There was an anodyne or mostly anodyne,
(11:56):
as I recall it, Ron Howard comedy starring Michael Key,
about the Japanese buying a Detroit auto factory. Now, the
Japanese had been eating our lunch in terms of car
manufacturing for decades at that point, but they decided to
do this culture clash story. And one of the tropes
that they leaned on in that story, and I think
(12:16):
it was a trope both outside the film and within
the film as well, And I'm not sure whether it
originated in that order or the other one. It's been
a very long time and I feel pretty certain that
it's not a movie worth seeking out and revisiting. But
the idea was that when something breaks culturally, the Japanese
want to know how to fix it, and Americans don't
(12:37):
want to know how to fix it. They want to
know who to blame. And that came to mind recently
because there's been a lot of commentary about the meaning
of pedophilic sex crimes related to Jeffrey Epstein and their
magnetic appeal to the right. As we go through this
current controversy involving the President of the United States and
(12:58):
his long ago relationship with that feller, it seems like
the fixes in. I won't go down that line extensively
here except to say that I've seen various commentators point out,
among them Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo very articulately,
that the victims are never centered in the right wing
narratives about these crimes, because they're not that interested in
(13:19):
the victims. They're interested in getting licensed for vengeance, because,
after all, what would be out of bounds to do
in retaliation to those who would harm our children or
to protect our children, And if you were really lucky,
and there's a one to one overlap between those whom
you disagree with culturally or politically and those who turn
(13:42):
out to be who are revealed as people who harm children.
Then you would be relieved of the obligation to negotiate
with them, to get done with or to dispense with
policies that you want or don't want. You could just
line them up against the wall and shoot them. So
there's this weird wish fulfillment thing going on, at least
(14:04):
for some of them. You want the children to be safe,
but not retroactively. Retroactively you wish that they suffered a
lot of harm, so long as it was the right
people who inflicted that harm, because then you not only
know who to blame, you know what to do about it.
You get what I'm saying, right, It's not necessarily intuitive
because everyone involved is talking about kids. But just imagine
(14:25):
there's a turkey sub on the table in front of you.
I don't mean to compare children to turkey subs. I'm
just saying an abstract kind of problem. Well, Bob needs
a turkey sub wants a Turkey sub, and Jim needs
and wants a turkey sub, and they pretty much have
equal rights to that turkey sub and the best solution
would be for them to share it. But they don't
(14:47):
like each other very much. They don't have the same
system of values in a lot of ways that have
nothing to do with children. They both love kids in
a wholesome way. They both would die for their kids,
protect their kids. It's not about children at all. It's
just the fact that they can't see eye to eye
on most matters, and so they can't agree to share
their turkey sandwich. However, if Jim is convinced that Bob
(15:09):
is an evil man who does terrible things to kids,
then Jim is justified in doing anything that he might
do to get rid of Bob. And by the way,
now he gets to have the entire turkey sandwich to himself. Conversely,
if they could just set aside their differences and find
some middle ground and in the process agree to share
(15:31):
said sandwich, which they've been arguing about for a quarter
of a century now, or a half a century or
one hundred years, and it's long since gone off, but
it's the principle of the thing. If they could find
a way to do that, they might find that they're
not so different and their entire community might move forward.
But just like that Ron Howard Michael Keaton movie that
(15:52):
came out of that Japanese panic back oh thirty years ago,
at this point or a little more, I think we
would rather have the easy release of knowing who to
be angry at, rightly or wrongly, then we would want
to do the hard work of solving the problem. And
in an episode of this show that is greatly about
(16:13):
Yankees and prospects, well, that applied to George Steinbrenner too.
He'd rather get angry at a prospect for not being
prepared to play perfect Major League Baseball than understand that
perhaps his team, because he felt that way, was incapable
of training them up to the level that would have
(16:34):
met his demanding standards. You can't have it both ways,
and I'll talk more about that in a moment after
the break which is barreling down upon us, when we
talk about Jay Buner. You know one other note on
Mike pali Rulo. In the interview I just quoted, he
said something that to me borders on the incoherent. He said,
there are guys who play the game on good teams
(16:57):
and guys who play the game on bad teams who
put up the numbers on good teams and guys who
put up the numbers on bad teams. How do you
tell them apart? I think you do it by seeing
how much heart they have. I stared at that quote
for a while. A guy hits three point fifty with
thirty home runs on a good team, and another guy
hits three point fifty with thirty home runs on a
(17:19):
bad team. But one of them has heart and the
other doesn't. So you tell them apart by the birthmark
on their left butteck, the functional difference is zero. They
still hit three point fifty with thirty home runs each.
Something perhaps got lost in the translation, but hopefully we
won't get lost during this break. So after this brief intermission,
(17:40):
we will return to the Yankees in the nineteen eighties
and one of the most infamous trades of George Steinbrenner's
long reign of anti prospect terror. I'll see on the
other side. Okay, during that break, I stepped out for
(18:17):
a minute and my wife said, Hey, the Mets got
an Oriole as well, And I said, yeah, they got Gregorysoto,
the reliever from the Orioles. But what do you mean,
as well, and she said, didn't the Yankees get an Oriole?
I said, no, they got a Rocky, And I realized
I was just one syllable off from Charlie Brown's immortal
line of Halloween disappointment from the Peanuts Halloween Special. I
(18:38):
got a rock I guess in Yankees baseball history that
would be I got a trout. Sometimes, while watching baseball,
I'm fascinated by how every play takes at least two
players to make a good thing good or a bad
thing bad. With the caveat that hitting looks much much
easier on television than it does at the ballpark or
(18:59):
if heaven, for you're facing live pitching yourself. Sometimes you'll
see a pitcher throw a meatball down the pipe and
the hitter either swings through it or takes it, and
you say, that was it. That was the one he
was going to get this hit bat. He missed his chance.
And I don't mean it would have been your meatball,
because you are not Aaron Judge. I mean, I shouldn't
speak for anyone but myself me. I am not Aaron Judge.
(19:21):
I am not even Johnny Lamaster. The point rather is
that even if television does make hitting look a lot
easier than it is by slowing it down dramatically. If
you've watched enough baseball, you learn to recognize a center
cut fastball as it heads for the plate. You learn
to see a slider that is breaking directly into the
sweet spot for a left handed power hitter. Similarly, if
(19:43):
you watch your favorite hitters long enough, you learn their
strengths and their vulnerabilities. You know that, say, a hitter
has a weakness for high fastballs, and that if the
pitcher sequences things correctly and then throws one somewhere a
little outside and at the height of say the batter's shoulders,
he's going to miss it. But then again, sometimes that
pitch goes out. Sometimes the slider that the lefty on
(20:05):
nine days out of ten would have pulled into the
seats gets tapped to the shortstop. And to exaggerate just
a wee bid, if a batter hits thirty balls three
hundred and ninety feet and Byron Buxton pulls all thirty
of them down at the wall, that hitter is in
a bad slump. He's oh for thirty. It just happens, though,
(20:25):
that Byron Buxton was out there otherwise he's hitting on
all cylinders. So a bad pitch is only a bad
pitch if everyone cooperates, if the hitter takes advantage, and
a good pitch is only a good pitch if someone
swings and misses, and both might be moot if a
fielder gets in the way, but maybe there's a bad
fielder out there. In twenty seventeen, Jeff Samarga, pitching for
(20:48):
the Giants, allowed twelve triples, which is tied with Ubaldo
Jimenez for the most three base hits given up by
a pitcher in a single season this century. He played
in a park, the Giants Park, that promotes triples, but
his center fielder was also Denard span who had been
a pretty good defensive outfielder, but by then he was
in his thirties and had undergone two hip surgeries, which
(21:10):
tends to cut down on your movement. Statistically, that year
he was the worst defensive outfielder in the major leagues.
He played only one more season after that, and it
was in left so Marja had a four four two
ERA that year, but his fielding independent RA was only
three sixty one, which would have been the second best
full season mark of his career to that point. Unfortunately,
(21:34):
you can't disentangle the player from his context, from his
team and give him credit for things that should have
happened but didn't. And if you want a theme for
this segment, it's that prospects are like that as well.
I bring this up at trade deadline time because I
want to look at one of the most infamous Yankees
trades of all times in a different way. I'm speaking,
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of course, of Jay bunif Ken Phelps. What you thought
I was going to bring up Urban Schocker with Nick Cullop,
Joe Geddy and Fritz Mazell, less Nonamaker and fifteen grand
to the Browns for Gettysburg, Eddie Plank and Del Pratt.
I suppose I could have. I mean, Urban Schocker was
a great pitcher until you know he inconveniently died. Pratt
(22:17):
was a pretty good second baseman for the Yankees, although
passed his peak, and well Gettysburg Eddy was a Hall
of Famer, but he retired rather than go to New York.
So yeah, not their best, far from their worst. For
the record, This one, which may have been that or
it's on the list, came on July twenty first, nineteen
eighty eight, and the Yankees got, as you know, the
veteran DH and occasional first baseman Phelps in return for
(22:39):
outfielder Buner and pitching prospects Wreck Ballibon and Troy Evers
their nineteen eighty five first and second round draft picks, respectively.
Well sort of. In Ballaban's case, he was a compensation
pick due to an odd commissioner's ruling coming out of
the now defunct January Draft secondary phase. This was in
(22:59):
nineteen four. The Yankees selected pitcher Tim Belcher with the
first overall pick, but they didn't get to keep him
because of a procedural screw up. About a nanosecond after
he signed, the A's took him as a free agent
compensation pick, and that shouldn't have been allowed by the
commissioner's office. It was a paperwork mix up. But Booie
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Kune was one of the worst commissioners, which is not
saying much because all commissioners have been one of the
worst commissioners. You point me to a good baseball commissioner,
and I will point you to an imaginary story with
elves and unicorns in fast food that's healthy to eat.
I digress. On December twentieth, nineteen eighty four, the Pirates
made an awful trade of their own, with the Yankees
picking up used up outfielder Steve Kemp and infielder Tim
(23:40):
Foley in return for del Barra, Alfonso Polito, and Buner.
When the Yankees acquired Buner, he had just hit three
twenty three with a four to twenty seven on base
percentage and a five thirty seven slugging percentage as a
teenager in the New York Penn League. He continued to
slug as he climbed the ladder and had hit thirty
one homers for Triple A Columbus in nineteen eighty seven.
(24:03):
During spring training nineteen eighty eight, the Yankees listed him
with al Lighter, roberto' kelly and Hensley Bam Bam Muleins
as prospects they wouldn't trade, no matter how desperately they
needed pitching, and oh did they. Simultaneously, they had Buner
blocked because they had signed for no particular reason, just
acting spasmodically, Jack Clark to be there everyday DH They
(24:28):
also had Ricky Henderson in left field, Dave winfield and
right field, and some combination of the veterans Claudelle Washington
and Gary Ward were going to handle center, but if
that didn't work out, Roberto Kelly had DIBs on the
spot because he was the one of the prospects you
could project as a center fielder. Buner was acknowledged to
have a great arm, but he wasn't going to play
center full time in the majors, and indeed that was
(24:50):
not his destiny. And he had a hitch in his swing.
You heard that constantly, Oh God, that hitch in his swing.
How would he ever hit with that hitch in his swing?
And I swear it was coming from inside the building.
It was not opposition scouts were bemoaning the hitch in
the swing. It was the Yankees' front office and their
broadcasters got the word, and every time he came up,
(25:12):
it was, oh, that hitch in his swing. Just before
the Yankees sent him down for the final time, because
he spent parts of eighty seven and eighty eight riding
with the Mariners general manager later called the Henry Cotto
Shuttle up and down to Triple A Columbus. He struggled
quite a bit, striking out in over a third of
his hit bats, and at the moment of his last emotion,
(25:33):
he was in the midst of a one for thirty
slump with fifteen strikeouts. Oh that hitch. The Yankees had
been trying, in fact, to trade him for a while.
They had offered him to Cleveland for Mel Hall, who
was on their mind for years, and they offered him
to Pittsburgh for Tommy greg All turned out to be
a bad guy on a few different levels, including in
the clubhouse, but he did hit from time to time
(25:55):
in a platoon sort of way. I mean greg though
greg never hit in the majors, and if you look
at his minor league numbers, what they suggest is if
everything had gone right, he might have turned into sort
of a Dave Maggoten style first baseman. Ask yourself, if
under most conditions you would trade a good defensive outfielder
(26:15):
with thirty home run power for that guy. That April,
the Yankees offered buner or Mulens to the Braves for
the lefty pitcher Zane Smith. The Brave said meet. They
offered him to the Orioles with Charlie Hudson and Bobby Meacham,
two players they were desperate to get rid of in
return for the second base prospect Pete Stanisek and the
(26:37):
veteran right handed starting pitcher, former twenty game winner Mike Bodiker.
The Orioles were game, but they wanted to keep Stanasek
and have the Yankees ad Pat Clements, a lefty who
the Pirates had thrown into the Rick Rodin Doug Drebek deal.
Another nightmarish exchange for the Yankees did not happen. Bodicker
could give the Yankees a formidable right handed staffing Rick
(27:00):
Rodin and Rich Dotson in the rotation, wrote Michael Martinez
in The New York Times. Oh boy, was that could
doing some heavy lifting. And it did not require or
doesn't require the benefit of hindsight to have known that
at the time. Mike Bodiker, big curveball guy, former twenty
game winner, aler leader who was in his free agent
walk here. So the Yankees were willing to deal away
(27:21):
all those guys to be fair, two of three of
them fungible, but for a past peak pitcher who would
not have made a difference in the race. Not enough
of one, I mean. Subsequently, at the deadline, the Oriole
sent Botiker to the Red Sox instead and got back
Brady Anderson and Kurt Schillings. So yeah, good judgment. Ohs,
that was GM Roland Hemand and kudos to him. In summary,
(27:43):
though the Yankees were begging Baseball to take Jay Buhner
off their hands, Lou Panella, who Steinbrenner was bouncing between
the general manager and manager's chairs at that time, later
said that George ordered him and Bob Quinn at that
moment the titular GM, to make the deal that ultimately
satisfied them. In that regard the deal for Phelps to
(28:04):
choose between Buner and Roberto Kelly as to who to
send away. I didn't want to give up either, young outfielder,
Penella said, but George liked to move people, managers, pitching coaches,
So Buner was picked and we made the deal. Now Phelps,
he was thirty three. He had been a late bloomer,
in part because he had come to the majors through
the Royals and Expos organizations, turf teams that built around speed,
(28:28):
not slow sluggers. When he finally found his way to
the Mariners organization via purchase from the Expos, the young,
still recent expansion team gave him his first solid chance.
This after hitting a total of one hundred and fifty
one home runs in the minor leagues, including forty six
one year for Triple A Wichita, and he proved to
(28:49):
be a pretty special hitter. He was limited, but in
a way that could help you. In five hundred and
twenty nine games with Seattle, spanning nineteen eighty three through
nineteen eighty eight, Phelps hit to U fifty five with
a three to ninety nine on base percentage and a
five forty one slugging percentage against right handed pitching. Over
two hundred and fifty players had at least one thousand
(29:11):
plate appearances against righties in those same years nineteen eighty
three through nineteen eighty eight, how many had a higher
slugging percentage than mister Phelps. Your mission, should you choose
to accept it? Three Darryl Strawberry, Don Mattingley, and George Brett.
As a Mariner, he homered once every thirteen point three
at batts. That's approximately thirty eight for every five hundred
(29:35):
times at the plate, and that's a huge total, especially
for back then. So it wasn't a bad idea to
acquire Phelps in and of himself. The Yankees have been
trying to do that since nineteen eighty five. The immediate problem,
as I've already hinted, was that they had nowhere to
play him. When Phelps got the word, he in fact
called Bob Quinn and said he was excited to be
(29:57):
a Yankee, but asked, what do you need me for again?
Clark the DH and he had played right field in
first base during his career, but he wasn't great defensively,
and he tended to get hurt as importantly, you couldn't
pinch Don Mattingley so he could play first base, and
you couldn't pinch Dave Winfield so he could play right field,
and you couldn't bench Ricky Henderson so he could play left.
(30:18):
Panella's solution was to argue that Mattinglee could play the outfield.
Mattingly said, no, I told Lou I gave away my
outfielder's glove this spring. He said, I didn't think I
needed it again. I haven't taken fly balls since nineteen
eighty four. Mattingly, by that time was a three time
Gold Glove first baseman, and putting aside the fact that
(30:40):
when you have a player who really is all that
on the fielding job, you don't move them if you
know what's good for you. Relocating Maddingly to the outfield
created the same problems that moving Clark would have caused,
namely that you would have had to bench one of
two future Hall of famers Henderson or Winfield. Argument was, well,
(31:01):
those guys could use the occasional rest, so we'll have
a bit of a rotation. He also said during the
rain delay the other night, I watched the highlights of
the Yankees sixty one World Championship team. They won the
championship with Johnny Blanchard and right field and Yogi Barra
in left. It didn't hurt them many. Besides, if ahead
(31:21):
of the game, you can always make a defensive switch. Now,
it is true that the Yankees off and had Yogi
Berra playing left field for a good chunk of the
nineteen sixty one World Series, he seems to have forgotten
that Roger Maris was the everyday right fielder. Blanchard made
only five starts in right, four of them late after
the race had been decided, and Mickey Mantle was hurt,
(31:42):
and so Maris played center, and yes, Mantle was unable
to go in the nineteen sixty one World Series, so
in that five game contest, yes, Maris played some center
and Blanchard played some right. That is what you call
a small sample problem, and one that Penela may or
may not have been able to get by with. If
(32:02):
the Yankees had made the nineteen eighty eight World Series,
the problem was they had to get there first, and
the nineteen sixty one Yankees were not so good that
they would have made it to the World Series without
Mickey Mantle hitting fifty four home runs over most of
the regular season. He did that very specifically because Hack
was intelligent enough and he was not the world's smartest manager,
(32:25):
but he knew not to bench him for Johnny Blanchard,
who really was kind of the Ken Phelps of the
nineteen sixty one Yankees. He hit really well, slugged six
thirteen in two hundred and seventy five played appearances, most
of them coming as one of the reserved catchers, because
the Yankees had bigger fish to fry in the outfield,
namely Mantle and Marris. I know this is obvious. I
(32:45):
will stop now. Clark did make the odd appearance in
the field after the Ken Phelps trade on July twenty fourth.
He played first base Mattinglee played left field and Phelps
was the designated hitter. This had the added bonus of
irritating Ricky Henderson, who has moved from left to center field,
which he felt was too hard on his legs and
led to injuries. That turned out to be a one
(33:07):
time experiment. Phelps started just twenty five of the sixty
eight games remaining after his acquisition. He made the most
out of his playing time, hitting two twenty four with
a three thirty nine on base percentage and a five
point fifty one slugging percentage, hitting ten home runs in
one hundred and seven at bats. It wasn't bad. It
was just redundant and disruptive, and of course, because folks
(33:28):
were more batting average oriented back then, they didn't necessarily
notice just how often he was killing the ball a
home run once every ten times up. And the Yankees
didn't win, not because they had been or were short
of left handed power, but because they were short of
right handed pitching, also left handed pitching and starting pitching
and relief pitching. You know the rest of the story.
(33:49):
With Buner. He played for the next dozen years and
hit three hundred and ten home runs, all for the
Mariners swatting forty or more every year from nineteen ninety
five through nineteen ninety seven. Was he a great player? No,
not necessarily. Was he a good one? Oh yeah? Did
he strike out a lot because he had a hitch
in his swing? Sure, but he had two fifty four
for his career, which, given power and walks and the
(34:12):
throwing arm was good enough. The TLDR of this story
is that you can't build a good team by giving
away twenty three year old top prospects for thirty three
year old platoon dhs. Everyone knew this except George Steinbrenner,
so there was a lot of agida about the trade,
including the famous rant given to Jerry Stiller on Seinfeld
(34:34):
that August Buhner came back to the stadium as a
visitor and hit a four hundred and fifty foot homer
into the centerfield bleachers in the old ballpark. Only five
hitters had done that since Yankee Stadium was renovated in
the mid nineteen seventies, and it was a bitter thing
for fans to watch. And yet we also have to
talk about what would have happened had Buhner stayed. My
(34:56):
guess is he wouldn't have been anything very much at all.
So in a sense, in trading him, the Yankees optimize
his value to them. And I know that's counterintuitive, but
I'll explain what I'm trying to say in making that
observation right after we take our second and final intermission
(35:16):
of this episode. You'll stick around, won't you. We've talked
(35:41):
about it on other episodes, so I'm not going to
spend half an hour or an hour or ten unpacking
all the examples of Steinbrenner disliking young players. The short
version is that he lacked the patience to let players
learn on the job and make mistakes, so he was
always saying integrating things about them and trading them away
(36:02):
for old guys. I don't think it's too much to
say that he hated young players. There were also definitely
players that he liked that he wanted to be friends with,
and some of them indeed may have come up through
the organization, but they had to succeed fast, otherwise he'd
say he's shown us who he really is. He spit
the bit, and the next thing that player knew he
(36:24):
was with the padres or while the Mariners as a
symbolic measure. I suggest that the Rookie of the Year
award was started in nineteen forty seven. The Yankees had
six of those awards before Steinbrenner came around. They picked
them up for Gil McDougald, Bob Grimm, Tony Kubeck, Tom Tresh,
Stan Bonsen, and Thurman Munson when George was alive and
(36:45):
running the team. They picked up two, one for Dave
Righetti in nineteen eighty one, which must have been some
sort of accident, and Derek Jeter in nineteen ninety six,
and they came very close to sending Jeter back out
to Columbus and trading for Felix for Mean. There's also
a direct correlation between this state of affairs and Steinbrenner's
(37:05):
free agent addiction, since the rule at that time was
that the signing organization forfeited its first round pick to
the organization that lost a team. The Yankees had one
regular first round pick in eleven years from nineteen seventy
nine to nineteen eighty nine. They lost their seventy nine
pick for signing Tommy John in nineteen eighty they forfeited
(37:28):
it for Rudy May nineteen eighty one, Dave Winfield nineteen
eighty two, Dave Collins nineteen eighty three. They lost their
picks in the first three rounds for, respectively, Steve Kemp,
Bob Shirley, and Don Baylor. Nineteen eighty four, they somehow
actually retained their pick, but they missed on it, selecting
a pitcher named Jeff Prize. In eighty five, they lost
(37:51):
their first round pick for signing Ed Whitson, but they
picked up Ballabon for the reasons I already mentioned. In
eighty six. They gave it up for Al Holland, in
eighty seven for Gary Ward, in eighty eight for Jack Clark,
and in nineteen eighty nine for Steve Sachs. Not only
were some of these signings disastrous and on the face
of them, not worth paying the penalty, they are why
(38:15):
they had no pitching. You can sometimes find decent position
players in the later rounds of the draft. Mattingly was
a nineteenth rounder. Ricky Henderson was a fourth round pick,
not theirs of the A's but still incredible as that seems.
They picked pali Arulo in the sixth round. Phelps, who
was drafted a bunch of times before signing out of Arizona,
State was a fifteenth round pick. Pitchers with live arms,
(38:38):
they're largely not down there, and if the Yankees had
found them, or found more than Al Lighter, a nineteen
eighty four second rounder, George would have traded them away. Heck,
they traded Al away too because of wildness and blisters,
and they needed Jesse Barfield for some reason. I liked
Jesse Barfield. Good player, even not hitting forty home runs
(39:00):
he did one time for the Blue Jays, he was
still a very good defensive outfielder, had some pop, took
his walks. I even talked to him one time and
he was very friendly and fun to converse with. But
you don't trade your one pitcher who's under thirty nine
and has a live arm for an outfielder who's been
a league average hitter over the last couple of years
(39:21):
in his cresting thirty. You just can't. You can't, that is,
but they did. And just as I mean no offense
to Barfield, I mean no offense to any of the
players who cost those draft picks. Some of them were really,
really good. Winfield is in the Hall of Fame, Tommy
John was close to that level. Clark might have gotten
there with better parks and a lot more durability, and
(39:42):
maybe it makes sense to trade a first round pick
for Winfield, a lottery ticket for Dave Winfield. But no
disrespect to All star reliever Al Holland, but you don't
trade away a first round pick to sign him. I
wouldn't do it for any reliever, and certainly no reliever
who you're not going to use in the highest leverage situation.
And they did not have that plan for Holland. Not
(40:03):
only that, but he was thirty three and ended up
pitching only twenty eight games for them. The player they
might have selected with that pick could have been with
them for ten years. I'll give you an example of that.
Although it's admittedly an outlier. This doesn't happen often with
compensation picks or any picks. But remember I said the
Yankees lost their first three picks, picks one, two, and
(40:26):
three in the nineteen eighty three draft due to free
agent signings. The Angels got their third rounder for losing
Don Baylor. Good player, Don Baylor, also nice guy in
my experience. They picked Wally Joyner with that selection, and
so the Yankees got three seasons from a thirty something
designated hitter, two of them pretty good. Conversely, the Angels
(40:49):
got Well, a super popular kid who then went on
to have sixteen major league seasons in front of him.
But then the Yankees wouldn't have known what to do
with Joiner either. He would have been another Al Morris
stuck behind Mattinglee traded for Tim Leary or the equivalent
Rick Ballaban, the pitcher thrown in or one of the
two pitchers thrown in to the Ken Phelps trade was
(41:11):
interesting in that way. Actually, the Yankees had that compensation
pick for losing Belcher placed at the very end of
the first round of the nineteen eighty five draft. They
took Balaban out of high school. He was considered a
first round talent, but he fell that far because it
was understood that he would stick to a commitment to
attend Arizona State. The Yankees gave him a two hundred
(41:33):
thousand dollars bonus to change his mind. The first overall pick,
BJ Surhoff, in comparison, got one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
So Balaban signed and he was really good at first,
pitching to a one seven fort ar in seventy two
and a third innings for low A ONEANTA. But then
he had bone chips in his elbows or elbow singular.
(41:53):
I suppose it doesn't matter if he had bone chips
in his left arm, underwent surgery and was still trying
to come back when he was in luted in the
Buner deal. His RA in the Yankee system in nineteen
eighty seven was six point nine two. With the Mariners,
we're getting decent at developing the odd pitcher. Back then.
He worked to a two eighty five ERA in one
hundred and eighty innings in nineteen eighty nine and a
(42:16):
two ninety two RA in one hundred and seventy nine
innings in nineteen ninety Now would he have recovered from
the surgery in the same way with the Yankees. My
argument is no. They lacked the patients. Therefore they lacked
the experience, which means that no matter who is on staff,
they lacked the expertise. Now at that point, he seems
(42:36):
to have broken down again with the Mariners, and he
never did make the majors. In fact, he stopped pitching
all together at twenty four and I haven't been able
to figure out what happened exactly. He was from the
Philadelphia area, and it seems like he went home and
went back to college at that point. That was after
a rough start at Triple A in nineteen ninety one
that saw him demoted to Double A, and he seems
(42:58):
to have said okay, no more. His strikeout rate dropped
from eight and a half per nine in nineteen ninety
to five in nineteen ninety one, with a concomitant near
doubling of his walk rate. And that's why I'm inferring
that maybe his arm was unhealthy again. That could have
happened in any organization to any pitcher. Of course, my
point is that the Yankees might not have been able
(43:19):
to get him to that point. As I said, they
lacked the skill, they lacked the patients, and the same
thing applies to Buner and that hitch. That was the
pinstriped excuse. They would have kept him on the bench
for old guys and blamed that rather than trying to
coach him out of it. The Mariners needed to coach
him for a while as well, and they did, but
(43:40):
it took about four years. There were some injuries and
some slumps. He didn't fully escape Triple A Calgary until
June of nineteen ninety Given the trades the Yankees made
in that period, if his development had run along parallel lines,
they would have had to resist sending him out for
del Maahorsick or throwing him into the deal that sent
an unhappy Clark away to the Post, or for mel Hall,
(44:01):
who they finally got, for Tom Brookins, who they acquired
to platune with Pali Rulo, or is Steve Balboni the
return or John Habian or Walterrell I'll stop, But there
were zero chance he wouldn't have been included zero in
one of those deals, because as soon as he started
striking out, Steinbrenner would have soured on him. And all
(44:22):
of this is counterfactual, but it seems to be rooted
in truth. Buhner for Phelps was a terrible trade, but
at the same time, trading Buhner was the only thing
the Yankees could do to realize value in him. They
were incapable of finding that value if they held on
to him. Therefore, he had greater value to all other teams. Now,
(44:44):
what the Yankees really needed to do is address that problem,
which means they needed George to go away, and that
would be arranged shortly but so long as he was
in charge dealing Buhner was the right decision because they
were incapable of acting for the right reasons in the
right way. The wrong decision, the really wrong decision in
(45:05):
this story, was moving him for a player they didn't need,
who was a short timer in another delusional attempt to
win a division title despite their overwhelming weakness in other areas.
And so the moral of the story, one man's treasure
is another man's trash. If he's insistent upon it. It's
no fun, but it's true. I hope you don't mind
(45:29):
the Yankee centric story here on Trade Deadline week at
the Infinite Inning. Who knew we were going to do that?
Was it Aristotle, Socrates or Plato who said the unexamined
life is not worth living well? The planned life is
kind of a drag in my opinion, So I just
wing it subject for further research. Why did I feel
obligated to apologize for a Yankee centric episode? Should you
wish to explore the subject with me further, you can
(45:50):
do so at Stephgoldman dot Beskuy dot social or write us,
by which I mean me at Infinite Inning at gmail
dot com and They's still a Facebook group. Our own
bespoke website is a coming. As always, this show is
brought to you by its advertisers and its Patreon supporters,
and you know I appreciate you all. Should you wish
to support the show, I do hope you'll visit Patreon
(46:11):
dot com, slash the Infinite Inning, And on that note,
I would like to welcome Ben a board. Thank you
so much. Ben. Gear of rudimentary kind available at the
hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original
soundtrack available gratis at casual Observer Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with what the proverbial moment to spare,
(46:34):
please go to the podcast of your choice and rate, review,
and subscribe. And if your podcast or doesn't let you
do those things, go out and get yourself one of
those page boy haircuts like Louise Brooks wore in the
nineteen twenties. Let folks see you and see if the
style makes a comeback. Our theme song, which you're hearing
now and happen hearing throughout the episode, was a co
(46:54):
composition of myself and doctor Rick Moring, who says what
you call sin I call the Great Spirit of Life.
You're always so distant, and yet I fear nothing. Well,
if I can convince my umbrella to stop trying to
turn a frown upside down long enough to stay dry,
then I'll be back next week with more tails from
inside the Infinite Inning
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