Infinite Inning 341: Oh Say Can You See Bad Yankees Trades

We’re back after an unanticipated medical time out! Casey Stengel gives a medical report and so does the host; why the bad parts of American history give meaning to the good parts, and vice-versa; a whirlwind tour of Pirates-Yankees trades, including one that should have happened but was preempted by an overzealous commissioner.

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

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Crowd and field noise before and during homerun hit at MLB baseball stadium by bmadore

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My Mi, I am so out of practice. There is
no rehab assignment when you're a podcaster. I guess someone
else could have invited me on to their show to
let me limber up a little bit. But now that
I think about it, I might not have been up
to doing it. Well, we'll get back to that in
a minute. Let's start somewhere where we're all comfortable. That

(00:20):
Casey Stengele, Hall of Fame manager of the Dodgers, Braves, Yankees,
and Mets was still working at age seventy five in
nineteen sixty five was quite the accomplishment, given that the
life expectancy of a man born in eighteen ninety wasn't
anything like seventy five years old, never mind an active
seventy five An active seventy five year old who not

(00:43):
only had to fly all around the country every baseball season,
but was an avid smoker and drinker as well. I
always think of President Franklin Roosevelt, who was born in
eighteen eighty two, so eight years before Casey, but died
in nineteen forty five, thirty years before he did. Now,
he had some famous comorbidities, obviously, so he's not the

(01:03):
best example He's just another flawed hero of mine, so
easy for me to remember. How about some actors. Frank Morgan.
You may not remember him by name, but he was
a standby, particularly for MGM pictures in the forties and fifties.
He was a leading man in the Silent Days. If
I recall correctly, you might have seen him in the
Lubitch classic The Shop Around the Corner. But hell, every

(01:25):
American I would think has seen The Wizard of Oz
nineteen thirty nine. He played the Wizard to Judy Garland's Dorothy.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. That
was him. He was born eighteen ninety died nineteen forty nine,
the same year Casey won his first World Series with
the Yankees. Stan Laurel the brains and half the talent
behind Laurel and Hardy born June sixteenth, eighteen ninety died

(01:49):
nineteen sixty five, about a month before a broken hip
finally forced Casey into retirement. Horror writer Bigot and I
Am Providence, Rhode Island, and Weirdo HP Lovecraft, born about
a month after Casey died in nineteen thirty seven. While
Casey spent an enforced year off being paid by the
Dodgers not to manage and looking after his oil investments.

(02:13):
President Dwight D. Eisenhower aike born in Texas in eighteen
ninety but brought up in Abilene, Kansas, only about one
hundred and fifty miles from where Casey was growing up
in Kansas City. Like Casey, he smoked all the cigarettes,
and for a while he was subjected to probably more
stress than any human has ever endured, trying to manage

(02:35):
the coalition that won World War II. He checked out
in nineteen sixty nine. Of the two other Hall of
Fame ballplayers born in eighteen ninety, the outfielders Max Carrey
and Sam Rice, the former survived Casey by a little
less than a year. He was also his predecessor with

(02:55):
the Brooklyn Dodgers as manager. The other Ris predeceased him
by the same amount of time. Now that's not to
say that Casey the old man didn't have any health
problems even before the broken hip. And I'm not just
talking about the uninsured driver who ran him down on
a rainy day as he crossed or attempted to cross
Boston's Kenmore Square during the War. Your attempt at suicide

(03:18):
understood wired his friend Frankie Frisch or the time in
nineteen twenty two, he was hitting the head by Cubs
pitcher Virgil Chieves, and as he remembered, it felt okay
until after the game, when he and some fellow giants
were in a speakeasy and he started coughing up blood.
Then I did get scared, he said, And I said
to Irish Musal, for heaven's sake, get me out of here,

(03:39):
because I do not wish to die in a saloon.
So they helped me back to the hotel and I
went to bed, and that's when they found out my
skull was fractured. As May nineteen sixty gave way to June,
he felt off that year would be both his last
pennant and his last season with the Yankees. He was seventy,
which made him the oldest manager to take a team

(03:59):
to the World Series to that point in time, and
it seems like he almost didn't make it. He was
perhaps suffering from some kind of hard to shake virus
which I quote settled in his kidneys. At his age,
it could have been something dire, and so he was
sent to the hospital. It took about ten days for
the thing to run its course. He went into the
hospital about May thirty first, was released roughly six days later, and,

(04:24):
after resting another couple of days at home, rejoined the team.
It went three to four under his substitute Ralph Houck.
Never mind that, though what did the doctor say, Casey?
They examined all my organs. Some of them are quite remarkable,
and others are not so good. A lot of museums
are bidding for them. That's how I have felt for

(04:44):
the last three weeks, having just been through a similar experience.
And so I am reminded not just of Casey's deflection
as to his physical condition, which was bad enough that
it might have kept him from taking the Detroit Tiger's
job in nineteen sixty one after he he left the Yankees,
but also his remark, after his long career had finally

(05:05):
concluded that if he had it to do all over again,
he would not be a manager. He would choose to
be an astronaut Meto Casey, and then we could together
or separately, amur rocket at the second note that one
is hiding neverland. So make that third star to the
right and blast off for the infinite inning. Well, hello there,

(06:07):
and welcome back to the show. Oh my goodness, welcome
you back, Welcome me back, Welcome us all back. Welcome
the cat, the dog, the parakeet, whoever is with you
watching this show, the wife, the child, the husband, the
best friend, the orphan you found along the side of
the road, the plucky orphan who you are now helping
in their adventures to recover the fortune that was stolen

(06:30):
from them by their late father's business partner. I said
watching this podcast, didn't I Watching it is entirely optional
because there is no visual There is only audio. I
realize that makes us self defeating in some way, but
you really don't want to see me right now. If ever,
my voice definitely sounds better than I look or I feel.

(06:51):
I in case you've forgotten, Am Stephen Goldman, York can
vivial host for as always a mission to better understand
the present via a trip to the past, the time
machine being for the most part, the game of baseball
a microcosma of the rest of our American world. And yes,
it's been a while, I have been away. If you

(07:12):
happen to hear the last reissue episode, or are in
the Facebook group, or you are a Patreon supporter, then
you likely saw my message that I was on the
injured list. I had surgery three weeks ago today, and
I was so naive about this procedure, and I won't

(07:33):
be coy about it. I'll tell you more about it
in a minute, because I hope that I can help
some people who might be suffering from the same problem
that I did, which was a problem that a flicks
men of a certain age, which, whether I like it
or not, I happen to be. The reason that I
say I was naive is that this was an outpatient procedure,

(07:54):
and the brochures that they give you and the lecture
that you get from your doctor and so on emphasize
is that this is a relatively low impact thing. And
what I convinced myself of was that I would be
back on my feet within a matter of oh, twenty
four to forty eight hours, and so I didn't build
in any time off, particularly for this program, and in retrospect,

(08:17):
I don't know where I got that from, because even
the propaganda says most people are back to normal activities
within a week. I would like to meet those people,
because I don't think it happens I've read a lot
of testimony subsequently from people who had this procedure, and
like me, they weren't having any fun after a week,
certainly not after twenty four to forty eight hours. And

(08:41):
I should have known from baseball that when anyone says,
on average, well, some days lou Garrett goes for for
four and some days he goes, oh, for four, and
you don't know what you're gonna get when you buy
your ticket. And for me, now that I'm on almost
exactly twenty one days, I've definitely made progress. But an
accurate prediction would have said you'll feel better in a month.

(09:04):
Back in June, The New Yorker published a David Sidaris
story about his partner Hugh undergoing hip replacement surgery, which
is a famously punishing experience, and Sidaris, or the Sidaris character,
feels put out because Hugh does all their cooking and
he Sidaris, doesn't want to accept that that task will

(09:24):
now fall to him. I'm sure there are people who
recover from hip replacement in a matter of days. You
just don't hear about them. He says. I wasn't that
naive or that wilfully naive, but I was close. And
whereas it's not like I did no research before heading
into this experience, it was only after that I discovered

(09:44):
a Reddit board devoted to this great, supposedly easy, comfortable procedure,
in which virtually every poster said he regretted having it
and was dealing with any of a number of dire
after effects. I wouldn't characterize my own. Well, let me
take that back. There were some kind of dire moments.
As I said, I want to talk about this, but

(10:05):
I figure that if some of you are squeamish or
you don't want to have to explain this to your
kid or the cat or that other long list of
folks I said might be listening with you right now,
you can just skip ahead a couple of minutes. As
I said, I'm a middle aged male, and like a
lot of folks who fit that description, I've been suffering
from an enlarged prostate for a while. For those of

(10:27):
you who are new to the whole prostate experience, it
is a part of the male reproductive system. It's a
gland that produces semen. And while I am not going
to describe the entire process of making a baby for you,
what I do want to say is that you know
how sometimes religious extremists like to argue with evolution by
saying parts of the body, such as the eye, are

(10:49):
too complicated to have been produced over a period of
thousands of years via natural selection. Do you think nature
could just make a camera. There had to be someone
designed that thing. There had to be an intelligent designer.
That's pretty easily refuted, actually, and eyes are a great
example of evolution because you start with a light sensitive

(11:12):
cell somewhere and a creature that has some vague light
sensitivity and being partially blind. I can tell you that
having some vague white perceptivity is a lot better than
having none. And so the primitive critter that can see
a tiny, tiny bit has a better chance of surviving
and passing on its genes than one that can't see

(11:32):
at all. And they get together and create offspring that
can see a little bit better, and again the ones
that don't see as well, they are predated upon, they
do not get to pass on their genes, and you
kind of build up words again over a process of ears.
But I will also point out that the body is
full of examples of unintelligent design, specifically dual use plumbing.

(11:56):
If your air duct and your food intake we're not
located in the same place, there would never be a
need for a Heimlich maneuver. Similarly, having one's reproductive and
waste elimination system all jammed together in the same space
and making use of the same passages is just pure laziness.
One's bladder sits just above the prostate. The prostate hugs

(12:19):
the tube bleeding out of the bladder, commonly called the urethra.
This is fine when you're a young fellow and the
prostate's only twenty or twenty five grams, but as you
get to be my age, there is the potential of
a medical issue called benign prostate hyperplasia BPH, meaning that
the damn thing inexplicably gets bigger, as if you've exercised

(12:39):
it too much. I've had a happy life that way,
but not that happy. It just happens. It happened in
a very severe way to my father, and so I
always thought it likely that it would be a problem
for me at some point in my life. And that point,
over the last oh I don't know year, but probably longer,
it has arrived. And when the thing gets larger, it

(13:01):
starts to choke off your ability to eliminate liquid from
your body. I don't know why they call it benign,
since it's not benign at all, but I guess they're
trying to differentiate between that prostate problem and prostate cancer,
which of course can off you, which is yet another
way that this completely hidden gland. There's another aspect of
unintelligent design that we have invisible parts and no dummy lights,

(13:25):
no warning system, and with some things, by the time
you say, ow, what is that, it's too late. If
you just allow it to get worse and worse, this
so called benign issue can cause a lot of damage
to you, first of all, because it damages the bladder
because essentially the bladder gets backed up and has to

(13:45):
work twice as hard, and eventually it can just turn
off the faucet all together through closing that passage, and
then you're in trouble. That's an er visit. You know.
There's a famous story that may or may not be
true about the astronomer type Gobrahi, that he died from
some version of this, some version of his plumbing not

(14:06):
being open enough, and he was at some formal event
and he didn't want to get up to try to
relieve himself or he was unable to and he became
an overfilled water balloon and eventually just went. That seems
like a very unpleasant way to go. And unfortunately, because
my poor late dad had so many illnesses that prevented

(14:28):
him from receiving certain treatments for certain medical issues, he
couldn't address this the way that I've been able to
address this now. So he kind of got to that
Tycho Brahi place a number of times. And there are
artificial ways of plumbing that blockage, which and I've just
had some experience with that coming out of the surgery

(14:49):
are spectacularly uncomfortable, painful. There are also medications for this,
but they're not a fix. They treat the symptoms but
not the problem, and ultimately the gland itself has to
be dealt with. Fortunately, there are a variety of options
at that point, and all of them have downsides because
there's a non zero chance that the outcome will affect

(15:11):
either your elimination or your sex life. And I've always
liked both about how I had them prior to this episode.
I prefer to keep enjoying them as I have enjoyed
them and so I chose a relatively new. By relatively new,
I mean about ten to fifteen years old procedure that
is supposed to have the least risk of harming things
and the greatest chance of improving things without doing any damage.

(15:33):
And it's been, as I said, about three weeks, and
everything seems to be headed in the right direction. But
I'm not back to normal either, mainly in the sense
that it's been uncomfortable for me to sit here in
front of my microphone for long periods of time. And
I've been talking to you now for over fifteen minutes
and I'm about at my limit. You won't know that,

(15:54):
because at some point I will pause and kind of
move around a bit and reload. So to reload is
probably a bad terment in this context, but you get
the idea, limber up, give things a rest. I even
have a special pillow and everything, But no matter what
I do, the pressure is in all the wrong places.
If you look at a diagram of the body, male

(16:15):
or female, albeit the female one lacks that particular organ
They've got fun problematic organs of their own, you'll see
that everything is jammed up together. And I find it
a wonder that anyone can ever sit down. I tell
you it's just an unintelligent design. Some of this equipment
should be like in a pack on your back, or

(16:35):
the equivalent thereof. And I tell you all of this
because if you're a male of a certain age and
you find yourself getting up a lot at night to
go to the bathroom, because that's one aspect of how
things start to change for us as we get pasted
or into it in past our forties. A lot of
people think that's an inevitable part of aging, but actually
it may be an expression of this sort of problem.

(16:58):
And the good thing about the timing of what I
chose to do, being resolute about having to face it,
is that you're only a candidate for this lower impact
procedure that I had while your gland is under a
certain size. Once you get to a death star proportion,
they no longer can do that. They have to do

(17:20):
something more radical, and that has more risks to those
systems that I just described. So time is of the essence.
And let me say this much that even though the
aftermath was much more uncomfortable than I thought it would be,
I have also stopped getting up to go to the
bathroom approximately twenty nine times a night, which means that

(17:41):
I rest better and in some profound way, I feel better.
And the doctors promised me that as things continue to
heal and calm down, that I will just get to
keep enjoying that without any of these other consequences that
I've been experiencing. And it is getting better, as evidenced
by the fact that again I have been speaking to
you now for almost eighteen minutes, and three weeks ago

(18:01):
I could not sit here at all, and two weeks
ago I could only sit here for a couple of
minutes at a time before feeling like I needed to
run away. And now I'm going to be able to
progress through the program and have a conversation with you,
which is of course the thing that I most look
forward to doing every week. So look, whereas I don't
apologize for taking care of my health in a way

(18:24):
that I needed to, I do apologize for not understanding
just what I was about to go through, and therefore
not banking a bunch of mini episodes with more stories
for you so that the experience, while painful for me,
would not be painful for you. I don't ever want
you to feel abandoned, and certainly one of the prime

(18:45):
directors of podcasting is simply to be there. And as
you know, I've tried very very hard to keep the
show on its regular Friday schedule going back a long
time now, and it really broke my heart, among other
pieces me that I was going to have to break
the role that we were on together. And I really

(19:06):
do hope that you understand. And just again, I don't
want to dissuade anyone who might eventually need to consider
this sort of procedure by saying that the aftermath was uncomfortable.
Some people definitely have an easier time of it than
I did. I just got lucky, I guess, and I

(19:27):
do firmly believe that this was the right thing to do,
and that in the long term I will be very
happy that I did it. Having said all that, it's
time to move on to the second act of the show,
and I need to ask your indulgence again because the surgery,
this was brilliant planning on my part, took place directly
after the trading deadline, and my intention was to have

(19:50):
a show out immediately thereafter that reflected on it, and
since just before I heard the anesthesiologist say breathe deeply
as he shoved ah Me mask onto my face so
hard that it actually cut me under the eyes. Good
old Brian Cashman traded for, among others, David Bednar, the
Pirates closer. I thought I would review the long and

(20:13):
colorful history of Yankees Pirates trades with a few remarks thereupon.
It's not the most well allegorical episode that I've ever done.
It's certainly not the most political. It is just kind
of baseball wonkiness. But I thought as a change of pace,
you might enjoy that. And since sitting here has been
a problem, I certainly haven't had time to research and

(20:35):
write a whole new episode, and so I'm going to
stick with what I had planned, a look back at
one hundred years of Pirates Yankee swaps and see what
conclusions we can draw from well, a lidany of good
and bad, mostly bad, I would say trades, but I
suppose that depends on your point of view and which

(20:56):
side of the equation you find yourself on, or at
least which team you find yourself rooting for. So finally,
for the first time in three weeks, we will pause
for this brief intermission, and on the other side, we
will consider the art of team building or team deconstruction
through the lens of New York and Pittsburgh. You've waited

(21:18):
this long, so you'll wait till we get to the
other side, won't you. I do thank you so much?

(21:41):
So did you take a break during that brief intermission?
I took a break. I promised my break was longer
than your break, unless you went away for a day
or a week or something. I haven't been gone that long,
but I gave my body a chance to be comfortable
with being all folded up here again. And I am
ready and raring to go, and I hope you are

(22:02):
as well. How often is one really raring in their life? Like?
Are you raring to go to McDonald's? Do you rare
on a daily basis? Is that too personal a question,
because I'm not sure in what context we rare? I
do want to say this much off topic. While I
was gone, I was thinking about this. I said before
the break that this is not one of those episodes

(22:25):
of the infinite Inning in which I'm trying to construct
an elaborate analogy from baseball to our historical or current situation.
Our way of living today. As you know, we could
do that. We could do that every week. Here's how
Babe Ruth reacted to the nineteen thirty two presidential election

(22:45):
Herbert Hoover versus Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Here is how, and
I returned to this subject at Baseball Perspectives fairly recently.
Here is how the nineteenth century outfielder Pete Browning was
affected by living in a version of our culture in
which destroying yourself was just something that one did, and

(23:06):
it was kind of a private decision, and one was
looked upon with judgment but not necessarily empathy. And that
was true until fairly recently. And we've told that story
in a number of different ways, including with the tales
of notable giants pitchers, Bugs Raymond, and shuffling Phil Douglas,
I feel like, if you have to explain to people

(23:27):
why letting someone drown in their own psychological problems is
a poor leading indicator for society as a whole. If
you have to explain why kicking the least and poorest
among us while they're down suggests a meaner, crueler version
of America for everyone, I feel like, if you have

(23:48):
to explain why the erosion of one person's rights eventually
normalizes the erosion of everyone's rights. Then you've already lost.
Right before I came on here, I was looking at
an essay by the author Clint Smith in The Atlantic
called Actually, Slavery was Very Bad. Clint Smith wrote a

(24:09):
tremendous book a couple of years ago called How the
Story Is Told, which is about the remembrance of slavery
in this country, and he was reacting in this essay
to our current elected leader's truth social post decrying the
Smithsonian Institution's emphasis on slavery being bad. You know, the

(24:31):
Smithsonian is a very large operation, and a lot of
it just emphasizes pandas or dinosaur skeletons. And if you
walk into the National Museum of American History, which has
always been a weirdly disjointed, disorganized experience, the first thing
you see, actually is the star spangled banner, the flag,

(24:51):
the literal flag that flew over Fort McHenry during a
bombardment of the fort by British ships during the War
of eighteen tw Well, that was observed by a lawyer,
Francis Scott Key, and it inspired him to write the
poem that became our national anthem. The anthem itself is
just his set of verses set to an English drinking song.

(25:15):
Francis Scott Key was a slaveholder, and a lot of
the inspiration for the War of eighteen twelve was not
as we are often taught about British interference with American shipping.
The East Coast states were against the War of eighteen twelve,
and some argued they should secede rather than participate in it.
It was the Western States agitating for that, and it

(25:37):
was because the British were propping up the Native Americans
on the frontier, and the Western States wanted to steamroller
those guys, but they weren't free to do it. Does
the Smithsonian give you that information that background. Hell no.
They just every fifteen minutes drop a protective scrim on
the thing because it's rather fragile, and they play a
snippet of that drinking song, which always makes you want

(26:00):
to shout play ball as it gets to the end.
That's its main use. Its main use is to signify
that a ballgame is about to begin. And then the
scrim goes back up and it's not quite so bad
that you exit through the gift shop at that point,
but you go on to the rest of the museum,
which has incredibly challenging exhibits on American history, like here
are all the gowns the first Ladies wore at their

(26:21):
inaugural balls. Over the years I have gone there, I
have seen exhibits on Superman and the Peanuts comic strip.
I have seen exhibits on Mash. When Mash went away,
that was a long time ago. I'm not sure if
they still have this victuring out there, this cabinet which
has a whole lot of television artifacts in it, which

(26:42):
probably mean increasingly little to visitors as time goes on.
But it had Howdy Duty in it, and the Fonds's
jacket and the roster board from Barney Miller, and Archie
Bunker's chair and so on. They had poor Kermit the
Frog there under glass for a long time, orphaned by
his father far too early in life. I remember going

(27:04):
there in the mid eighties and seeing one of the
cars from Blade Runner as part of an exhibit on design.
I remember taking my kids there some years ago and
seeing one of the Michael Keaton erab batmobiles. Have I
mentioned slavery yet No because it ain't there. They've got
ancient dynamos and train engines and mockups of pharmacies from

(27:25):
the eighteen eighties and musical instruments from one hundred and
fifty years ago. But in no way is slavery centered.
It's safer for them that way. But what there is
now is a National Museum of African American History and Culture,
and our leader objects to that museum focusing on slavery

(27:47):
and Jim Crow and so on as central to the
experience of those Americans, as if any American history that
doesn't start with the Pilgrims and just sort of blanketly, blanketly,
is that an advert blank it's all of us with
that single story. Every other version of it is illegitimate.
But of course that's the real story of freedom that

(28:09):
in every generation we've expanded the definition of who it
applies to. It's a tug of war that's been fought
over three hundred plus years. It's not just given. Sometimes
it's taken or demanded, and eventually sometimes it wins out.
And so this is paradoxical. But in a sense, slavery
and segregation are both the greatest crime in American history.

(28:32):
The central story of American history. But the fact that
we do build memorials to it, that we do acknowledge it,
that we put the manacles and the chains in museums
and say never again, we were wrong, but we know
better now, that is our crowning glory. The problem for some,

(28:54):
of course, is they don't like to ever acknowledge that
the country is flawed. If you say that our freedom,
our story is incomplete, then it opens you to being asked,
what else can we do? How do we further promote
how do we further expand the story of democracy and freedom?
And of course they perceive it as one person's increased

(29:18):
freedom means another person's lessened freedom. One person's increased share
of the national economic pie means another person's decreased share,
even if they are still going to be ungodly wealthy
once all is said and done. That's a very selfish
and narrow way of looking at it, and it's just
kind of primitivism, and it wears a lot of costumes

(29:39):
over the thousands of years of human history. But you know,
going back to when some human beings decided, you know,
we're not going to be hunter gatherers anymore. We're not
going to wander through the woods in the fields chasing
buys in or pulling sour apples off of trees. We're
going to plant wheat. Okay, there were some humans who said,
you do that. We prefer the hunting bison lifestyle. We

(30:02):
kind of like those sour apples. And there were others
who said, look at those morons over there sitting on
that one patch of dirt and making themselves vulnerable. They
got one thing right, Let's not hunt bison anymore. The
bison fight back sometimes, let's hunt them. And as soon
as they've taken that wheat and smash it into flour
and therefore bread, let's just go take it. Ever see
the movie The Magnificent Seven, the original with Yil Brenner.

(30:25):
So those primitive humans they do what the characters in
that movie did. They hire cops essentially to fight off
the former bison guys now turned predators, turned rustlers or thieves,
and they pass laws and they create stone tablets that
say thou shalt not bonk the wheat farmer on the
head and steal the fruit of his labor. And so

(30:47):
the former bison hunters now land pirates, now terrorists, they
get together and they say, okay, you know what, You're
right about that, mister farmer. That was wrong of us.
But what if the we question was black? What if
he were Jewish, what if he were gay? What if
he were all three? What if he were a woman,
then it would be okay, right. And the wheat farmers

(31:08):
look at themselves and they say, doing any of us,
none of us answer to any of those categories, right,
And so I guess it's okay. It still feels a
little awkward, though, And the wheat pirates they say, well, wait,
we've got scripture. Our greatest priests have talked to the
Almighty and he says that those groups it's okay to
bank them on the head and steal their stuff because

(31:29):
they're not all right. They are failed experiments, they are unholy,
they're unclean. And the wheat farmers say, well, yeah, that
we buy that. But not all of us are religious.
Some of us are more into scientific validation. And the
wheat pirates they come back and they say, well, we've
got that too. We made a chart and we've classified
everyone and everything from the smallest ant to the greatest dape,

(31:52):
and we've set up a hierarchy of humans in it
according to the latest data, and you can see that
white male Europeans they are the nie plus ultra of
the animal kingdom, and all those other groups we mentioned,
they're down here below the ants. It's weird, but it's true.
You can't dispute it. It's science. And the week I say, great,

(32:14):
so let's set up some lunch counters and we'll tell
those other guys that they can't come in. Time goes
by and everyone forgets because it becomes habitual to believe
these things, because some people teach others that these things
are indisputably true, and it just becomes second nature to
know it, and then the process of unlearning becomes such

(32:38):
a heavy lift thinking about it. I just talked about
lunch counters. One aspect of this history that you can
see at the National Museum of American History, at least
I assume that the furor has not pulled it out yet,
is a lunch counter which once resided. It's the literal
counter and four chairs that once resided in a Greensboro,

(32:59):
North CAROLINAE. Woolworth. I haven't heard it mentioned by our
leadership yet, but they'll get round to it. Here's what
the Smithsonian website says. Beneath a picture of that lunch counter,
tell me where the lie is. It says racial segregation
was still legal in the United States on February first,
nineteen sixty when four African American college students sat down

(33:22):
at this Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, politely asking
for service at this white's only counter. Their request was refused.
When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their
sit in drew national attention and helped ignite a youth
led movement to challenge inequality throughout the South. In Greensboro,

(33:42):
hundreds of students, civil rights organizations, churches, and members of
the community joined in a six month long protest. Their
commitment ultimately led to the desegregation of the F. W.
Woolworth lunch counter on July twenty fifth, nineteen sixty As A.
Blair Junior, Jabriel Kazan, Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil,

(34:04):
and David L. Richmond were students enrolled at the North
Carolina Agricultural and Technical College when they began their protest.
Protests such as this led to the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty four, which finally outlawed
racial segregation in public accommodations. Again, where is the lie?
Where is the thing that's inaccurate? And again there is

(34:24):
our glorious history of first ladies wearing expensive dresses and
the star spangled banner. If this is not the kind
of American history that you're willing to learn about, they
have Ike's Ike jacket, Eisenhower jacket. I guess they called
them Eisenhower jackets. He was a smaller guy than I thought.
And of course the Batmobile are greatest crime fighter of

(34:46):
all time, beating up on poor people, billionaire beating up
on poor people. I love Batman. But it's true it's
been gone for a long time now, but they used
to have an old fashioned ice cream parlor downstairs. That
was a lot of fun. And so as with every
place you go to, whether it's a National museum or
a cracker barrel, you can see what you want to
see and experience it the way you want to experience it,

(35:07):
and disregard what you don't like, or refuse to learn
from it, or painfully squeeze your eyes shut when it
offends you. But to demand that what you don't like.
Be erased is a very sinister kind of thinking, because
you're erasing evidence of a crime, You're erasing knowledge that
it was a crime. You're erasing, yes, the very legitimate

(35:30):
guilt that one inherits. As part of being a claimant
to the entire American pageant, all the good stuff, All
those Thanksgiving turkeys were sorry turkeys. Every syllable of we
hold these truth is to be self evident that all
men are created equal. You get the other stuff too,
as part of the package, and learning to hold contradictory

(35:50):
thoughts in your head, whether about your mom or about
your country. We are really great, but we let you down.
Sometimes we try really hard to do the right thing,
but we're also disappointing, and sometimes we fail. Every single
human being you've ever met answers to those terms, and
so does every single country. And in that same way.
And I think I've used this example before. France, for example,

(36:13):
gets liberty, fraternity egalite. I think I've got the order
wrong there, but you get my point. They also get
the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre. And I can get up
from this chair right now and pull out any of
a half dozen books on the Vietnam War from my
shelves and point out pictures of French soldiers happily standing
next to the decapitated bodies of Vietnamese citizens who used

(36:34):
to be part of their empire. So again, to come
full circle. And I know I've been trying to do
that for a while, and I apologize if I've been
overly discursive. But to come back to mister Smith's essay,
if you're in the position of having to explain to
people who might not have studied it as much as
you have, slavery was actually really bad, then you're in
a dire place to begin with. The unlearning has happened.

(36:58):
It's the same thing as with the Holocaust. We can
say the Holocaust and it's just a sound that comes
out of our mouths, and we can even read about
it lightly, and gee, it sounds pretty bad, doesn't it.
But when you get into it on a granular level,
in the day to day experience of people living under
that kind of terror, it was worse than anything you

(37:19):
can possibly imagine. Try to personalize it. Try to imagine
it and personalize it. If you've never done that before,
imagine saying to yourself, pick any age of your life.
If you're me, you're a parent, you're an adult. You say, well,
here's my life as I'm living it. Every morning the
alarm clock goes off, I have some coffee, maybe I
have some eggs, and then I get to work. But

(37:41):
the boots, the brown shirts, they showed up at my
door today. I was told that I have to move
in all my family. Likewise, my children have already been collected.
My life as I knew it for the last half
century is permanently over. When and if I return to
this spot, should I be so fortunate as to survive,
I will find that all my goods have been sold,

(38:02):
and that my house is owned by someone else who
bought it at auction for a dollar. We have been
allowed to pack a few socks and a couple of
other precious items, and now we are being loaded onto
a train. We got off after a very harrowing train journey.
At the platform, they separated my wife and daughter from
myself and my son. I never saw them again. I
learned after it was all over that they were immediately guessed.

(38:24):
My elderly parents, who went out on a prior train
and I thought would be waiting for us here are
also already dead. I never got to say goodbye. And
I'm going to stop here because this is too painful
for me to do, and because I know people who
experienced this, relatives of mine who did not live to
tell the tale, and people who I met who did.

(38:46):
Did they have normal days after that having survived it? Yeah?
Not many, And I would say that every moment of
their lives were in some sense inflected by the terror.
But I am asking you, I am sincerely asking you
to find some quiet space in the day days of
your life, some five minutes somewhere, maybe in the dark,
maybe before you fall asleep one night. Personalize it, try

(39:08):
to live it in your mind. And if that doesn't
work for you, then try the American version, which means
being a Native American at Sand Creek, or being a
Union Soldier of Color at Fort Pillow, or simply being
on an auction block in Baltimore or Washington or New
Orleans or Natchez and having your child pulled out of

(39:30):
your arms so some stranger can squeeze your thighs and
inspect your teeth preliminary to buying you. And then you
are sent to God knows where, and you never see
your children again. And in that time, by the way,
a firm cap has been placed on your life span,
firmer than whatever the actuarial tables of the time would

(39:51):
have said that your life span would have been. Because
you are about to be worked to death. That is
as much America as the invention of the telegraph or
this steam engine, or the light bulb, or the fact
that we won the Battle of the bulge, and the
immigrant stories one way or another of Hans Wagner and
Babe Ruth and Lou Garrick and Jolton Joe DiMaggio. We

(40:15):
need to know both things. We need to be able
to say or think simultaneously. I want to be, as
Casey Stengel said someone for the United States. I want
to write things as elevating of the cause of freedom,
as Thomas Jefferson did. But hell no, do I want
to be like Thomas Jefferson, a rape slaveholder. We need

(40:36):
to have both in our memories. We need to know
that when the umpire does say play ball at the
end of the Star Spangled banner, that the invitation was
at one time not open to anyone who wanted to play,
but it is today and that's a great thing. And
to acknowledge that it once wasn't true is to be

(40:57):
proud of our country, because now it is. The latter
without the former is meaningless. It's just jingoism. It's just
pride and the thing because you're told to be proud
of it. Did you ever have a really hard course
in school and in the first quarter you got a
D or an F and you said to yourself or
your folks, look, I underestimated how hard that was going
to be. I admit I didn't study enough. But I

(41:18):
am going to buckle down and work at it. In
next quarter, I'm going to get an A and then
you do. That's the story of humanity at its best.
And of course it's the story of the United States
of America. And it's the story of baseball too. So
what do you say, I told you I promised that
we would just do some fun baseball trades. Can we
do that? Now? Let's take one more break, and on

(41:40):
the other side, let's look at those Yankees pirates trades. Okay,
and we'll talk a lot of stuff that's kind of
limited to cleats for the most part. But even when
you do want to get that a you do take
a break from studying every now and again, don't you can?
I do the theme song wind Up that I do
on the reissue episodes. I kind of enjoy that version.
In this case, it's signifying, Okay, we're turning the baseball

(42:01):
engine back on, so buckle up. Who are side time travelers? So,

(42:29):
as someone who has spent a lot of his life
professionally geographically in proximity to the Yankees, I'm always interested
in what they do at the trading deadline. It is
incumbent upon me, both as the kind of baseball fan
and writer that I am to be curious about what
everyone does about everything all the time. But I am

(42:50):
especially engaged with their history. So at the trading deadline,
general manager Brian Cashman went on a shopping spree. He
attempted to sell the team's third base problem, which should
have been approached over the winter with Ryan McMahon of
the Rockies, who has fielded well but has not hit
as we should not have expected him to hit. He

(43:12):
picked up some right handed platoon guys Ahmed Rosario who
got hurt, Austin Slater who got hurt, and Jose Caballero,
who actually has played very well in a small sample,
hitting way over what he typically does. Maybe they unlock
something special in Jose Caballero. He's already hit two home
runs and has stolen six bases in seven attempts, so

(43:33):
he has worked out tremendously well. On the pitching side, however,
they acquired David Bednar, the closer from the Pirates, Camillo Deval,
the defroct closer from the Giants, and Jake Bird, who
had been a setup man for the Rockies that has
worked out so well. Bird is already in the minor leagues. Deval,

(43:55):
who has always struggled with his control, has walked nine
guys per nine roughly in a again small sample with
New York, and Bednar has been okay. It took them
a while to figure out that they needed to send
Devin Williams as far back into the bullpen as they
could without having him actually weave the stadium. Arguably, Devin

(44:15):
Williams has done more damage to his free agency case
and he is heading into free agency as any player
in baseball this year who has been healthy throughout the campaign. Unfortunately,
Bednar has pitched in eight games for New York. As
I say, these words, he has had six save opportunities.
He has converted three and blown three, and that is

(44:37):
not acceptable, not when the standard saves conversion rate is
something like eighty five percent. And you know the reason why.
It's because a competent pitcher can usually get three outs
before he gives up three runs. That's how Joe Barowski
once led the American League in saves with an ERA
of five point zero seven. I alluded to this on
a recent episode when I noted a Blue Jays position

(45:00):
player throwing thirty five to sixty five miles per hour
giving up only two runs while getting three outs. Baseball
is that hard. If he had come in with a
three run lead, he would have been credited with a save.
Baseball is a tough game, and most of the time
even a below average pitcher can get three outs before
he gives up three runs. Now, having said that, I've
really enjoyed Bennar's story this season, in that he had

(45:21):
some really rough spells in twenty twenty four and finished
with an ugly line of five to seventy seven ERA
after putting up a two to twenty five RA in
about one hundred and eighty innings over the prior three years.
He began this season getting shellacked in April, and I thought, well,
something's broken, maybe permanently, because the story of most relievers,

(45:42):
the vast majority of them, is inconsistency. The Pirates sent
him down, this twenty eight year old who had led
the National League in saves in twenty twenty three, and
I suppose it was a mechanical issue that they correctly
diagnosed or he did, because he got better. In the
thirty seven innings he pitched between coming back back up
and being traded to New York, he allowed only seven

(46:03):
or in runs, eight walks, fifty strikeouts. That's a one
seventy era, and the Yankees needed him to solve a
problem given that, as I already said, Williams has pitched
like a two cup of coffee a day man after
his third cup. It's still too early to say whether
that will be the case or not, but so far
it hasn't been so great for me. The odd thing

(46:24):
was that that was what I expected. As soon as
I heard Yankees Pirates trade, I thought this isn't going
to end well. I don't know why I thought that.
It took unpacking the entire litany of trades between the
two clubs to figure out why, and so a review.
Here is what I found. The first trade between the
Yankees and the Pirates came in nineteen fifteen when New

(46:46):
York bought Dazzy Vance, Yes, a future Hall of Famer,
one of the all time great strikeout pitchers. Unfortunately, the
Dazzler was then twenty four, had a bad arm, wasn't
dazzling anyone. It was only seven years later, after having
some sort of surgery it's not clear what kind, that
he became one of the greats. The Yankees had long

(47:07):
since dumped him at that time, and of course he
went on to glory with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who received
him as a throw in on a trade on essentially
a third catcher. The Yankees missed out again in nineteen
thirty seven, when they sold right hander Jim Tobin of
Tobin's Spirit Guide Fame to the Pirates. Tobin was still
only twenty four, and, like Fancy, had some injuries going

(47:29):
that kept him from blossoming. It was only later with
the Braves that he started throwing a knuckleball and had
some consistent success. If you ever see his name, it's
because he once hit three homers in a game against
the Cubs. These are not things the Yankees could have predicted,
but still were over two. In the fall of nineteen
forty six, the Yankees traded Tiny Bonham, the control pitcher

(47:52):
whose death inspired the name of this podcast. They received
lefty Arthur Cookie Cukarulo, who never pitch for them. Meanwhile,
Bonham had about a season and a half left in
the tank, and then sadly he passed away late in
the nineteen forty nine season. Here's a deep cut I
find fascinating. In February nineteen seventy three, the Yankees traded

(48:15):
the rare prospect from American Samoa. In fact, I think
the only prospect from American Samoa, Tony Salita, who was
twenty five at the time, to the Pirates. Of course,
to the Pirates. All of these involved the Pirates, and
they received a thirty two year old first baseman who
was a fourteen year minor league veteran named George Kopez,

(48:36):
who was never going to play for them. They just
needed filler at TRIPLEA. There was some strange disregard in
the Yankees organization for a player who seems to have
been I mean, he was. He would later prove it
to have been a real prospect. Back in nineteen sixty eight,
Solita had been the MVP of the Class A Carolina
League with a three h two four thirty four six

(48:58):
seventy two season runs and one hundred and thirteen walks
are in there. He also struck out one hundred and
twelve times, which probably seemed like a ton back then,
and the Yankees just kept sending him back out even
after he played well at the higher levels, if not
to the level of the Carolina League MVP season, and
then finally they just gave him away. He then hit

(49:19):
well for the Pirates at TRIPLEA, but they left him there.
They failed to protect him in the Role five draft,
and off he went to the Royals, and to jump
ahead a little bit, he spent about a half dozen
seasons as a platoon bat in the Majors and he
hit two fifty five with a three fifty seven on
base percentage a four to twenty one slugging percentage, which
is not bad at all. For the nineteen seventies, it

(49:39):
works out to a one to twenty ops plus. Following that,
he went off to Japan and he slugged one hundred
and fifty five home runs in four seasons with the
Nippon ham Fighters, and indeed the Fighters fought their war
against him and won it. He didn't necessarily have a
great time there, because at that time the Japanese baseball
players or baseball leagues were and great at making foreign

(50:01):
born players feel welcome. He went home to Samoa, revived
little league baseball there, put this guy in the Hall
of Fame. Unfortunately, he was murdered there in a property dispute,
apparently at the age of forty three and far less
significantly before anyone writes me, yes, I know that the
team is the Nippon ham Fighters, that Nippon Ham sponsors

(50:23):
the club. They are not the Nippon Ham Fighters. I
just enjoy thinking of them that way, not that I
have anything against the Hams. What have the Hams done
to me? Live and let live? I say to the Hams,
now here's a good trade for the Yankees, A great trade,
one of the best trades in team history and one
of the worst. Conversely, in Pirates history. In nineteen seventy five,

(50:43):
do you know where this one's going? Already? They sent
starting pitcher Doc Medick to that point forty nine and
forty with a three forty era in his career out
to Pittsburgh in return for pitchers Doc Ellis and Ken
Brett and a young second baseman named Willie Randolph, an
unreck dignized great of the second base game. Medick flopped
in nineteen seventy six, and the joke around Pittsburgh was

(51:06):
that Ellis was even a better doctor than he was.
The Pirates, I guess thought that Rennie Stennitt was going
to play for them forever. But first of all, Rennie
Stennitt was only a soso player. Really. Second, he got
very badly hurt and was never the same guy. And
I guess the next great, not great, but good second
baseman that they came up with was Johnny Ray. Baseball
Reference has Willie Randolph at about sixty seven career wins

(51:28):
above replacement. By the way, he'll never go into the
Hall of Fame, but I watched him every day growing up,
and I can tell you that the stats don't wholly
tell the story of how good he was. Now we
have to talk about a Pirates Yankees trade that didn't happen.
First baseman Jason Thompson played in the Majors from nineteen
seventy six through nineteen eighty six. He wasn't the most

(51:50):
consistent guy. He hit only two sixty one for his career,
but he had walks, he had power, so he was
very productive anyway. He wasn't a great fielder, wasn't fast.
Left handed pitching gave him problems. But he did have
three All Star campaigns when he did things like hit
two eighty four with a three ninety one on base
and slug five to eleven with thirty one homers and

(52:10):
one hundred and one walks. My favorite kind of player.
He did that for the nineteen eighty two Pirates. The
thing was he shouldn't have been there. He was supposed
to have that season in pinstripes. Now. Thompson had come
up with the Pirates and had had great hitting seasons
for them in nineteen seventy seven and nineteen seventy eight.
He slumped in seventy nine, and when that dragged into

(52:32):
nineteen eighty, the Tigers sent him to the California Angels
for outfielder Al Cowens. He recovered his stroke in Anaheim.
He hit three seventeen, four, thirty nine, five, twenty six
in one hundred and two games. Those are your lottery
numbers for today. The problem from the Angels point of
view is that they already had Rod Carew playing first base,

(52:52):
and they wanted to dh Don Baylor, so there was
no room at the end for Jim. In April of
nineteen eighty one, they the Pirates and the Yankees worked
out a three way deal. The angel sent Thompson to
the Pirates for catcher Ed Odd, a twenty nine year
old non hitter, and Mickey Mahler, a twenty eight year
old lefty swingman who had a five to fifty career era.

(53:14):
And all there is to say about that is that
the next good general manager that the Angels have is
probably also the first good general manager that they've had.
The Pirates then sent Thompson onto the Yankees for veteran
first baseman Jim Spencer, a minor league pitcher named Greg Cochran,
another then minor league pitcher named Fred Tolliver, and a

(53:34):
cool eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Pirates wanted Spencer,
a gold glover at first, but one who seldom hit,
because they had the forty one year old Willie Stargel
playing first base and tomorrow from mel Brooks and Medline Conn.
Everything below the waist was coput. The Yankees wanted Spencer

(53:55):
gone because he was irritating. They had somehow consented to
a clause in his contract that said that if there
were a right handed pitcher on the mound, he had
to play. It wasn't up to the manager, and he
insisted that clause be honored too. They were surprised a
little over half the money going to the Pirates was

(54:16):
meant to cover his salary. Unfortunately, that payment triggered the
Commissioner of Baseball a few years earlier, Charlie Finley, than
the A's owner, had realized he was not going to
re sign the players he was going to lose when
free agencies started, both because he was cheap and because
they hated his guts, and so he sold Vita Blue
to the Yankees and Joe Rudy and Roleig Fingers to

(54:39):
the Red Sox. Commissioner Buie qune vetoed those trades and
proclaimed an arbitrary ceiling of four hundred grand in any deal.
Anything over that had to be as Rod Serling would say,
submitted for his approval. Well, he looked at the Yankees
Pirates Angels trade and disapproved. So the Pirates and the
Yankees restructured their side of things. This time, the Yankees

(55:02):
were supposed to receive Thompson and six minor leaguers. Everything
else was the same, with the exception that the avowed
purpose of the four hundred and fifty thousand dollars component
was supposed to be for the purchase of those kids,
not as a payment. The Commissioner said no, and this
was not the only time he did this. He looked
at the prospects involved as if he were writing for

(55:25):
well Us at BP and said, no, I don't think
those prospects are good enough. They're not worth four hundred
and fifty grand. You're just trying to circumvent me. The
Pirates then made a third offer, forget the cash and
give us rady pitching prospect Gen Nelson. At that point
the Yankees walked away. It just got to be too much.
George Steinbrenner said, it meant stripping myself of a player

(55:48):
I consider my future, meaning Gen Nelson, who you might
recall as a kind of set up reliever on some
good A's teams in the nineteen eighties. A year later,
Steinbrenner sent his future to see for Shane Rawley. They
never did get Thompson. On the other hand, Thompson wasn't
in Don Mattingley's way a couple of years later. So

(56:08):
you win some, you lose some. We jumped forward another
few years to another great trade for the Yankees, one
I won't dwell on because we discussed it quite a
bit on a recent episode of this podcast. The Yankee
sent corner outfielder Steve Kemp and infielder Tim Foley and
got back three players, one of whom was Jay Buhner.
I will add that Kemp had been a really good

(56:28):
hitter for the Tigers in White Sox from nineteen seventy
seven through nineteen eighty two, hitting two eighty four with
a three seventy seven on base in a four to
forty six slugging percentage. Remember when I don't know Michael
Confordo was good. He was kind of like that. The
Yankees signed him as a free agent, giving him a
five year contract in December nineteen eighty two. By the way,

(56:50):
forfeiting the thirteenth overall pick in the draft, allow me
to indulge in a gratuitous amount of hindsight here. The
White Sox used that pick on a high school right
hand Joel Davis, who did make it to the majors,
but not really for anything he did in the miners.
It seems like they were just trying to justify the pick.
Roger Clemens was right there. He went to the Red

(57:11):
Sox with the nineteenth pick. Again totally on fair hindsight
on my part, So take that for what it's worth.
Kemp was very disappointing in his first season in New York.
He scuffled for all but a little burst of life
in June, and by late August he'd be benched for
the rookie. I just mentioned Don Mattingly, but there was
also a tragic accident involved. On September eighth, he took

(57:32):
of all people in Omar Moreno line drive. That's another pirate,
by the way, former pirate at that point. He took
an Omar Moreno line drive to the face during patting practice.
He suffered a fractured cheekbone, two broken teeth, and damage
to his left eye. He never lost consciousness, and after
he said he remembered lying on the grass and joking
that he hoped the ball it hit him in the nose,

(57:53):
because then he could get a nose job. But as
he saw the expressions of the other players standing above him,
he thought it must be bad. At that point, the
pitcher Rudy May came over, looked down at him and said,
oh my god, and Ken thought it is bad. At first,
all he had left in his eye was light sensitivity.

(58:15):
Remember I mentioned that at the beginning of the show
he played part time in nineteen eighty four. He hit
two ninety one, but his power was gone. He was
only twenty nine and he never did get back to
where he was, or really anything close to that. We
go from there to one of the worst Yankees trades
of all time with future Nlsy Young Award winner Doug
Drebeck dealt to the Pirates with relievers Logan Easiley and

(58:37):
Brian Fisher for starting pitcher Rick Roden and relievers Pat
Clements and Cecilio. You're breaking my heart, Glante. I was
actually a Rick Rodin fan because he was such a
good hitter by pitching standards, but gosh, like every other
Yankees pitcher at the time, he was thirty four, he
didn't throw hard, and he had a lot of mileage
on his arm. They picked him up coming off a

(58:59):
two hundred and fifty inning season as well, And here
is a recommendation to say that future good general manager
the Angels are going to theoretically one day higher. Don't
do that. I realize we don't let pitchers throw two
hundred and fifty innings anymore. So whatever the nearest reasonable
facsimile is, whatever the current ceiling is, it's like buying
a used car from a little old lady who only

(59:22):
drove it every day all day. From here to batelgeis Gwante,
who I've discussed before, was superficially successful, but had some
spectacular blown saves in key games, especially June twentieth and
June twenty first, nineteen eighty eight at Detroit, when he
allowed walk off home runs in back to back games.
One of them and Alan Trammel grand slam. I will

(59:44):
never forget. We're almost back to the present day and
thus the conclusion of this discussion. But I am obligated
to take a final break this episode, So let's pause
one last time, and on the other side, we'll get
yet closer to the present day and can cl an
actual infinite inning episode our first in three weeks, and
I'm kind of excited because I didn't require hospitalization or anything. Knockwood,

(01:00:09):
let's not jinx that. Uh. One last Yankees Pirates trade
from the nineteen eighties to discuss just barely made it

(01:00:31):
in under the cut before the decade changed. In December
nineteen eighty nine, the Yankees sent catchered Don slug O
Slot up to Pittsburgh for two fungible pitchers up out
out to Pittsburgh. Slot wasn't the greatest defensive backstop in
the world, but he was a very effective hitter, particularly
against left handed pitching. In six seasons with the Pirates,

(01:00:53):
he hit three h five with a three seventy one
pace and a four to twenty one slugging percentage, and
played in three postseason series, which was three more than
the Yankees played at that time. And now we're going
to get into the Brian Cashman era. Here's a pretty
bad trade. In June two thousand and one, he sent
lefty pitching prospect Domiso Marte, who was tearing it up

(01:01:14):
in the miners, to Pittsburgh for no field, no hit
utility guy Enrique Wilson. Marte was always wild, but he
was wild in a productive way. He threw pitches that
tended to dart out of the strike zone, but batters
chase them, or most batters did so. Even though he
did walk some guys, he was off ineffective. From two

(01:01:35):
thousand and two to two thousand and seven, he pitched
to a two eighty eight era with the White Sox
and Pirates. This is as a setup type reliever. Over
the course of his career, good years and bad, he
held left handed hitters to one ninety five, two eighty nine,
two eighty six averages. Cashman then spent a number of
years trying to get him back, and did so in

(01:01:56):
a two thousand and eight trade that also brought Xavier Nady,
but both of them were pretty much washed up by then.
If I recall correctly, Marte was about to suffer a
torn labram. That's pretty much that a lot of the time.
Scott Brocious, then, the starting third baseman, suffered a broken
hand on a hit by pitch. He was due to
miss six weeks, and Cashman overreacted by overpaying for Wilson.

(01:02:20):
He also sent two pitchers to the Rangers for Randy Vallardi,
a very good player at times, but one who was
thirty nine and had nothing left to give. In related news,
and this makes me feel old, almost as old as
my prostate makes me feel. Randy Vallardi is now sixty
two years old, and I feel like it was just
yesterday that I heard Bob Sheppard saying, ladies and gentlemen,

(01:02:44):
your attention please now batting number eighteen, Randy Vollarde number eighteen.
Did you hear that crowd get up for Randy Vallardi?
They sure loved their Randy Vallardi in New York back then.
True story. One of my best, closest old friends who
worked for the Yankees for a time. You've heard me
mention him often. He had Bob Shepard record his wedding announcements,

(01:03:08):
his wedding introduction when he got married. If I had
thought of that sort of thing when I got married,
I might have tried for stan Lee. Then again, you know,
they have a rule at Disneyland disney World. You can
get married in those places, but they will not let
Mickey Mouse give you away or officiate the thing, because
when your spouse turns out to be a nasty cheater,

(01:03:28):
they really don't want people going around saying, and damn
that Mickey Mouse for not warning me off at that
son of a bitch. And that's why it's best not
to involve your heroes or even favorite imaginary characters in
your personal affairs. In February twenty twelve, Cashman continuing to
make trades with the Pirates, cent Aj Burnett, who had
had a very up and down three years in New York,

(01:03:50):
to the Pirates for two minor leaguers, one of whom
didn't make it, one of whom was up for about
half a second. Burnett pitched well for the Pirates. He
had a three forty one ERA over the final two
years of his contract. Catcher Francisco Cervelli was sort of
slot like. He was somewhat overqualified as a backup catcher,
but he had an unfortunate tendency towards concussions. In twenty

(01:04:12):
thirteen and twenty fourteen, he hit a nice two ninety three,
three seventy two, four forty nine in sixty six games
for the Yankees. At that point, Cashman traded him for
a lefty reliever, Justin Wilson, who was still out there
pitching well. He had a good year in New York
in twenty fifteen, and Cashman sent him on to the
Tigers for Chad Green and Luis Cessa. Cervelli spent five

(01:04:33):
years with Pittsburgh and hit two sixty four, three sixty two,
three seventy four, not at all bad for a catcher,
but of course he did have those problems with getting
hurt in two of the four years. He was even
better than that, so the averages don't tell the full story.
Green was very good for the Yankees for most of
a seven year run with the club. And now we
have just three trades of significance left to discuss. One

(01:04:56):
I can sort of complain about, one I can't, and
one was a pretty big in for the Yankees. The
first involved trading out the league average pitcher or league
average ish pitcher, Ivan Nova, who always reminds me of
a character from Babylon five. But putting that aside, Nova,
who also reminds me of well, Biggles, wasn't all that,
but he was an established pitcher, and he was dealt

(01:05:18):
out for an outfield prospect who never made it and
a reliever, Stephen Tarpley, who never established himself in the
big leagues. Again, I'm not saying that moving nova was
the same as trading Whitey Ford in nineteen fifty five,
but he had some value at the fourth starter level,
so there's an opportunity cost when you miss a shot
like that. In twenty twenty one, Cashman sent four prospects

(01:05:41):
to the Pirates for Jamison Taian and got two decent
years out of him, Whereas the four players never paid off.
The one of them, pitcher Rosy Contreras, seemed like he
might become a good starter for a minute that proved
to be a flash in the pan. Finally, on July
twenty sixth, twenty twenty one, the Yankee sent Diego Keo
and Hoy Park to the Pirates for Clay Holmes. And

(01:06:03):
I know Holmes could be exasperating at times. He's still
that way now that he's starting for the Mets. Yet
they gave away two players who proved to be of
little import for one of the best ground ball pitchers
in the game, one who gave up all of ten
home runs in two hundred and twenty games with the Yankees,
despite the silly plastic park in which they play, and
had a two sixty nine ERA in those years. Yes,

(01:06:26):
he blew the odd save, But look at what they've
got now. All they do is blow saves, and so
as the who sang, we call that a bargain the
best they ever had. Maybe not the best, but it's
not bad either. I suppose there's no real takeaway here
except that if at first you don't succeed, try try again.
Brian Cashman is still a young man and he has
time to get it right. Maybe don't try for so

(01:06:49):
many ex rockies, but there have been some good pirates
liberated for greater purposes than selling beer and playing exhibitions
out there in western Pennsylvania. I suppose that's azah, even
or especially when you don't get the best of the deal.
We have come to the end of another episode. I

(01:07:11):
thank you for waiting for me to get better. I'm
still not all the way there, as I said, but
regular service should resume without interruption at this point. And
to all of you who wrote me and said take
care of yourself before you take care of the podcast,
I thank you so much for your generosity. Should anyone
else wish to write me, they can do so at
Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. And should they wish

(01:07:32):
to follow me on social media, they can do so
at Stephngoldman dot bsguide dot social. I've been quiet while
I've been recovering, but I'm blimbering up again. A Facebook
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Bang you're there. Posting will resume at this time as well,
but I am planning on terminating the thing. Really, I'm
not just the boy who cried terminating Facebook. Should you

(01:07:53):
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(01:08:15):
moment to spare, go to the podcature of your choice
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you are hearing now and have been listening to throughout
the episode, was a co composition of myself and doctor
Rick Mooring, who says why didn't you do a whole
episode about my surgery? I had my tonsils out, and

(01:08:37):
you didn't say nothing. Oh sorry, Rick, that was a
long time ago in podcasting hadn't been invented yet. I
promise if it had been well, I better cut myself
off there and just say, if I can manage to
stay away from the surgeon's knife and the butcher's cleaver,
I'll be back next week with more tales from inside
the Infinite Inning.