Trade Him! – Edited by Jim Enright, 1976 ★½

Wheeling and Dealing as Strength and (Mostly) Weakness

Two bad things came out of being a New York Mets fan this season. The first was watching my team stumble out of the gate and never right itself. The second came later, as the injury-riddled franchise traded off name players with expiring contracts in hope of getting something – anything – in return.

Such is the nature of the market. It wasn’t always so. In the old days, baseball trades were not about heading off free-agency but establishing, or maintaining, franchise relevance in a Darwinian world of rapidly-aging stars and diamonds in the rough. In those days, baseball executive Branch Rickey opined: “It’s better to trade a player one year too soon than one year too late.”

It was the sort of world captured, if fitfully and vaguely, in this 1976 collection of essays about famous baseball trades compiled and edited by Jim Enright.

Each essay is penned by a baseball scribe of the time and lays out a trade history of a particular team. Some of the writers are recognizable names: Furman Bisher of The Atlanta Journal covers the Braves, The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich handles the Senators/Twins, and Bob Broeg of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes on the Cardinals. Enright himself, a sportswriter with Chicago Today, does double-duty on the dealing histories of the Cubs and White Sox.

Trade Him! starts out with two strikes against it. Employing a wide variety of baseball scribes, it lacks thematic unity and a consistent approach. Being published in 1976, it is badly dated by the subsequent advent of free agency as a main driver of baseball business, as became the case for my Metsies in 2017.

When the book succeeds at all, it is as a time capsule. Alas, it doesn’t often. Trade Him! proved for me a choppy read.

I was an easy audience, too. The 1970s is my favorite baseball decade, so viewing the game as it was should have been a perk. Also, Enright mentions my father, Frank, in his acknowledgements, and the copy I found in his basement is autographed by Enright: “To Frank – The One An [sic] Only – Remember – Only Suckers Beef!”

What did Enright mean by this? It’s too late to ask him. As I read Trade Him! I began to wonder if maybe bringing so many writers together and trying to synthesize their contributions into a publishable, coherent whole gave Enright some grief. Too-Many-Cooks syndrome, perhaps?

The book begins with a short introduction by the noted broadcaster and former catcher Joe Garagiola. Garagiola was a good one to bring out the human aspect of the game, and I was glad to see he did so here. Garagiola was a close friend of my father’s, and I suspect that might have led to Enright’s cap-tip to Dad.

Garagiola writes: To me, being traded was like celebrating your one hundredth birthday. It might not be the happiest occasion in the world, but then you have to consider the alternatives.

Bill Gleason of The Chicago Sun-Times then brings out the other side of trades when he recalls his childhood happiness as his beloved White Sox netted three stars from the Philadelphia A’s back in 1932: Al Simmons (a future Hall of Famer), Mule Haas, and Jimmie Dykes. This wasn’t from a trade, exactly; the A’s were having one of their perennial fire sales. A’s owner Connie Mack needed to unload some salaries; his loss became a bounty for Chicago’s South Side.

Gleason writes: With those three stars in the lineup, the White Sox weren’t going to finish in no seventh place again, 56½ games out of first place…The Deal that was better than a trade made winter a joyous one. School was interesting. Food tasted better. Joe Penner and Jack Benny were funnier.

But as Gleason sadly goes on to note, perception would outpace reality. The 1933 White Sox finished sixth, 31 games out.

After that, we get to the team-by-team stories. Here Trade Him! paints a patchy portrait of the player-trading process. Each account is so different from the next. Some of the writers focus on the recent past, such as Tom Kane of the Sacramento Bee’s account of the Oakland A’s. Kane bypasses the story of the A’s days in Philadelphia and Kansas City to explain how current owner Charlie Finley managed to keep his core of star talents intact while winning three consecutive World Series from 1972-74.

If Trade Him! had been published a year later, Kane’s tale would have been quite different. Like Mack before him, Finley found himself in 1976 unable, or more precisely, unwilling to keep up with the rise of player salaries that came with free agency and the demise of the reserve clause, which had kept players firmly under owner control. Two of the stars Kane writes of here, Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman, would be gone in 1976. Others quickly followed.

The Oakland A's during the peak of their glory, 1974. The team would be sold off over the coming years, not the first or last time the Athletics suffered such a fate. Image from http://www.sportsecyclopedia.com/al/oakland/oaka_simages.html

You can’t blame Kane for not knowing what was to come, but it came quickly, probably about the same time Trade Him! hit book stores. Maybe he was one of the beefers Enright was referring to in his inscription to Dad?

Other entries err by delving too much into a team’s past, and ignoring the present. For some reason, Dick Young of the New York Daily News got the assignment to write on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Not surprisingly, Young’s account focuses almost entirely on the Dodgers’ days in Brooklyn, which had ended 20 years before.

Furman Bisher’s account of the Braves is frustrating on other fronts. Bisher’s legacy is a strong one; he’s one of several writers here, like Young, Povich, and Broeg, enshrined in the writer’s wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here, his writing style tends to the grandiloquent:

It cannot be said that the Braves’ lack of prowess at barter has been limited to any one of their three locations [Boston, Milwaukee, and Atlanta]. Nor can it be said that their record of sameness, while checkered at best, has not produced its telling results. The Braves of the twentieth century have been represented by three quite definite periods of success, all three righteously rewarded with pennants, but neither period being of exciting duration…

More than nearly any other writer here, I couldn’t wait for Bisher’s section to conclude, a sad thing really given how much stock I placed in him going in.

Other writers focus too much on one trade. Don Merry, of the Long Beach [CA] Independent-Press-Telegram really crows about the trade that brought Nolan Ryan to the California Angels.

Maybe I minded this being Ryan was traded (with three other players) by the Mets for that famous flop, Jim Fregosi, but I did find other writers here doing the same thing, spending most of their ink on one big deal and short-shrifting the rest. Bob Wolf of the Milwaukee Journal focuses almost exclusively on the 1974 swap that brought home-run king Hank Aaron to the team, and back to the city where he began his big-league career. Never mind Aaron brought little to the Brewers beyond his name.

Enright’s own accounts of the Cubs and White Sox limn over the highlights and suffer from the same tunnelvision issues. The Cubs chapter concentrates on one bad deal, Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio; the White Sox chapter focuses on older players. Neither team had won a World Series for quite a while, and that seems to be all that mattered to him.

No account of baseball deals is complete without mention of the one that made the game what it is today, when the Boston Red Sox traded their star pitcher-outfielder Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Trade Him! explains how the deal went down, with the Yanks not only getting their franchise keystone but a lease on Fenway Park! Image from Wikipedia.

If I could have chosen just one writer here to write the whole book, a desirable outcome, it would have been Clark Nealon of the Houston Post. The Astros were one of baseball’s newest teams in 1976, just 14 years old. Nealon explains how they squandered such prime talent as Joe Morgan, Jimmy Wynn, Rusty Staub, and Mike Marshall:

It’s almost as if the Houston club is hounded by a horrible fate. While the Houston entry struggles on to put it all together just one time, there is all too plain evidence that the Astros have traded away valuable talent, stars-to-be who made key contributions to World Championships, to league titlists, to strong contenders, and to All-Star teams, some with remarkable rejuvenations. Meanwhile the Astrodome’s regulars have never mounted a really serious pennant threat.

Maybe the subsequent success of those liberated ‘Tros might have had something to do with getting out of Houston. Nealon quotes a former Astros pitcher who went on to win a Cy Young Award playing for the Orioles, Mike Cuellar. “Over here,” he said of his Baltimore teammates, “they catch the ball and they hit it.”

Nealon concludes: The lingering feeling about Astro trades is perhaps best bound up in that old dugout adage, to wit:

          There’s one thing about beating your head against a brick wall. It feels so good when you stop.

Alas, I knew that feeling by the time I finished reading Trade Him! It doesn’t come together in any way one can draw conclusions from, except that some teams do really well at trades and others don’t.

Baseball is a lot different now, in many ways for the better. You can’t treat players like cattle anymore, or pay them less than they are worth. The New York Yankees may still sit in the catbird seat, but they can’t use other franchises as their own private gardens the way they once did the Boston Red Sox or (later and more egregiously) the Kansas City A’s.

But the players do move around a lot more now. It’s hard to get attached to them like you once did, now that free agency has made them, more than ever, into money-magnetized disks on a vast shuffleboard. Yet the heartbreak itself is nothing new. If nothing else, Trade Him! does remind one why the good old days weren’t all that great.