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.
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.
