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Powerful mistakes Trading young sluggers comes back to haunt many teamsPosted: Tuesday April 08, 2003 1:07 PM
Entering this season, only one member of the 500 Home Run Club had been traded before his 25th birthday: founding member Babe Ruth. Unless you need to finance a Broadway play and/or wish to cast a mythical curse upon your franchise, you just don't trade a young player with that kind of historic power potential. Of the other 16 players to hit 500 entering this season, Reggie Jackson hit the most home runs after leaving his original team (309). Jackson was 29 and a nine-year veteran when Oakland traded him to Baltimore in 1976. Look closely, however, at the beginnings of the three players most likely to gain entry to the 500 Home Run Club this season: Sammy Sosa, a member as of last week, Rafael Palmeiro and Fred McGriff. (Ken Griffey Jr.'s chances of joining that trio this season took a severe hit when he dislocated his right shoulder Saturday, an injury that could keep him sidelined six to 10 weeks.) Sosa, Palmeiro and McGriff were all traded before they turned 25. And in 2005 or 2006, Jeff Bagwell (380 homers entering this year) may become another of the great home run hitters to have been given up on early in his career. For comparison's sake, you can't find that many 300-game winners who were traded at a young age. Since 1900 only one such big winner has been dealt before he turned 25: Nolan Ryan, who was 24 when the Mets shipped him to the Angels for Jim Fregosi. No such pitchers are on the horizon, either. Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson are the only hurlers with a decent chance of winning 300 games before the end of the decade. None were traded so young. (Johnson comes close. He was 25 when Montreal unloaded him to get Mark Langston from Seattle, and The Big Unit who turns 40 in September, would need to average 16 wins per season until he's 44 to reach the land of 300.) Missing that badly on a great player is a phenomenon that probably has no equal in any major sport. Why has it happened with power hitters? In general, clubs tend to be more patient with pitchers than hitters because great pitching is the rarer resource. Indeed, three of the four future sluggers discussed here were traded for pitching. Also, unlike the ability to hit for average, which is typically apparent early in a career, many hitters develop home run power as they age and mature physically. Sosa and Bagwell, for example, grew into heavily muscled sluggers. "The year Sammy, Dean Palmer and Juan Gonzalez played on the '86 Sarasota team, I think they had one home run among them all," said Diamondbacks assistant GM Sandy Johnson, who ran the Rangers system at the time. "But Sammy always did have tremendously strong hands. He would swing at everything. He was like a young colt with a lot of energy. He wouldn't be denied. You could see the ball jump off his bat, even if he wasn't hitting many home runs then." Two of our four historic sluggers were traded at the winter meetings and two were swapped in deadline deals (one being the deadline for interleague waivers, the other for postseason eligibility). If there is one common denominator among the deals, it is impatience. Following is a breakdown of trades that are already infamous. The Cubs and Red Sox, who have played 168 combined seasons without a world title, also have the distinction of having given up four of the six players who hit the most home runs after being traded by their original team. Here's the list:
Figuring 500These days it may seem as if anyone can join the Five Hundred Club, which may be true if you're talking about the casino in Clovis, Calif. or the golf course in Japan that both go by that name. But baseball's 500 Club still has an exclusive cachet despite many players predictably making a run at it these days. Hey, what did you expect when the amount of teams almost doubles in 37 years and hitters spend more time practicing their craft and conditioning their bodies than ever before? Here's some number-crunching on the 18 men who have reached the milestone. (All numbers for current players are through April 7.)
* No World Series appearance |
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