Bang For The Bucs

The Pirates�wanted him to fly to Nashville. But having just been dealt by the Red Sox before the 2003 trade deadline, minor league infielder Freddy Sanchez decided he'd rather make the 1,100-mile drive from Pawtucket, R.I., to his new Triple A home. Sanchez was upset by the trade, but he insists that wasn't the reason he declined the Pirates' request. No, he hoped that a long, leisurely drive with his wife, Alissa, would help heal the sharp pain in his right foot that had sidelined him for a couple of games. Sanchez didn't feel any better when he pulled into Nashville, though he still suited up. "The pain was so excruciating, I knew I couldn't play on it," he recalls. "But I didn't want to go to a new team and be like, Oh, I can't play." Sanchez limped through his debut on Aug. 3 before undergoing surgery to repair a bone spur, stalling his Pirates career before it had begun.

Now, three years after the five-player swap that sent righthanded starter Jeff Suppan to Boston, Sanchez has arrived in every sense of the word. At week's end he was hitting .356 to lead the National League by 20 points, still one more example of how it can take years to evaluate the true beneficiaries of a deadline deal. The Red Sox gave up Sanchez because they believed a deeper rotation would yield their first championship since 1918. Suppan, who had won five straight decisions for Pittsburgh, went 3--4 with a 5.57 ERA down the stretch and didn't make a postseason appearance. (He did his part to end Boston's drought, however, by signing with the Cardinals in the off-season and then losing a 2004 World Series game to the Sox.)

The 28-year-old Sanchez, meanwhile, evolved into this season's most unlikely All-Star. After hitting .291 as a utility player in 2005, he cracked the lineup only after third baseman Joe Randa went down at the end of April with a stress fracture in his right foot. Sanchez's potential, however, was no secret. "He had hit at every level," says Pirates general manager Dave Littlefield, who needed two trades in '03 to land him. He initially inquired about Sanchez before a July 22, four-pitcher deal in which Boston sent Brandon Lyon and Anastacio Martinez to the Pirates for relievers Scott Sauerbeck and Mike Gonzalez. But Lyon, it turned out, had a bad right elbow. Pittsburgh filed a grievance, and the teams renewed negotiations. On July 31 the Pirates returned Lyon and Martinez to the Red Sox, threw in Suppan and received Sanchez, Gonzalez and cash.

"He's a guy that has to grow on you," says Blue Jays scout Mike Berger. "You have to see him for an extended period. Pure and simple, he has a knack for finding the ball on the big part of the bat. There's not a lot of wasted energy to his swing."

A former Burbank ( Calif.) High star who played at two NAIA schools before the Red Sox took him in the 11th round of the 2000 draft, Sanchez is popular among his teammates, who appreciate that his demeanor hasn't changed since the days when he was getting five at bats a week. When this year's All-Star picks were announced, Pirates outfielder Jason Bay, another deadline-deal prospect who went on to prosper in the bigs (chart, right), called his wife, Kristen. His first words were, "Freddy made the All-Star team!"

"What about you?" Kristen asked.

"Oh, yeah," Jason replied, "I made it too."

Sanchez received the most write-in All-Star votes in the majors this year, just one sign of his rising profile among fans. Another: In a June 29 game against the White Sox, Sanchez already had three hits when he came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with the score tied 6--6. With the crowd chanting Fred-dy! Fred-dy! throughout his at bat, he responded by drilling a walk-off homer to leftfield. The chants continued until he came out for a curtain call. It's a far cry from his first days as a Pirate. "It was hard to take at first," says Sanchez of the trade from Boston. "That was the team I came up with, the only team I ever knew. All the history that goes along with the Red Sox is something that I wanted to be a part of. But things happen for a reason. [The trade] was the best thing that could have happened to me."