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July 14, 2009

You Could Look It Up

Royal Pains

by Steven Goldman

Last week I was reading Joe Posnanski’s reaction to the Royals’ acquisition of Yuniesky Betancourt and was struck by this passage:

A few years ago, the Royals traded Jermaine Dye for Yuniesky-comp Neifi Perez. Now, that trade was an absolute disaster—the worst in team history in my opinion—but there was this indisputable line of reasoning. The Royals felt like they did not have a shortstop ready to play in the big leagues. This is a powerful problem: When you play baseball, you must have a shortstop… otherwise teams will laugh at you. Yes, true, they will laugh at you if you have Neifi Perez at shortstop too, but they’ll laugh at you more if you don’t have a shortstop at all.

Jermaine Dye has had a fine career, and that 2001 trade was indeed egregious, sending a 27-year-old right fielder who had hit .308/.372/.543 over the previous two seasons and had just won a Gold Glove to the Rockies for Neifi Perez, one of the worst hitters of all time, one who would bat an astounding .238/.265/.303 in one and a half seasons in Royals togs. Any brief against Allard Baird, the team’s general manager from June, 2000 to May, 2006, must begin with this truly bizarre transaction, but was it actually the worst in team history?

Looking for the worst deal the Royals have ever made serves to remind one of just how far this team has come from its solid foundations of the 1970s under GM Cedric Tallis. So many key Royals of the period were acquired in trades that were outright blind steals: Amos Otis spirited away from the Mets for Joe Foy (1969), or John Mayberry and Dave Grangaard lifted from the Astros for Jim York and Lance Clemons (1971), and who can forget Hal McRae and Wayne Simpson filched from the Reds for Richie Scheinblum and Roger Nelson (1972)? While the Royals have made some solid trades in recent years, such as getting Alberto Callaspo from the Diamondbacks for Billy Buckner, or sending Ambiorix Burgos to the Mets and bringing back Brian Bannister, or even the trade for Dye himself, which merely got the Braves Keith Lockhart and Michael Tucker, these days the Royals are more likely to be the victims of larceny than its perpetrators.

Of course, no GM is immune from the odd trading mishap, and even Tallis has one of the franchise’s biggest trading backfires one his ledger, the December 7, 1973 deal that brought 38-year-old former closer Lindy McDaniel to the club in exchange for 30-year-old outfielder Lou Piniella. Unjustly forgotten today, McDaniel belongs somewhere among the top 100 relievers of all time with his solid 21-season career, but he was all but finished in 1974 and he put in just 78 games for the Royals over two seasons, whereas Piniella would hit .295/.338/.413 (better rates then than now) in more than a thousand games with the Yankees.

An even worse Tallis-era trade was apparently directed towards healing an old wound. The Royals had drafted catcher Fran Healy from the Indians in the 1969 expansion draft, but after keeping him on the farm for two years, Tallis had sent him to the Giants in exchange for journeyman reliever Bob Garibaldi. Healy spent two seasons as a reserve in San Francisco, and failed to distinguish himself—while he hit a very respectable .280/.380/.376 in 47 games his rookie year, he suffered an epochal sophomore slump that saw his rates plunge to .152/.257/.222. Nonetheless, Tallis apparently hadn’t gotten over him, and it was after this latter season that he re-obtained Healy in return for Greg Minton, a starting pitcher in the California League, thus foregoing all 16 seasons of the Moon-Man’s big-league career, which featured a 2.99 ERA in 1089 1/3 innings of relief pitching. Healy spent three nondescript seasons in Kansas City, the last of which was interrupted by shoulder problems, at which point Tallis’s successor, Joe Burke, redeemed the original trade by sending the catcher to the Yankees (who were desperate for a caddy for Thurman Munson) for starting pitcher Larry Gura, another best-of trade in franchise history.