Dorfman: Five Biggest Trade Deadline Deals For Cubs, Sox
By Daniel I. Dorfman-
(CBS) It used to be we would gather around the radio at this time of year to hear who was traded as your favorite baseball team tried to shake up their roster to make a run for a championship. Now we log on to our computers to see the latest Tweets or we do the same on our mobile phone.
While the technology has changed, we still anxiously await to hear about trades more in baseball than in any other sport.
As general managers Jim Hendry and Kenny Williams possibly make more moves, I couldn't help but think of some of the more interesting trades each team has pulled off at the trading deadline. These are trades that affected the franchise, both good and bad. Some big trades with big names are being omitted here because they did not have a major impact. Others are on the list because they may not have seemed like a big deal at the time, but they turned out to have major ramifications.
Finally, these are deadline deal trades, not ones during the waiver period that now runs from August 1 to August 31.
So with an assist from former Tribune sports staffer Bob Vanderberg, here are the five biggest deadline trades for each team.
Cubs
1964 - Traded Lou Brock, Jack Spring and Paul Toth to the St. Louis Cardinals. Received Ernie Broglio, Doug Clemens and Bobby Shantz.
So much has been written said about this one that it would be piling to go over it again. Suffice to say, nearly 50 years later, this is still viewed as a low point in Cubs history. Brock went on to the Hall of Fame and Broglio was a sore armed pitcher. Just a few years earlier St. Louis took the football Cardinals from Chicago. Given the anemic history of that franchise, it seems as if Chicago went 1-fo-2 right around that time.
1984 - Traded Darryl Banks (minors), Joe Carter, Mel Hall and Don Schulze to the Cleveland Indians. Received George Frazier, Ron Hassey and Rick Sutcliffe.
Possibly the biggest trade in team history. The Cubs got off to a good start in 1984 and GM Dallas Green decided 39 years was long enough to wait for a championship. After trading Bill Buckner for Dennis Eckersley a few weeks earlier, Green rolled the dice and sent what were thought to be two very good prospects in Hall and Carter to Cleveland. Frazier was effective in relief and Hassey appeared in 19 games for the Cubs that year, but Sutcliffe dominated the National League like few pitchers ever have. He went 16-1on his way to the Cy Young Award. He won 16 games again five years later for the Cubs as they won another NL East title. Carter went on to have a terrific career, especially when he hit the game winning homer for Toronto in Game 6 of the 1993 World Series, but even that does not equal what Sutcliffe did for the Cubs.
1998 - Traded Jon Garland to the Chicago White Sox. Received Matt Karchner.
A bit of a stretch here, but the Cubs were pursuing the wild card in 1998 so they decided Karchner would help out in the bullpen, as he had done some nice work for the Sox. The Cubs did win the wild card, but Karchner did not do much.
So the Cubs traded their top draft choice in the 1997 draft in Garland to the Sox. Garland may never have developed into a great pitcher, but his 132 career wins are nothing to sneeze at, and neither is his World Series trophy that he won with the Sox.
2003 - Traded a player to be named later, Matt Bruback (minors) and Jose Hernandez to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Received Kenny Lofton, Aramis Ramirez and cash. The Chicago Cubs sent Bobby Hill (August 15, 2003) to the Pittsburgh Pirates to complete the trade.
Remember when Hendry was popular with Cubs fans? That was the case when he pulled off this bit of larceny. For a couple of months, Lofton played like the Kenny Lofton in Cleveland as he filled in for an injured Corey Patterson. Ramirez has been the third baseman the Cubs have been looking for since Ron Santo and helped the team to three division titles.
2004 - As part of a 4-team trade, traded Francis Beltran, Alex Gonzalez and Brendan Harris to the Montreal Expos and Justin Jones (minors) to the Minnesota Twins. Received Nomar Garciaparra and Matt Murton from the Boston Red Sox. In addition, the Minnesota Twins sent Doug Mientkiewicz to the Boston Red Sox; and the Montreal Expos sent Orlando Cabrera to the Boston Red Sox.
Who would ever thought this complicated trade could have been pulled off? Garciaparra was once thought at the heart of soul of Red Sox Nation. But injuries had taken their toll on him and the Cubs decided to bring him into Chicago. It turned out Garciaparra was the shell of the player he once was and was unable to be on the field all that much in his year and a half in Chicago.
White Sox
1983 - Traded Tony Bernazard to the Seattle Mariners. Received Julio Cruz.
The Sox were 28-32 on June 15, 1983 in fifth place when GM Roland Hemond decided to swap second basemen with Seattle. Cruz added a jolt of energy to the lineup and the clubhouse and the Sox went 71-31 the rest of the way as they won the division by a staggering 20 games.
All these years later, members of the team are reflecting on what the trade did for the Sox in 1983.
Cruz brought a little bit more excitement and a little more happiness because Bernazard wasn't happy at the time," said Ron Kittle, who won the American League Rookie of the Year Award in 1983 with 35 homers and 100 RBIs.
"They were two different type players," said Tom Paciorek, who played first base. "Tony was not having his best offensive year. But Julio Cruz was magical from a defensive standpoint. He had a great knack of making the spectacular play. He could really and jump and turn a double play as well as anybody. The range he had was really something."
What remains one of the great mysteries is what happened to Cruz and why he did absolutely nothing for the next three seasons before the Sox got rid of him after the 1986 season.
1997 - Traded Wilson Alvarez, Danny Darwin and Roberto Hernandez to the San Francisco Giants. Received Brian Manning (minors), Lorenzo Barcelo, Mike Caruso, Keith Foulke, Bob Howry and Ken Vining.
What became known as the "White Flag" trade. The Sox were a .500 team, but they were only three games behind Cleveland when they traded two of their starters and their closer.
The team took a lot of flak for this trade even though it did seem like a stretch or in Jerry Reinsdorf's words at the time "crazy" to think they would have beaten out the Indians that year.
Foulke and Howry wound up making contributions to the Sox, but Caruso was supposed to be the shortstop of the future and turned out to be a bust.
The bigger problem for the Sox was the perception they had given up and this was only three years after the 1994 strike that wiped out the World Series. It was hard for a while to get people into U.S. Cellular Field following that trade.
2004 - Traded Esteban Loaiza to the New York Yankees. Received Jose Contreras and cash.
Loaiza won 21 games in 2003 for the Sox and started the All-Star team. Despite making another All-Star Game appearance in 2004, he was not the same pitcher as the year before and with the Sox out of the race Williams decided to trade him to the Yankees for Jose Contreras.
Sox nostalgia has a full chapter devoted to the way Contreras got hot at the end of 2005 and became the team's top starter leading into the playoffs. He won three games in that post-season and it is hard to believe there would be a World Series championship banner without his efforts.
2005 - Traded Ryan Meaux (minors) to the San Diego Padres. Received Geoff Blum.
Remember at the time a lot of Sox fans were screaming for Williams to go out and get Ken Griffey Jr.? Well, the only move he made was picking up the journeyman Blum who no one really thought about until 86 days later when Blum hit the home run in the top of the 14th inning to give the Sox the lead in Game 3 of the World Series.
Blum did not come back to the Sox in 2006, but he is always going to be remembered fondly on the South Side because of that one at bat in the wee hours in Houston.
2009 - Traded Dexter Carter (minors), Aaron Poreda, Clayton Richard and Adam Russell to the San Diego Padres. Received Jake Peavy.
As of now, this is not a question of what the Sox gave up. Richard is 5-9 this year for a San Diego team, and is on the disabled list right now. Still he went 14-9 last year and as all Sox fans know, Peavy has had trouble staying healthy and with his $16 million annual salary being an albatross on the team that is payroll challenged right now.
If Peavy ever returns to the form he had in San Diego, this trade might look good one day. But that is one big if right now.
The overriding lesson of all of these trades is the general manager never really knows how they are going to work out. That is the beauty of baseball and we will be checking out our Tweets constantly over the next couple of days.
Daniel I. Dorfman is a local freelance writer who has written and reported for the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe among many other nationally prominent broadcast, online and print media organizations. He is also a researcher for 670 The Score. You can follow him on Twitter @DanDorfman To read more of Daniel's blogs click here.
