swap me before i kill again

there’s a fun post at hardball times about trading - rates the winners and losers, franchise by franchise, going all the way back to 1960. the interesting thing about the cardinals is not where they rank — by this data they're middle of the pack, have basically broken even — but rather the sheer number of deals they have transacted. by this research, since 1960 the cardinals have made more trades than any team in the majors except the mets — 463 swaps, which works out to just over 10 a season.

can that be right? 10 trades seems high for a single year, let alone for a yearly average. so i decided to visit retrosheet, the source of hardball times’ data, to do a quick spot-check. chose at random a year from my youth — 1975, when i was 12 — and counted ’em up. and i’ll be damned if the cardinals didn’t make 17 trades that year — eight of them during the season. here they are (players to be named later in parens):

Feb 14 Stan Papi to Montreal for Craig Caskey
Mar 29 Danny Godby to Boston for Danny Cater
Apr 4 (Jim Willoughby) for Mario Guerrero
May 9 Larry Herndon and Luis Gonzalez to San Francisco for Ron Bryant
May 18 Ted Martinez to Oakland Athletics for Steve Staniland and (Mike Barlow)
May 27 (Doug Howard) to Cleveland for Luis Alvarado
May 28 Elias Sosa and Ray Sadecki to Atlanta for Ron Reed and (Wayne Nordhagen)
June 4 Ed Brinkman and Tommy Moore to Texas for Willie Davis
June 25 (Mike Barlow) to Houston for Mike Easler
June 30 (Bill Parsons) and cash to ChiS for Buddy Bradford
July 25 Jim Dwyer to Montreal for Larry Lintz
Oct 20 Willie Davis to San Diego for Dick Sharon
Oct 28 Larry Lintz to Oakland for Charlie Chant
Oct 28 Mike Garman and (Bobby Hrapmann) to ChiC for Don Kessinger
Dec 8 Ken Reitz to San Francisco for Pete Falcone
Dec 9 Ron Reed to Philadelphia for Mike Anderson
Dec 12 Buddy Bradford and Greg Terlecky to ChiS for Lee Richard.
Dec 22 Mick Kelleher to ChiC for Vic Harris

imho, this list of transactions appears to be the product of a diseased mind. consider first the number of players who were acquired and dealt away within the twelvemonth — five on’m (barlow, reed, davis, bradford, lintz). consider further the pointless, fevered traffic in bad utility infielders— out with stan papi, ted martinez, ed brinkman, and mick kelleher, in with mario guerrero, luis alvarado, lee richard, and vic harris. is there a peso’s worth of difference among any of these guys? it looks like bing had some kind of compulsive need to roil the roster — kind of like a sick kid has a compulsive need to pick at his chicken pox. surely he couldn’t have thought he was improving the team . . . . ?

with ten minutes’ further digging, i found that 1975 was anything but an unusual year for bing devine. the following year he made another 17 trades, most of them as pointless as his ’75 deals, then tacked on 19 useless swaps in 1977. his "career high" came in 1973 — a mind-numbing 21 trades in that calendar year. four of those 21 deals included a pitcher named mike nagy, whom devine acquired twice and dealt away twice in the course of 1973.

between 1972 and 1977, devine authored a staggering 104 trades — 17 a year. during the full run of his second term as cardinals’ gm (1968-1977), he made 147 trades — 14.7 a year. that’s not normal. per the hardball times article, the per-team average in the 1970s was about 3 trades a season. stan musial, whose term as stl’s gm (1964-1967) separates the two bing devine eras, made only 9 trades during his three-year reign (including the deals that brought roger maris and orlando cepeda). and after devine left in early 1978 and john claiborne took over, the diarrheal spewing of transactions abruptly stopped. whitey herzog, considered a great wheeler-dealer, made only 22 trades during four years-plus as the cardinals’ gm.

so der bingle — what gives? here’s a theory, completely off the cuff and worth exactly what you paid for it. devine’s last trade before he got fired in august 1964 was arguably the most famous trade of all time: brock for broglio. other trades may have been more lopsided (see mike’s baseball rants for a top-20 list), but brock-for-broglio became enshrined as a symbol of the cubs’ futility — and since cub futility is one of the longest-running and most popular shows in the major leagues, brock-for-broglio occupies the same niche as an iconic broadway tune. you know — "yankee doodle" isn’t the best song ever written, but everybody knows it. . . .

anyway, i digress. when the cardinals rallied to win the 1964 pennant, the deposed devine became something of a martyr — and brock-for-broglio his badge of vindication. by the time devine returned the stl front office in november 1967, brock-for-broglio had played a central role in two cardinal world series triumphs. even at that early date, it was part of baseball lore — and that, i think, drove bing devine partially insane. perhaps he thought he had a special genius for talent evaluation and was determined to prove it by finding another brock, even if it meant sifting through a haystack of vic harrises and lee richards and mario guerreros. or, conversely, maybe brock-broglio burdened devine with a reputation for genius he could never live up to, and so he played the role as best he could by trading a lot, if not particularly well.

but most likely devine was just an old-school gm who made trades because that’s all gms had to do in those days. they didn’t have free agents to woo or arbitration hearings to prepare for; they spent their time smoking cigars and chomping red meat and drinking martinis with other gms, and --- sometimes for lack of anything better to do -- making trades. what, you wanna swap ballplayers? sure, what the hell, you take this guy and i’ll take that one. . . . like flipping baseball cards. something to pass the time.

for the record, trader jock has averaged a healthy 6 trades a year as the cardinals’ gm.