Let’s get the obvious out of the way: if the Red Sox had to do it all over again, they probably wouldn’t trade the entire Hall-of-Fame worthy career of Jeff Bagwell for the twenty-two innings of relief pitching that Larry Andersen provided the Red Sox during the second half of the 1990 season. Retrospectively, there is absolutely no way to justify trading away one of the best first basemen of all-time, for sixty-six outs from a middle reliever. We can all agree that this is true.
And we can all agree, I think, that teams don’t typically know the future. We all understand that the individuals making decisions on baseball teams, like all of us, experience time as a linear progression towards an unknown future. General Managers do not exist out of time: while physicists love to debate the linear progression of time, GM’s, like most of us, are content to live out the Newtonian concept of time as a structural part of the universe’s race towards entropy.
So I think that the first step, in trying to understand the Bagwell-for-Andersen trade, is to get outside our retrospective perspective. While it’s fun to understand history through the 20-20 vision allowed by hindsight, it isn’t a useful way of evaluating baseball decisions.
Think it through. No one lists the Padres decision to draft Donavan Tate in the first round of the 2009 draft one of the worst decisions in baseball history. But it was, at least in retrospect, a terrible selection. It was a most costly decision than the Red Sox decision to trade Jeff Bagwell, because the Padres could have selected Mike Trout. Twenty-three teams passed on Mike Trout before the Angels got their chance: is it reasonable to say that those twenty-three teams, collectively, made the worst decision in baseball history?
Of course not. We don’t hold teams accountable for draft decisions that look bad in retrospect. But we do hold teams accountable for trade decisions that come out looking bad a few years down the road.
I don’t think that’s useful. Whenever the Bagwell-for-Andersen trade gets listed among the worst trades ever, I cringe a little bit, because so much of the weight of that trade’s badness is retrospective. Jeff Bagwell became a Hall-of-Fame player, and Larry Andersen became a good broadcaster…so it’s a terrible trade.
Was it, though? In the context of when it happened, was it really that bad?
That’s what I’m wondering. That’s the question we're considering today.
And to get an answer, we have to first get over retrospective analysis: we cannot evaluate the merits of the trade by judging an uncertain present through the lens of a future we know. To really understand a trade, we have to see it within the context of its own time.
* * *
Stepping back: when we drop retrospective analysis, we still get some bad trades.
In 1919, Babe Ruth led the majors in home runs, runs batted in, and runs scored, and managed to go 9-5 with a sub-3.00 ERA on the mound. He was without question the best offensive player in the game, and he was a massive drawing card. Even the most devout fan of musical theater would concede that an owner selling that kind of player was a mistake.
Or the Sandberg for Ivan DeJesus trade. My god, that trade looks horrible. I mean, I get that the Phillies had to dump Larry Bowa…but I have no idea why they felt obliged to throw-in a young infielder coming off a strong year in Triple-A to get a player coming off a .196, 0 HR season. It makes no sense. It’s a stupid, dumb trade that didn’t solve anything for the Phillies.
The Frank Robinson trade wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t great, but let’s cut Branch Rickey some slack. Milt Pappas was a young right-hander coming off a three-year run when he posted a 2.97 ERA with a 45-25. He was entering his Age-27 season, and had been healthy as a horse throughout his career. Robinson was the much greater player, but he was hitting thirty, a time when most players decline somewhat. Rickey rolled the dice on the younger player, and the Reds were desperate for pitching, and sort of overstocked with outfielders. The Reds Tony Perez and Lee May waiting in the wings...so maybe a part of the decision was about getting those guys a chance to play.
And it’s not like Milt Pappas went and fell off a cliff: he pitched for eight more years, winning 99 games and getting a few Cy Young votes in 1973. He wasn’t an inner-circle Hall-of-Famer, but he wasn’t dreadful.
More recently, I think we can count the Shelby Miller for Dansby Swanson and others as a pretty terrible trade. I mean, that looked bad at the outset: the only people in the world who thought that Shelby Miller was ace-like enough to trade away a #1 overall pick and a decent pitching prospect were a) Shelby Miller's mom, and b) the D'Backs. Everyone else thought it was a pretty drastic overpay.
On the other hand, the Red Sox just traded perhaps the #1 prospect in baseball for Chris Sale. This seems fine for the Red Sox, as they're a) covered in the infield, and b) trying to build a contender. And it's good for the White Sox, who are looking to collect a pool of young talent. Getting baseball's top prospect (and shedding Sale's pretty terrific contract) is a good step for the team.
It could turn out that Chris Sale's arm flies off in mid-May, and Yoan Moncada puts in a Hall-of-Fame career for the White Sox. I don't think that should change our evaluation of the trade: both teams made decisions that are absolutely justifiable in this moment...I don't know that we should re-prosecute either organization twenty years down the road.
* * *
So who was Jeff Bagwell?
In the summer of 1990, Jeff Bagwell was a young Wade Boggs. Playing for the Red Sox Double-A team, Jeff Bagwell put up a season that looks a lot like a Wade Boggs minor-league season:
Player
|
Year
|
2B
|
HR
|
BB
|
K
|
BA
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
Boggs
|
1983
|
41
|
5
|
89
|
41
|
.335
|
.437
|
.460
|
Bagwell
|
1990
|
34
|
4
|
73
|
57
|
.333
|
.422
|
.457
|
Boggs was a year older than Bagwell, but he put up his line up in Triple-A, so we’ll call this even.
The central point is that Jeff Bagwell was a legitimate prospect. If, in the long-ago year of 1990, baseball teams still didn’t value on-base percentage as much as they should have, that .333 batting average stands out. Bagwell was a legitimate prospect.
But he wasn’t the Jeff Bagwell that exists in our collective memory. He was not projecting to be the player he turned into: a power-hitting first basemen. He looked like he was going to be a high average, low power bat. He looked exactly like Wade Boggs.
The Red Sox had two problems.
Well…problems isn’t the right word. The Red Sox had two variables that complicate this story. The first very obvious variable is that the team already had a Wade Boggs-type player: they had Wade Boggs. Boggs was under contract for two more seasons, and it was highly unlikely that they were going to move their perennial batting champ just to see if Bagwell has the same talent.
This seems, at least to me, like an eminently reasonable position to take. We wouldn’t expect a major league team to be cavalier with one of the best players in the major leagues, just to make room for someone putting up the same numbers in in Double-A. There’s too much of a gap between who Wade Boggs was in 1990 and who Jeff Bagwell was in 1990 for the team to seriously consider moving Boggs.
So that’s issue one: the Sox had Wade Boggs entrenched at third base, at least for a few more years. We all know that.
The second variable is less known. The second variable is that the Red Sox were insanely crowded at any position where Jeff Bagwell could have reasonably played. At third base, the Red Sox had Wade Boggs, and then they had Scott Cooper in Triple-A. We’ll come back to Scott Cooper.
What about first base? That’s the positon that Bagwell was transitions over to. How did the Red Sox look at first base?
The Red Sox had Carlos Quintana, a rookie, playing at first base. Carlos Quintana wasn’t blocking anyone, but he held his own 1990 rookie year, posting a respectable triple-slash line. But Quintana was viewed as a place-holder for the Red Sox 1989 first-round pick, who was, in the summer of 1990, crushing baseballs in Pawtucket. The same year that Jeff Bagwell posted his .879 OPS in Double-A, Mo Vaughn was posting a .921 OPS in Triple-A. The Red Sox clearly saw Vaughn as their future first basemen, and judging by what Vaughn and Bagwell had done to that point in their profession careers, that was an absolutely reasonable projection. Vaughn was a better hitter than Bagwell in the summer of 1990.
And the Red Sox were right, as it turned out. Mo Vaughn turned into a terrific player.
What about the outfield?
The Red Sox outfield was crowded. Mike Greenwell was a twenty-six year old with an adjusted OPS of 137. Ellis Burks was a year younger, and was entering a season in which he’d win the Gold Glove and Silver Slugger as a centerfielder. The team added Tom Brunansky early in the year…they swapped Lee Smith for Bruno, who was under contract for two seasons past 1990.
And the Red Sox had Phil Plantier waiting in Triple-A. Mo Vaughn hit 22 homers in Pawtucket in 1990….but Phil Plantier hit 33 homers for that team. In 1991, Plantier cracked the Red Sox lineup halfway through the year and ended up posting a batting line that would’ve made Fred Lynn blush: a .615 slugging percentage in 53 games.
Phil Plantier had a short career, but he was a good hitter: after a disappointing sophomore turn, the Red Sox traded him to San Diego, where he put up a 34 HR, 100 RBI season before fading into obscurity. That’s not really ‘fading’: he could hit.
So it is not just that Jeff Bagwell’s path to the majors was blocked by other prospects …it’s that Jeff Bagwell‘s path to the majors was blocked by a lot of prospects and young major leaguers who actually had good major league careers. Mo Vaughn wasn’t a better player than Bagwell, but he won an MVP and hit a bunch of homers. Ellis Burks and Mike Greenwell and Tom Brunansky aren’t getting into the Hall, but they all had fine careers. Wade Boggs was a terrific player through his thirties, though he ended up missing Fenway Park tremendously. He got to ride a horse, which is nice. Carlos Quintana was a good player in 1990 and 1991.
The 1990 Red Sox had third base solved. They had first base solved. They had the outfield straightened out, and they had a few players worth trying as designated hitters. The team happened to have a lot of quality offensive players coming up through their system at the same time, and not enough positions on the diamond to put them.
* * *
We’ve talked about players, but we need to consider the team context.
The 1990 Red Sox were not a great team.
The team had two greatplayers in Boggs and Clemens, and two very good players in Burks and Greenwell. They had Mike Boddicker, a fine pitcher acquired in a trade for Brady Anderson and an offensive meme generator. They had Jody Reed, who was a much better player than anyone realized. I loved Jody Reed.
But it was not a great team: the Red Sox would win 88 games in 1990, winning the division because the rest of the AL East was a little in flux. They won 83 games in 1989, and they’d win 84 games in 1991…and that’s about what they were: a .500ish team that stumbled into a division title.
But they were in first place. On August 31st, the day of the Bagwell trade, Boston was sitting comfortably at the top of the table:
AL East
|
GB
|
AL West
|
GB
|
BOS
|
--
|
OAK
|
--
|
TOR
|
6.5
|
CHW
|
6.5
|
DET
|
11.5
|
TEX
|
16
|
MIL
|
12.5
|
CAL
|
16.5
|
BAL
|
13.5
|
KCR
|
17
|
CLE
|
15
|
SEA
|
18.5
|
NYY
|
18
|
MIN
|
23.5
|
The team was eight games into a ten-game winning streak, playing the best baseball they’d play all year. The Blue Jays would eventually draw closer: it took a Tom Brunansky catch off an Ozzie Guillen line-drive for the Red Sox to clinch things. But on the day that Lou Gorman pulled the trigger for Larry Andersen, the Red Sox had every reason to think that they’d win the AL East.
And they knew who they’d be playing in the ALCS. While the Red Sox weren’t a great team, the Oakland A’s were. The 1990 Oakland A’s were the best team of their era. The 1990 lineup had Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire, and Jose Canseco hitting around the likes of Harold Baines, Dave Henderson, and Carney Lansford. Dave Stewart and 27-game winner Bob Welch anchoring the rotation, and their closer was the nearly unhittable Dennis Eckersley. The A’s had played in the World Series in 1988 and 1989, and they were strong favorites to get back there in 1990.
So the Red Sox management knew who they’d be facing in the ALCS: Boston had been trounced by Oakland when the team clashed in the 1988 ALCS: Canseco, McGwire, and Dave Henderson combined to hit .340 with 10 runs scored, 5 homers, and 11 RBI over the four-game sweep. The 1990 version of the team had all those players back, plus Rickey Henderson. The Red Sox faced an uphill battle against the A’s.
What was the team’s biggest area of weakness?
This is easy: the Red Sox bullpen was a mess. The team’s closer was Jeff Reardon, who was good ‘nuff (22 saves, 3.16 ERA). After Reardon, things got a bit sketchy:
Pitcher
|
IP
|
ERA
|
Dennis Lamp
|
105.2
|
4.68
|
Wes Gardner
|
77.1
|
4.89
|
Rob Murphy
|
57
|
6.32
|
Jeff Gray
|
50.2
|
4.44
|
Jerry Reed
|
45
|
4.80
|
Eric Hetzel
|
35
|
5.91
|
Joe Hesketh
|
25.2
|
3.51
|
That’s who they had: one established closer, and a bunch of guys who had ERA’s in the 4’s or 5’s or 6’s. Joe Hesketh, a left-hander, was their most reliable arm.
Looking at this a little differently, here are the ranks of AL teams by bullpen ERA:
Rank
|
Team
|
ERA
|
1
|
Athletics
|
2.35
|
2
|
White Sox
|
3.18
|
3
|
Tigers
|
3.26
|
4
|
Orioles
|
3.52
|
5
|
Rangers
|
3.52
|
6
|
Angels
|
3.55
|
7
|
Blue Jays
|
3.65
|
8
|
Twins
|
3.67
|
9
|
Yankees
|
3.77
|
10
|
Indians
|
3.78
|
11
|
Mariners
|
3.87
|
12
|
Royals
|
3.93
|
13
|
Brewers
|
3.94
|
14
|
Red Sox
|
4.62
|
The Red Sox didn’t just have the worst bullpen in the league…they had the worst bullpen by a comfortable margin. Their middle relief was a mess.
They had a couple left-handed relievers. As I mentioned earlier, Joe Hesketh was the most reliable pitcher in the pen, and the team was probably thinking about moving lefty Tom Bolton for the playoffs. But they didn’t have a reliable right-handed middle reliever.
And Oakland had a lot of right-handed bats. The team was almost entirely right-handed: Rickey, Canseco, McGwire, Hendu, Steinbach, and Randolph were all righties. The only pure lefty was Harold Baines. Willie McGee and Walt Weiss switch hit. Maybe ‘hit’ is too strong a word to describe Weiss, but that’s a digression. The A’s lineup was right-handed heavy, and the Red Sox didn’t have a reliable right-handed relief pitcher to get those guys out.
Enter Larry Andersen.
Here is a table of the five best relief pitchers from 1989 to 1990, according to FanGraph’s version of WAR:
Rank
|
Name
|
WAR
|
1
|
Rob Dibble
|
8.0
|
2
|
Larry Andersen
|
5.0
|
3
|
Tom Henke
|
5.0
|
4
|
Dennis Eckersley
|
4.9
|
5
|
Duane Ward
|
4.3
|
The first thing worth pointing out is that Rob Dibble was really, extraordinarily good. No one really comes close to touching him.
The second thing worth pointing out is that Larry Andersen was one of the absolute best relief pitchers in baseball when the Red Sox acquired him. He wasn’t famous, mostly because he was an old guy pitching in Houston, but he was a terrific pitcher, with an absolutely devastating slider. As a pitcher, he was on par with Eckersley and Henke.
And he was a right-hander. The Red Sox needed a bullpen arm that could neutralize the right-handed bats of the A’s. Larry Andersen was the very best player available to do that.
The narrative that we hear about the Andersen-for-Bagwell trade is that the Red Sox shipped Bagwell off for some middle reliever no one remembers. That understates things considerable: Larry Andersen was one of the three or four best relief pitchers in baseball at the time of the trade, and the Red Sox, looking at an improbable division title, were extremely light when it came to good right-handed relief arms. They had a capable closer, but they needed middle-innings help, which is the spot where Andersen excelled. He answered a huge and lingering question mark that the team faced all year, and he was the very best answer that was available.
And he pitched great. He posted a 1.23 ERA over those 22 regular season innings, helping Boston fight off the late-charging Toronto Blue Jays. He played an important role in getting Boston into the playoffs, and while Andersen got the loss in Game 1 of the ALCS, he hardly imploded: Oakland tied the game at 1-1 on a walk (McGwire), a force-out, a single, and an RBI fly (Rickey). You can’t hold a guy too accountable for walking Mark McGwire and getting Rickey Henderson to fly out.
Teams don’t make the playoffs ever year. The 1990 Red Sox found themselves, unexpectedly, to be ahead of the pack at the trade deadline approached. Their general manager a) identified the team’s most glaring weakness, and b) worked out a deal for the one player in baseball who could best solve that weakness. That decision probably put the Red Sox ahead of Toronto, and it gave them a puncher’s chance against the behemoth of the Oakland A’s.
I said that retrospection isn’t a good way to evaluate trades, but the dimensions of this trade have replicated themselves over and over again in recent years. Aroldis Chapman, Mark Melancon, and Andrew Miller were three ace relievers traded to contending team at the deadline this year in exchange for prospects: two of those three ended up pitching in the World Series. The importance of having good relief pitching in the postseason has been one of the most significant storylines of recent playoffs, and it does not seem unreasonable to view the Andersen-for-Bagwell trade as being a predecessor for those later moves.
All of which is to say that there was a great deal of foresight in Boston’s decision to trade for Larry Andersen. The management probably understood that the team wasn’t great, and that they had lucked into a position where they had a comfortable lead in the division. The management looked at the team objectively and identified the biggest area of concern, both for the rest of the season and come the playoffs. They worked out a deal to acquire the very best player available who would address that concern. They took a risk on trying to win in 1990, and it paid off. They won the AL East, and they entered the Championship Series better equipped to beat the A’s. They didn’t beat Oakland, but they took their best shot.
The one sin of management….the one element that clearly deserves criticism, is that the Red Sox opted to send Jeff Bagwell to Houston instead of Scott Cooper. I think that the story goes that Houston asked for Cooper, and Lou Gorman countered with Jeff Bagwell.
This was a bad call.
While Jeff Bagwell was putting up an .880 OPS in New Britain, Scott Cooper was putting up a .727 OPS in Pawtucket. Cooper had a good strikeout-to-walk ratio, but Bagwell’s was much better. Pawtucket was a hitter’s park, and New Britain was a pitcher’s park. There was ample information available to the team to suggest that Jeff Bagwell was going to be the better player.
I think this is the crux of the Red Sox culpability. The Red Sox should have known that Bagwell was the better prospect, but they decided to protect Cooper. Maybe they liked him because he was already in Triple-A, and performing decently. Maybe they thought that his power was developing (Cooper had 12 homers to Bagwell’s four), and maybe the scouts thought that Bagwell wouldn’t ever develop as a power hitter. Maybe they were fooled by park effects. Maybe they were sick of high-on-base infielders. Maybe Lou Gorman just didn’t really know what was happening down in New Britain.
All things considered, this seems like a pretty slight error in judgement. One team asks for a third-basemen in Triple-A. The other team says, "Well, that’s a bit steep. How about our guy in Double-A?"
To me, this is doesn’t get you into one of the circles of General Manager Hell…you’re just in Purgatory, pushing boulders up a hill. And while it is absolutely true that Lou Gorman should have known that Bagwell was the better player, it’s also true that a GM has to juggle a thousand tasks and a million variables. A GM has to consider a team’s present needs against its long-term future. A major league team has hundreds of players under their watch, and it is impossible to expect one man to have a full grasp of everything that is taking place at every level in the organization. Add to that the stress of a looming trade deadline, and it is not that surprising that Gorman’s counter to Houston asking for Triple-A third-baseman Scott Cooper was to offer Boston’s Double-A third baseman.
Bagwell-for-Andersen has been historically misunderstood in four ways:
1) It’s difficult to understand just how crowded with bats the Red Sox were in the summer of 1990, and how unclear Bagwell’s path to the majors.
2) No one really remembers how good a pitcher Larry Andersen was. He’s viewed as ‘some’ middle-inning relief pitcher, when he was essentially Andrew Miller.
3) It isn’t widely understood just how much the Red Sox needed a pitcher like Larry Andersen to win the division and beat Oakland, and,
4) People overestimate what kind of prospect Jeff Bagwell was in the summer of 1990.
That third part…the over-estimation of Bagwell…relates to his monumental climb as a player. He was traded in August of 1990, and he was starting with the Astros in spring training. He won the NL Rookie-of-the Year, almost unanimously. A couple years later he won the MVP.
That change happened quickly: you don’t often see a guy hit .333 with four homers in Double-A go on to hit fifteen homers (in a massive pitcher’s park) with a .294 average in the majors. Bagwell’s OPS+ was 139 as a rookie…that’s a pretty big leap from raking in Double-A.
Because Bagwell was a terrifically good player from the second he entered the majors, we tend to assume that he was showing some clear indications of that talent in the minors. And he was showing a lot down in New Britain: he had great on-base skills, he led the league in doubles, and he posted a terrific batting average. But it was still Double-A: Jeff Bagwell was still a long way from the majors. There were already questions about his ability to handle third base, and the Red Sox wanted to try Mo Vaughn at first. Maybe they should have thought about Vaughn as a DH and put Bagwell at first but…they didn’t.
I wish the Red Sox had kept Jeff Bagwell. But the team needed a player like Larry Andersen, and he helped keep Boston ahead of Toronto in the September. The Red Sox were blown away by Oakland in the Championship Series, but they took their shot, and I think it’s reasonable that they did: it’s tough to make the playoffs in a two-division league.
It was a mistake to trade away Bagwell. But the Red Sox got a good pitcher back, and rode that pitcher to a narrow division title and a shot at the World Series. That’s not nothing. The trade was a mistake, but I don’t see it as one of the worst decisions in baseball history.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com