SO, Mike Piazza gets traded to the Florida Marlins and the Los Angeles Dodgers get just about every monied player left on the Marlins' roster. Think Marlins stink?
Try the ’82 TwinsLongtime Marlins fans (all 10 of them) are in a huff. Their team is going to be terrible for awhile.
And, from all the hand-wringing and serious looks we're getting from the so-called baseball experts, you'd think this little trade was the ruination of the game as we know it.
Good lord, they lament, how can Wayne Huizenga do this to the good people of south Florida? This is corporate greed at its worst. It's awful. It's a travesty. It represents everything that is wrong with baseball.
That's all bull.
This kind of thing has been going on in Major League Baseball for years. The San Diego Padres did the same thing just a few years ago and now they're the toast of the National League.
I got to watch a similar fire sale while living near the Twin Cities in the spring and summer of 1982.
On opening day, the Twins started a couple good-looking rookies named Kent Hrbek and Gary Gaetti at first and third base and another fine young player, who shall remain nameless until later, in center field.
THEY also had quality, veteran players who everyone knew were going to be sold off to the highest bidders as soon as the team fell out of the pennant race, if not sooner. Shortstop Roy Smalley and catcher Butch Wynegar were coveted by the "big market" teams of the day.
Within six weeks, the team had unloaded every veteran player who was making any kind of money. In return, they got what seemed like a couple of old batting helmets and an outfielder named Tom Brunansky.
You think the Marlins are lousy? The Twins were 7-41 from April 30 through June 26 that year. They were 3-26 in May, the second-worst record for a month in the history of baseball.
Some kid pitcher named Frank Viola went 4-10 and was the bright spot of a staff that had the worst earned-run average in the American League.
What's the point of all this? Well, the Twins' owner, Calvin Griffith, was dumping salaries so he could make a little money and eventually sell the team. Sound familiar yet?
Twins fans constantly griped about Griffith for doing it. But by mortgaging the present, Griffith had unwittingly given Hrbek, Gaetti, Brunansky, Viola and, eventually, another young nobody named Kirby Puckett, a chance to play and become big-leaguers.
By the mid-1980s, Calvin had gotten his wish and sold the team.
Those young guys developed into quality players and, for a while, the new owner, Carl Pohlad, was willing to selectively sign some bigger-name players to help them out.
By 1987, the "kids" were stars in their own right and the Twins won the World Series. They did it again in 1991.
BUT those two titles didn't happen overnight. The Twins and the Washington Senators (same franchise, ya know) have been mediocre or worse throughout much of their history.
Baseball is an exercise in struggle and success. For every 20-game hitting streak there's a 4-for-35 slump.
What Marlins fans and some baseball writers need to learn is a little perseverance. For inspiration they need look no further than to the kid who started in center field for the Twins on opening day 1982.
Here he was, from St. Cloud, Minn., starting in center field for his favorite team.
A couple years later, he was back playing town team ball in St. Cloud. The Twins had given up on him. Who could have blamed him if he had given up on himself?
But Jim Eisenreich stuck it out. Since then, he has played in two World Series and drank from the champions' champagne bottle.
And just last week, he was involved in the trade that brought Piazza, if only for a while, to the Marlins and their incredibly lucky but temporarily inconvenienced fans.