Is Jose Quintaña trade the next Jon Garland deal? Or next Sammy Sosa?

The only surprising part about the Chicago White Sox trading away their top pitcher on Thursday is where he wound up – many baseball fans were convinced Jose Quintaña would wind up wearing the pinstripes and interlocking “NY” logo of the New York Yankees.
 

Changing uniforms, but not his home city

Instead, Quintaña is going to the Chicago Cubs; who gave up four ballplayers in their minor league system. Including the two who supposedly were the top prospects they had for their future.

IT’S ONE OF those deals that could come back to bite the Cubbies on their behind if any of those young ballplayers develops into a key to the White Sox’ next championship ballclub – whenever in the future that may occur.

It would be the Cubs’ luck that the “Cuban revolution” taking place on the Sout’ Side will win a pennant, and one of these no-longer-a-Cub players will get the key hit to win the Sox their second world series of this century.

Of course, baseball fans know there always is uncertainty.

For it also could turn out that Quintaña could be the key to gives the Cubs a jolt this season and helps them return to the form that enabled them to win their first World Series of this century just last year.

IN WHICH CASE, it would be just like the White Sox to provide the key piece to enable the Cubs to be able to claim to have more World Series titles in recent years (’05 for the White Sox and ’16 for those baby blue bears) than they do.

Cubs fans' fantasy all-Chicago trade?

So this trade is a gamble, as much of baseball always is. No one knows for sure how things will turn out, and we’ll probably need to wait a couple of decades before we can definitively say if somebody seriously screwed up with Thursday’s deal.

Could this wind up like the 1998 trade where long-forgotten pitcher Matt Karchner went to the Cubs for a minor league ballplayer who turned out to be Jon Garland – one of the starting pitchers who led the White Sox to that ’05 World Series championship.

The White Sox fans' retort

I’m sure that’s the dream from the perspective of 35^th Street.

ALTHOUGH UP AT Clark and Addison streets, they’re probably thinking more along the lines of that 1992 trade where the Cubs gave up an aging (but still capable) George Bell in exchange for a young outfielder whom the White Sox had written off as too stubborn to learn new ways of improving himself as a ballplayer.

Both of these Steves pitched better ...

Some six years later, Sammy Sosa hit those 66 home runs in a season and began that six-season streak in which he began bashing home runs at a pace only matched by Babe Ruth at his 1920s peak.

Which for a while made Cubs fans want to think of this trade as some sort of ultimate steal. Except that with all the steroid speculation that the rumor mill insists on tagging to Sosa, there are many White Sox fans who feel nothing but relief that their favorite ballclub doesn’t have to live with that albatross around its neck.

... for the other Chicago ball club

According to the Chicago Tribune, this is the 15^th time the two Chicago ballclubs have made trades with each other. We’ll have to see how things pan out.

THERE WILL BE some White Sox fans who will give extra scrutiny to outfielder Eloy Jimenez and pitcher Dylan Cease – who are now part of the Sox’ future rather than the Cubs. Although considering that the Cubs had these ballplayers this season at teams in South Bend, Ind., and Myrtle Beach, S.C., it would seem that maybe 2019 is the soonest we’ll see them in Chicago.

Still a freakish image to contemplateS

Although it wouldn’t be unheard of for one team’s player to have better luck on the other side of Chicago. I still remember former Cub Steve Stone (yes, the broadcast guy) being a key pitcher for that 1977 White Sox team that seriously contended for a championship, while Steve Trout (a local boy from suburban South Holland) missed being a part of the ’83 White Sox team that went to the playoffs but made up for it the following year by being a part of that ’84 division-winning Cubs ballclub.

So what’s it going to be for Quintaña?

Will Thursday go down in baseball history “infamy” for this trade? And on which side of Chicago will it wind up being detested, while beloved by the other part of the local baseball fandom?

  -30-

Will Peavy top Dean in ranks of Chicago baseball? Is he payback for Trout?

I’m starting to wonder if Jake Peavy is destined to be the best ballplayer to never accomplish a thing with a Chicago baseball club.

Peavy is the National League’s former Cy Young Award winner (as in the best pitcher in that league in 2007) who hasn’t shown a sign of greatness since joining the Chicago White Sox mid-way through the 2009 season.

I’LL CONCEDE THINGS started out promisingly. He won the three games he started when he first came to the team in 2009. But since then, the Jake Peavy story is one of injuries keeping him from pitching on a regular basis.

During his time with the White Sox, he has 10 wins, 6 losses, an earned run average of 4.11, with 40 walks and 111 strikeouts. Which would be acceptable if it came in a single season and Peavy were nothing more than the number four pitcher in the White Sox’ starting rotation.

But this is the man who supposedly was going to supplant Mark Buehrle as the White Sox’ top pitcher. The man who was going to be the dominant ace from Chicago. The one who would ensure that the White Sox would get another American League championship (if not a World Series title) in our current lifetime.

Now, we’re getting reports that Peavy may have become so anxious to return (and start earning the $16 million he is to be paid for the 2011 season) that he may have hurt his arm a little further, making it likely he will miss even more of this season. He definitely won’t be on hand when the White Sox start their season April 1 in Cleveland against the Indians.

DID THE SAN Diego Padres know what they were doing when they signed him to a big-money contract, then trade him away to Chicago?

I’m not implying some sort of conspiracy (leave that to Toronto Blue Jays fans still bitter over acquiring pitcher Mike Sirotka from the White Sox right as his arm went bad). I’m just wondering if Peavy is destined to be another hard-luck story that is so typical to Chicago baseball.

I’d say Peavy ranks up there with Dizzy Dean in the annals of Chicago baseball.

Dean is the Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher whom everybody remembers for his goofy temperament and his star years with the St. Louis Cardinals (including that peak year of 1934 when he won 30 games and he had a 2.66 earned run average.

BUT DEAN ALSO did four seasons with the Chicago Cubs, and nobody remembers his stint on the North Side – unless they’re looking for more examples of ineptitude by Cubs management throughout the years in acquiring athletic talent. Dean made the Hall of Fame DESPITE being a Chicago Cub.

Dean from 1938-41 won 16 games, while losing 8 with a 3.35 earned run average. That’s over four seasons. Which means if Peavy manages to win six more games during the next two seasons that he is under contract to the White Sox, he will match Dizzy both in victories AND in untapped promise.

There’s even the similarity in that Peavy and Dean were undone by injuries. In Dean’s case, it was sudden. The All-Star Game played in 1937, when Dean got hit on the foot by a line drive. His toe was broken, and he tried to come back before the foot was completely healed.

Which meant he had to alter his pitching motion to avoid putting full weight on that foot, Which cost him all of the movement on the ball that made him so special. That is when the Cardinals chose to let him go, and new Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley insisted on giving him what was big money for the era.

BIG BUCKS SPENT in Chicago to reward him for past athletic success. It applies to Peavy just as much as it did to Dean during the waning years of the Great Depression.

Which makes them the exact opposite of somebody like Steve Trout, the one-time White Sox and Cubs pitcher back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s who was a competent pitcher in Chicago – and was one of the regular starting pitchers for the Cubs the year they won their first division title ever in 1984 (13 wins, 7 losses, a 3.41 earned run average (80 wins, 78 losses with nearly 600 strikeouts during his 10 years in Chicago baseball).

In 1987, he was traded to the New York Yankees, who were counting on Trout to bolster their pitching rotation (the team’s weakness during the 1980s) and were willing to give him the big money contract that would have been his reward for a decade of work.

But four losses, no wins and a 6.60 earned run average in a half-season caused the Yankees to trade him away to the Seattle Mariners, while also paying that team $1 million to take him off their hands. It’s no wonder Trout these days is back in the south suburbs (he played his high school ball for Thornwood High School in South Holland – the same school that produced former Chicago Bulls player Eddy Curry – before signing with the White Sox) having to work for a living like the rest of us.

  -30-

Yet another year goes by without the World Series being played in Chicago

The World Series begins Wednesday, and those dreams some of us had of an all-Chicago affair deciding a U.S. professional baseball championship for 2008 are so dead they’re burned to a crisp.

It’s going to be the Tampa Bay Rays against the Philadelphia Phillies. While I can’t say I really care who wins the thing, I must admit to taking some interest in potential Chicago angles to this series.

IT IS THOSE Chicago angles that makes me think all of us in the Second City ought to be rooting for the Devil Rays (I don’t care if that name offends the locals, it’s a sea creature and it sounds better than just “Rays”).

In fact, this ought to be something that could potentially unite fans of the White Sox and a certain other ball club that had delusions of winning a pennant.

Take the Phillies, a ballclub that like the Cubs dates back to the 19th Century. And it is a team that quite possibly has an even more pathetic history than the Cubs (who were a respectable National League franchise for the first third of the 20th Century).

While the Cubs have only won two World Series in their history (1907 and 1908), the Phillies are a team that have only won the series once (1980) in their history.

JUST IMAGINE THE anguish Cubs fans would feel if the Phillies were to win the World Series, thereby giving them just as many overall victories as the Cubs? Ever since the Braves changed the losing character of their franchise history in Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta by rattling off a dominant string of division titles and five league championships in the 1990s, it has been the Phillies and the Cubs as the historic doormats of the National League.

And if the Phillies were to win a World Series, it would create the perception in some minds that they too have dumped their losing ways, leaving the Cubs all alone (except for a few dumpy expansion teams) at the bottom of the baseball pool.

They went from being convinced this was THEIR year to potentially being left alone in the loser pool.

I don’t think I could handle the mass depression that the North Side and its sympathizers would sink into. In fact, I think such depression would make Cubs fans even more unbearable.

BUT THERE ARE a pair of other reasons for which I will admit to taking some interest in Tampa Bay winning a World Series title – even though they have only been in existence for 11 years (it took the Houston Astros 44 years of existence before they won their first National League pennant, and are still waiting for that first World Series title).

Those reasons are pitcher Chad Bradford and outfielder Cliff Floyd – both of whom found their baseball fortunes at a point this year where they wound up signing to play for Tampa Bay.

Floyd is a Chicago area native who played his high school ball in suburban South Holland (the same high school that produced one-time Chicago Bull Eddy Curry and former White Sox and Cubs pitcher Steve Trout). He’s also the guy who grew up a White Sox fan (claiming Harold Baines as his favorite ballplayer) who later went on to play for the Cubs (in 2007).

This could literally be the year that all Chicagoans can unite behind rooting for a hometown guy to have that BIG moment, thereby making him a local sports legend for the remainder of his life – even if his “local” moment came for another city.

CHICAGO SPORTS FANS have so little history of baseball heroes in October that we’ll settle for a local boy done well somewhere else – just like we don’t hold it against Bill Skowron (who learned how to hit while playing slow-pitch softball back in the 1940s) that he had his baseball heroics playing for the New York Yankees back in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Then, there is Bradford, a relief pitcher who I still remember from the beginning of his career when he was with the White Sox.

Bradford is not the BIG MAN who comes into a game to finish it off. He’s the guy who pitches to a hitter or two at a time in mid-game, to prevent a messy situation from becoming a complete disaster.

What makes him unique is that he’s a sub-mariner. He throws his pitches with a motion that’s not quite underhand. But it definitely isn’t a sidearm throw.

I STILL REMEMBER the first time I ever saw him pitch (in 2000 in a late-season game against the Seattle Mariners). As it turned out, I had a seat that game in the lower deck straight behind home plate.

I got the same view of the pitcher that the catcher and umpire had, and I still remember the break on Bradford’s pitches as being absolutely freaky. He doesn’t throw overly hard, but I can’t hit him even in my dreams.

While I realize the White Sox shared the same doubts about Bradford (how can such a freakish throwing motion ever work long term?) that many conventional baseball people have, I must admit to being intrigued that he has lasted for so many ball clubs throughout this decade (the average major league baseball player’s career is only four seasons – he’s already lasted for nine).

If anything, I’ll watch Bradford come into ballgames and try to envision “What if?” As in, what if Bradford had been kept in Chicago? What could he have achieved on the South Side?

THEN, THERE’S THE biggest “What if?” What if we had lost the White Sox to St. Petersburg, Fla.?

Don’t forget that the monstrosity of a stadium that Florida officials built in the mid-1980s in hopes of luring a major league team to the Tampa Bay area nearly lured the White Sox (Thank God for political manipulation, Springfield-style, that kept the team in Chicago).

That World Series title in 2005, along with division titles in 1993 and 2000, and generally winning records throughout the 1990s and 2000s, could have easily been achieved by the “Florida White Sox.”

I’m willing to throw the fans of Tampa Bay a bone and let them finally have a winning season (including an American League pennant and a chance at a World Series title), particularly since it means those of us who are Sout’ Siders at heart got to keep our historic ball club.

SO GO RAYS! Beat the Phillies (even if our junior senator, Barack Obama, is being deluded enough by his campaign manager to root for Philadelphia).

And preferably, they’ll do it in less than six games. Because I’m really not in the mood for a Republican stink over the Obama infomercial on Oct. 29 delaying Game Six of the World Series. We have enough stupid issues in Campaign ’08. Here’s hoping baseball helps avoid another one from arising.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: All those people who placed pre-season bets on Tampa Bay to win the World Series this year (back when the odds were 200-1) have the potential to clean up (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g8_fAf0_P0VnrmKibfTL7ywUv8ugD93UEN4G0) financially.

There are two Rays players (http://www.baseball-reference.com/f/floydcl01.shtml) with the potential (http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/bradfch01.shtml) to stir up Chicago interest.

How will David Letterman mock Tampa Bay baseball these days (http://lateshow.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/top_ten/index/php/20020327.phtml)?

A history lesson (http://whitesoxinteractive.com/History&Glory/SaveOurSox.htm) about what could have been.