Sometimes, stories write themselves. Today I was looking at the various men in baseball history named (first/middle name) Philip and (last/family name) Phillips and I ran across one Deacon Phillippe, a name I knew only in passing from reading about the Great Game's early years.
In scanning Phillippe's BaseballReference.com page, I noticed that he had been part of what I can only describe as The Biggest Trade in Baseball History. How did I not know about this trade before now? Consider ...
... on December 8, 1899, the Louisville Colonels traded
Phillippe, along with Fred Clarke, Bert Cunningham, Mike Kelley, Tacks
Latimer, Tommy Leach, Tom Messitt, Claude Ritchey, Rube Waddell, Jack
Wadsworth, Honus Wagner, and Chief Zimmer to the Pittsburgh Pirates for
Jack Chesbro, Paddy Fox, John O'Brien, Art Madison, and $25,000.
Wow.
Forget, just for a moment, the fact that $25,000 was a ridiculous amount of money for the era -- focus instead on the unlikelihood of a trade including four future
Hall of Famers ever happening again, at any level ... Clarke, Waddell,
Wagner and Chesbro all have plaques in Cooperstown.
Back to Phillippe, who is not so enshrined, for a moment ... he won 20 or more games, with a career high of 25, in six of his first seven seasons
in the big leagues (of which only the first was with the Colonels, the
rest with the Pirates), and was a combined 22-5 over his last two full
seasons ...
You can make a decent case that Phillippe's career was as good
as, or even better than HOFer Chesbro's, but the latter's 41-12 mark in
1904 earned him an engraved plaque despite a career mark of "just"
198-132 -- more wins than Phillippe but a lesser winning percentage ...
Waddell is also in the Hall of Fame, though his career mark of 193-143
falls shy of Chesbro's in both win total and percentage -- and even
further shy of Phillippe's .634 winning percentage, which is tied for
43rd best in MLB history, with Hall of Famers Joe McGinnity and Kid
Nichols and Hall of Fame talent Doc Gooden, who had, uh, other issues
...
But this trade wasn't ALL about the pitching -- for instance, before
the trade, Clarke was the Louisville manager ... After the trade, he
was the Pittsburgh manager ... And after his 180-212 mark with LOU, who
saw the PIT run -- 16 years, 1422 wins, a .595 win percentage, four
pennants and the 1909 World Series title -- coming? He had just two
losing seasons with the Pirates, not coincidentally his final two years
at the nascent Steel City's helm ... Still, he apparently had Very
Nearly Hall of Fame numbers as a player (.312, 2,672 hits, 503 steals)
and his long success as a manager clinched his plaque in Cooperstown
... Call it the Joe Torre route, though the current Yankee boss isn't
enshrined yet (he will be) and, unlike Torre, Clarke was a player/manager his entire career,
quitting managing at the same time he quit playing, at the age of 42
... He lived to the age of 80, so could conceivably have put up real
Connie Mack-like numbers had he stayed in skippering ....
But again, it's not all about the Hall of Famers ...
For instance, Leach had 2,143 hits his own 19-year career that saw him
play more than 1,000 games in the outfield and more than 1,000 in the
infield, primarily at third base ... He also stole 361 bases and hit
172 career triples (leading the NL once and finishing 7th or better in
the NL six more times), so apparently he had pretty good wheels ...
And Ritchey was another infielder, mostly a 2B, who spent 13 years in
the big leagues, the last decade of which came after the trade ... His
only .300 (on the nose) season came in 1899 with Louisville, but did
hit .290+ each of his first two seasons with Pittsburgh and closed out
his career with a .273 average on 1,618 careeer base hits ... And think
for a moment -- a good argument can be made that Ritchey, whose #1
BBRef Most Comparable player is a Hall of Famer himself (admittedly the
improbably enshrined Phil Rizzuto) was the seventh- or eighth-best player in the trade!
Back to the pitching -- Cunningham won 142 big league games, though
just four after the trade and none while wearing a Pirates uniform ...
Zimmer played in the big leagues for 19 years, mostly as a backup
catcher, with 15 of those years coming pre-trade ... O'Brien, a 2B from
New Brunswik, played 500+ MLB games, but none of them came after the
trade ... Madison, like O'Brien was an infielder who played his entire
big league career before the trade, in two cuppajoes with the two
Pennsylvania-based ballclubs ...
If the old saw about "the team that gets the best player wins the
trade" has any truth to it, then obviously Pittsburgh wins ... It's
hard to remember that Hans Wagner even played for anyone other than the
Pirates, but on his way to Cooperstown, he started out in Louisville.
Wagner accumulated 2,967 of his 3,415 career hits for the Pirates after
the deal ... Did you know that Wagner pitched in two ballgames in
his career, allowing exactly zero earned runs in 8.1 innings pitched?
Okay, he gave up seven hits and five unearned runs, but that 0.00 at least looks pretty ...
Okay, items like that suggest we could deconstruct details of a deal of
this size for several thousand more words, so let's stop. Here are some
questions for y'all ...
https://www.battersbox.ca/article.php?story=20070620230353406