Day 27: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April
The book: "Going Going Gone: The Art of Trade in Major League Baseball"
The author: Fran Zimniuch
How to find it: Taylor Trade Publishing, 240 pages, $16.95 (paperback)
Where we'd go looking for it: At the publisher's website, as well as Powell's and Amazon.
The scoop: Was just reading a piece by the L.A. Times retired sports writer Ross Newhan about the worst trades in Dodgers' history, and the one where Fred Claire sent future Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez to the Montreal Expos for second baseman Delino DeShields still goes down as the one, in retrospect, that really stunk.
At the time, of course, Martinez was a 21-year-old with a 10-5 record in one full season as a Dodger (1993), having pitched 65 games, striking out 117 in 109 innings. But he was best known as Ramon Martinez's little brother, and thought to be (by Tommy Lasorda) too slight of build to hold up to any kind of endurance test that one must go through as a starting pitcher. DeShields, meanwhile, was a 24-year-old second baseman on the rise, four years of MLB service, 42 or more steals each season.
And in three years with the Dodgers, he did pretty much nothing. Was traded off to St. Louis, then to Baltimore, then the Cubs, then was out of baseball at age 33. Martinez ... you know what happened.
It's most amusing to us that Claire, the Dodgers' GM who pulled the trigger on that one, was given the space to write the forward for Zimniuch's book.
How it goes down in the scorebook: E-GM.
Other books by Zimniuch:
"Shortened Seasons: The Untimely Deaths of Major League Baseball's Stars and Journeymen" in 2007
"Richie Ashburn Remembered" in 1980
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