There weren’t many deals this year, and at least one was pretty bad.
Wid Matthews, the Cubs general manager from 1950-56, came from the Cardinals and Dodgers, where he was highly regarded as a scout under Branch Rickey, for both teams. Both the Cardinals and Dodgers were known for their early adoption of the farm system model in baseball and had been the league’s two most successful teams leading up to the 1950s.
All of this did not help Matthews become a good GM of the Cubs, as they lost at lest 89 games in five of his seven years as GM. And some of his deals were downright awful, as you’ll see. The rest seemed kind of pointless.
March 30: Acquired Pete Whisenant from the Cardinals for Hank Sauer
Sauer, one of the team’s most popular players in the 1950s, was NL MVP in 1952, the only year between 1947 and 1962 the Cubs didn’t have a losing record (they were 77-77).
But by 1955 he had been benched much of the time and played in just 79 games, having his worst year as a Cub. He was 38, perhaps time to move on.
Whisenant lasted one year with the Cubs, batting .239/.292/.414 and producing 1.0 bWAR before being traded after the season. He did hit a career-high 11 home runs and was tied for third on the team in steals — with eight.
Sauer didn’t do much in St. Louis, but he did squeeze out one more good year in 1957 with the Giants, batting .259/.343/.508 with 26 home runs at age 40. His 198 home runs as a Cub rank 10th in franchise history, and only Ian Happ (150, ranking 16th) has any real chance to overtake him.
This deal didn’t move the needle much for either team.
November 13: Acquired Ray Jablonski and Elmer Singleton from the Redlegs for Warren Hacker, Don Hoak and Pete Whisenant
“Elmer Singleton” is about the most 1950s baseball name I can think of. He was 38 when the Cubs acquired him and he did pitch reasonably well, a 3.39 ERA in 28 games from 1958-60. That was worth a whopping 0.9 bWAR.
Jablonski never played for the Cubs; as we learned in an earlier post in this series, he was traded to the Giants before the 1957 season even began.
Whisenant, I noted above.
Warren Hacker pitched nine seasons for the Cubs and got a handful of downballot MVP votes in 1952, when he went 15-9 with a 2.58 ERA. He lost a no-hitter with one out in the ninth May 21, 1955 in Milwaukee when George Crowe homered. That would have been the second Cubs no-hitter in 10 days, as Sam Jones had thrown one May 12 at Wrigley Field.
The reason this deal was made was Don Hoak. Hoak had been acquired from the Dodgers after the 1955 season, a year when he played in the World Series for them. And he hated being a Cub.
Writer Ron Berler quoted Cubs pitcher Jim Brosnan, a teammate of Hoak’s and a writer, about Hoak’s dislike for being a Cub:
“Don Hoak played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a very good team, before he was traded to the Cubs, a very bad one,” remembered Brosnan, from his home in suburban Chicago. “It was hard for Hoak to relate. As far as he was concerned, he went right from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh without ever stopping in Chicago.
“He refused to accept that he was a Cub. He had nothing but obscene words for the Cubs and their organization; he even hated [former club owner] P.K. Wrigley.
“Hoak,” he concluded, “is quite possibly the only man who ever conquered his Cubness.”
As noted, Hoak was traded to the Reds, but eventually wound up in Pittsburgh, where he had a very good year (.282/.366/.445, 16 home runs, 97 runs, second in MVP voting) and got a World Series ring. Hoak died young, at 41, of a heart attack. His daughter Clare became an actress, known for several films including “Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.”
December 11: Acquired Charlie Silvera from the Yankees for a PTBNL
Silvera became well known in New York because he was Yogi Berra’s backup. As such, he played there for nine years but only in 201 total games. He was on the World Series roster for the Yankees seven times, but got into only one game, in 1949. Still, he got himself six World Series rings.
Guess the Cubs figured they could tap into that. Nope, Silvera played about as much as he had in New York (26 games) and batted .208/.263/.264.
Three days later the Cubs sent Harry Chiti to the Yankees as the PTBNL. Chiti had been rushed to the big leagues at 17 because scouts thought, “Here’s the next Gabby Hartnett!” Chiti wasn’t. He never played for the Yankees, either; the Kansas City A’s grabbed him in the Rule 5 draft. Eventually he wound up on the famous expansion 1962 Mets, who got him from Cleveland for a PTBNL early that year, then returned him six weeks later, making him the first player traded for himself.
December 11: Acquired Jackie Collum, Ray Katt, Tom Poholsky and Wally Lammers from the Cardinals for Jim Davis, Sam Jones, Hobie Landrith and Eddie Miksis
John Holland had replaced Wid Matthews in October and this was his first big trade.
What on Earth was this? Katt never played for the Cubs, he was sent away in another deal. Lammers never played in the majors. Poholsky had a 4.93 ERA in 28 games in 1957 and never played in the majors again. Collum pitched in nine games for the Cubs before he, too, was traded away.
Miksis, who had played in a couple of World Series for the Dodgers in the late 1940s, was a mainstay in the Cubs infield for most of the early and mid 1950s, but he didn’t play much in St. Louis and drifted to the Orioles and Reds before retiring after 1958.
Landrith played just the one year in Chicago but served as a decent backup in St. Louis and San Francisco for a few years, also wound up on the 1962 Mets, and was still active as late as 1963.
The real kicker here was trading Sam Jones. The Cubs thought he was done at 30. He had two good years in St. Louis and then they traded him to the Giants for Bill White, a deal that worked out well for the Cardinals… but Jones had a great year in 1959, leading the NL in wins (21) and ERA (2.83) and finishing second in Cy Young voting at a time when there was just one such award for both leagues. Early Wynn won it for the White Sox, so if there had been two Cy Youngs in ‘59, Jones is probably the NL winner. That was a 5.7 bWAR season.
Jones would have helped the ‘59 Cubs quite a bit, as they were contenders for a while and failed largely because their starting pitching was just north of awful.
This was a terrible trade.
For that alone, 1956 gets a D grade.