What do Mark Langston, Doyle Alexander and Delino DeShields have in common? Outside of being decent Major League players, all four were traded for Hall of Famers.
With the elections of Randy Johnson, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez and Craig Biggio into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Tuesday, Cooperstown now adds some of the best talent it has in any year in the recent history of the Hall.
Tuesday’s news also brings to the forefront issues that MLB front offices have when it comes to contending in the short term with an eye on the long term.
Three of the four players that will be enshrined into Cooperstown later this year were traded by the team that originally drafted them early in their careers. Trades that were made in order for those teams to build a contender for the short-term. All three of those teams are still ruing those trades to this day.
Let’s check in on the deals and what transpired in the years that followed them.
Detroit Tigers trade John Smoltz to the Atlanta Braves for Doyle Alexander (August, 1987)
Alexander was the big name in this trade. Detroit had been attempting to acquire him for some time before finally being able to pull off the deal by offering up a youngster in Smoltz. At the time, this deal worked wonders for Detroit. Alexander finished that season with a 9-0 record and a 1.53 ERA in 11 starts with the Tigers, who ended up nabbing the division title. He followed that up with an All-Star campaign in 1988. However, he was out of baseball by the end of the 1989 season after finishing that campaign with a Major League-high 18 losses.
As it relates to Smoltz, he struggled in his initial stint with Atlanta, posting a 2-7 record with a 5.48 ERA in 12 starts in 1988. Again, it looked like Detroit came out on top in this deal.
But within two years, Smoltz had posted the first of what would be 10 double-digit win seasons in 11 years.
Smoltz, who served as both a starter and a closer during an amazing 21-year career, won 213 games and earned eight All-Star appearances, mostly as a member of the Big 3 in Atlanta. His best season came in 1996 when he won a league-high 24 games en-route to a Cy Young Award. Smoltz put up 199 of his 213 wins following Alexander’s retirement in 1989. And following their division title in 1987, the Tigers put up a string of 15 losing campaigns in 18 years prior to winning the AL Central in 2006. Meanwhile, Atlanta ended up as division winners every full season from 1991-2005.
Montreal Expos traded Randy Johnson, Gene Harris and Brian Holman to the Seattle Mariners for Mark Langston and Mike Campbell (May, 1989)
Johnson ranks second on the all-time strikeout list behind Nolan Ryan with nearly 4,900 K’s. The Big Unit, as he is known, won 303 career games, earned five Cy Young Awards and made 10 All-Star teams. In his 10 seasons with the Mariners, Johnson put up 130 wins, led the league in strikeouts four times and won double-digit games the last seven full seasons he played in the Pacific Northwest.
As it relates to Langston, he was nothing more than a rental. As one of the best pitchers in baseball at that time, Langston moved on to the California Angels in the offseason after pitching 24 games for an Expos team that ended the 1989 campaign fourth in the NL East with a .500 record.
Los Angeles Dodgers traded Pedro Martinez to the Montreal Expos for Delino DeShields (February, 1994)
At the time of this deal, it made perfect sense for the Dodgers. They were in the midst of a contract dispute with second baseman Jody Reed and needed to find someone to replace him. In acquiring DeShields, the Dodgers were getting someone who had hit near .300 in each of the previous two seasons and had racked up 40-plus steals in his first four years in the Majors. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, he was a downright bust in Southern California. He missed nearly half his first season with the team and didn’t hit better than .256 in any of his three years in Los Angeles.
By now, you already know Pedro’s story. He went 22 games over .500 in four seasons with the Expos, winning the NL Cy Young in 1997. As a small market team, Montreal had to find a way to move Martinez for some young prospects after those four seasons. And it did just that.
Unfortunately, they weren’t able to acquire much from the Boston Red Sox in return. The Expos nabbed top prospects Carl Pavano and Tony Armas in exchange for Martinez. However, they did turn DeShields into 127 victories between the three pitchers they acquired in the two separate trades.
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