This is the first of a series of articles we’ll be writing about infamous trades of the past in which a superstar player was dealt for multiple players of lesser talent or value.

June 15, 1977: Mets ace Tom Seaver to the Reds for Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Steve Henderson and Dan Norman.

In one of the blockbuster trades in baseball history, the New York Mets sent Tom Seaver to the world champion Cincinnati Reds last night for four players of far less magnitude.—Joe Durso, New York Times, June 16, 1977

That was the reality Mets fans woke up to on Thursday morning, June 16, 1977. Their ace pitcher, a hero and icon to many and the face of the Mets franchise, had been unceremoniously dealt to the Cincinnati Reds for four players of “far less magnitude,” a pitcher, a utility infielder, and two minor league outfielders. In addition to Seaver, the Mets sent slugger Dave Kingman to San Diego for Bobby Valentine, another utility infielder, and pitcher Paul Siebert, and dealt utility infielder Mike Phillips to the Cardinals for Joel Youngblood, yet another utility man.

More than 30 years later, Mets fans still refer to that moment as “The Midnight Massacre.”

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I’m happy to announce that I’ll be interviewed by MySportsRadio.com’s Alex Reimer on his baseball podcast, “Without A Curse,” which will be available for download on Monday, February 11. Alex and I will be discussing my book, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League, as well as Seamheads.com.

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When word leaked out last Tuesday that Twins ace Johan Santana was going to be traded to the Mets for four prospects, the uproar it caused among Twins fans was deafening. Not only were they losing arguably the best pitcher in baseball, but they were getting back in return four virtual no-names — outfielder Carlos Gomez and pitchers Philip Humber, Kevin Mulvey and Deolis Guerra — with a combined 63 games of major league experience. You’d have thought Santana was dealt for a used jock strap, a bag of balls, and an autographed picture of “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry. But he wasn’t; He was traded for four of the Mets’ top 10 prospects, ranked second, third, fourth and seventh, respectively, by Baseball America in early November.

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Thanks to our loyal readers, Seamheads.com recorded its 500,000th hit last month!  That’s amazing considering we launched just four months ago.  We’ve been mentioned on numerous blogs and received a nice boost in traffic when Fox Sports columnist Dayn Perry mentioned us in one of his columns.  We’ve also received fantastic support from Baseball Think Factory and The Hardball Times and we’ve forged new relationships with Baseball Digest Daily and Ball Hype that should help the overall success of the site.  In fact after only a day of being tracked by Ball Hype we’ve almost cracked their top 100 baseball web sites list.  We also want to thank those of you who’ve taken the time to compliment our site.  Your emails and comments are very much appreciated.

As you already know we’ve added Dave Rouleau to our staff and we’re excited to have him.  Our Quotes Database now includes 20 players, seven Executives/Managers/Front Office Personnel, one team and one quote about Major League Baseball in general.  That will grow exponentially over the next few weeks.  We’re also extremely close to launching our Ballpark Factors Database which is sure to draw a crowd considering the anticipation it drummed up when I first announced it a while back.

Lastly, my book, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League, is due out on March 30 and has appeared on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble’s web site.  It can be pre-ordered from either site or you can order it directly from my publisher.

Thanks again for your support and thanks for making us part of your baseball fix!

We’ve added a new writer to our staff and we’re very pleased to have him here at Seamheads.com. His name is Dave Rouleau. Dave is a SABR member who currently writes for several web sites, including Baseball Digest Daily, The Biz of Baseball, and The Biz of Hockey. He’s also an Associate Producer at Inside the Dome (Scout.com). For a sample of Dave’s work, check out his article: The Most Productive Hitting Streaks…Since 1957 over at Baseball Digest Daily.

We hope you enjoy his work as much as we do!

Did he or didn’t he, that’s the question. Eddie Cicotte is widely recognized as the inventor of the knuckleball, earning his nickname “Knuckles” around 1908, his first full year in the majors. Whether Cicotte is the knuckleball’s true inventor or not—Nap Rucker, Lew “Hicks” Moren and Ed Summers have also been credited with inventing the pitch (or at least refining it)—no pitch earned Cicotte more attention than his vaunted “Shine Ball.” But did he really throw it and, more importantly, did it even exist?

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A couple days ago Dr. Hoban posted an article about strange Hall of Fame voting in which he wondered why Bob Lemon was suddenly regarded as a better pitcher than Allie Reynolds in 1972 after Reynolds received more votes in the first seven years that they appeared on the ballot together.

“In 1972, a funny thing happened on the way to the Hall of Fame,” Hoban wrote. “After both players had been retired for many years, Bob Lemon suddenly and mysteriously became a ‘better pitcher’ than Allie Reynolds. Or, at least one could infer that from what happened in the voting. In 1972, Lemon passed Reynolds in the voting and went on to be elected to the Hall in 1976. And Allie Reynolds was never elected. What happened? How can anyone logically explain this turn-around?”

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On August 16, 1920 the Cleveland Indians prepared to take the field against the New York Yankees to start a crucial three-game series at Yankee Stadium that pitted the first-place Indians against the third-place Yankees. Cleveland was a mere four percentage points ahead of the Chicago White Sox in the standings; New York stood within a half game and only 10 percentage points of first place. The Yankees, perennial also-rans over most of the franchises first two decades, had been strengthened greatly by the acquisitions of manager Miller Huggins in 1918, pitcher Carl Mays in 1919 and outfielder Babe Ruth in 1920, and were contending for their first American League pennant. The Indians were basically in the same boat, having finished higher than third place only once in their first 17 years in the league, before consecutive second place finishes in 1918 and 1919 put them among the Junior Circuit’s elite.

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If you’ve hung around this site you’re no doubt familiar with our “Who, You Ask?” series of articles which celebrates the careers of largely forgotten ballplayers who fashioned excellent careers but slipped through the cracks of our collective memory. Every once in a while, however, I run across players who I’m unfamiliar with whose careers intrigued me enough to want to find out more. More often than not these players had brief stays in the majors and don’t warrant full-length articles, so I’ve created a category specifically for them called “Cup of Coffee.”

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New pages have been added to our quotes encyclopedia. They include quotes by and about:

Ban Johnson

Charles Comiskey

Ed Barrow 

Jacob Ruppert and Cap Huston

Jimmy Collins

Boston Red Sox

Major League Baseball

These pages will continue to be updated and new pages will be added soon.

We’re proud to announce the addition of our first database — the Seamheads.com Quotes Encyclopedia.  It can be found by clicking on the “Database” link on the navigation bar located underneath our logo towards the top of the main page.  The Encyclopedia consists of only one page at this time — Harry Frazee — but you can rest assured that it will be updated weekly and will contain many more pages as we head towards Spring Training and the start of the 2008 season.  Enjoy!

We here at Seamheads.com would like to thank those of you who visited the site in 2007 as well as those who have either bookmarked or linked to us.  We really appreciate you and hope you come back.  In less than three months we’ve attracted more than 20,000 visitors, who’ve accounted for almost 500,000 hits!  We can’t wait to see how many more visitors we attract in 2008 and we have several projects in the works that we think will bring you back to Seamheads.com for more.  A couple of them are major and at least one them can be considered ground-breaking; unfortunately we can’t go into detail about the latter yet because we’re still ironing out the details.  But we can list a couple of projects that will be posted to the site very soon.

• Ballpark Factors Database: Soon we’ll have the most extensive ballpark factors database on the Internet.  Our database will not only list factors for each type of hit, but it will include factor splits as well as stat splits.  For instance, if you want to know how right-handed home run hitters were affected by Turner Field in 2000, as opposed to left-handed sluggers we’ll have factor splits (HR factor for righties was 87; for lefties it was 105) and lefty/righty stat splits to complement the factors.  We have data on every stadium in major league history as well as those used in the National Association, the American Association, the Union Association, the Players League, and the Federal League (although not all will include splits).

• Quote Encyclopedia: We’re in the process of building an encyclopedia of quotes that will not only include the quote but will list the person who spoke or wrote it, the source of the quote (newspaper, book, magazine, periodical, etc.) and the date it appeared in print.  This will be a great tool for researchers who are looking for material for their books, articles, and/or essays.  Here’s a sample page to peruse.

There’s much more to look forward to here at Seamheads.com, but those are two of the many projects we’re working on.  We thank you for taking the time to explore our site and we look forward to adding many exciting new features over the next few months.

He is probably the only player other than Gehrig who can reasonably be considered the greatest first baseman ever in terms of peak value. The reason I say that is that the other top contenders, most notably (Jimmie) Foxx and (Willie) McCovey, were the same type of players that Gehrig was, and thus they can be directly compared to him, a comparison that they clearly lose. But the man I’m referring to was a different type of player, he didn’t have the home run pop, but he hit for a higher average, was faster and a better defensive player than Gehrig, and the comparison between the two is not easy.-Bill James, The Historical Baseball Abstract.

Who, you ask, was this great first baseman?

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Larry Macdonald, a good friend of mine for the last 10 years or so, and an original member of the Seamheads.com Diamond Kings Baseball League, made a sacrifice for another friend that makes me proud to know him. Macdonald donated a kidney to Jim Rosenbeck, a friend he’d met while playing in the same fantasy baseball league, and quite possibly saved Jim’s life. Their story aired on ESPN on Thanksgiving Day and if you missed it you can see the interview at YouTube.com. 

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In 1922 a 31-year-old seemingly washed up fireballer hit the major league scene with ten years of minor league experience under his belt and an 0-4 record and 4.09 ERA from three failed trials with major league clubs. By the end of the season he would be Brooklyn’s second best pitcher behind Dutch Ruether and would embark on a 14-year odyssey that would see him become the National League’s strikeout king for the next seven consecutive seasons, as well as its MVP in 1924. This after recovering from an inflamed elbow diagnosed in 1916 that took exactly five years to heal, just as his doctor had predicted. Who, you ask, is this unlikely hero?

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I have a list of articles I intend to write, most about players who toiled long before any of us were a gleam in our parents’ eye (hell, long before our parents were gleams in their parents’ eyes), but sometimes events collide and new ideas crop up and articles seemingly write themselves. With the recent indictment of Barry Bonds for perjury and obstruction of justice, it seems Bonds’ career is over and his home run total of 762 is the new standard (assuming it’s allowed to stand). Frankly, I was overjoyed when I heard of Bonds’ indictment because I can’t stand him and it’s always been clear to me (and I’m assuming a majority of baseball fans) that Bonds had been taking performance enhancing drugs. I’m also saddened and a little outraged that the indictment didn’t come BEFORE Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s home run record, but I’ll save that rant for another day.

Prior to Bonds’ indictment I obtained a copy of the 1999 edition of a book called Diamond Chronicles (There were three editions from 1998 to 2000) that features commentary from Bill James, Rob Neyer, David Pinto, Mat Olkin, John Dewan, Craig Wright, and Don Zminda, among many others. Last night while watching the Patriots beat the snot out of the Bills, I ran across an interesting article written by Jim Henzler on September 11, 1998 called “The Ultimate Home-Run Race,” in which he uses James’ Favorite Toy formula to determine which player had the best chance of surpassing Aaron. Now that we’re all but certain that Bonds’ 762 is the new mark to beat, I thought it would be interesting to review what Henzler wrote and rerun those Favorite Toy predictions almost 10 years later.

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Most baseball fans are aware that the current trade deadline is July 31, but from 1923 to 1985, the deadline was June 15, a date that’s often attributed to Harry Frazee’s alleged “Rape of the Red Sox,” in which he traded or sold most of his star players to the Yankees. Prior to 1923 the trade deadline was August 1, but when Frazee sent third baseman Joe Dugan to the Yankees on July 23, 1922, the transaction invited a storm of protests, especially from St. Louis, whose Browns held a slim game and a half lead over the second place Yankees. Most felt that adding Dugan to its roster gave New York a decided edge over the Browns and that the Yankees were attempting to buy the pennant. American League president, Ban Johnson, who despised Frazee, immediately called for a ban on mid-season trades. Commissioner Landis refused to entertain the suggestion— Landis despised Johnson as much as Johnson despised Frazee— but he agreed that a new deadline was in order and chose to adopt the June 15 recommendation of Pittsburgh Pirates magnate Barney Dreyfuss.

But contrary to popular belief the June 15 trade deadline had as much to do with the New York Giants’ mid-season deals as it did the Yankees’. The following includes excerpts from my book, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson, and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League, as well as details of the trades that were made that prompted Commissioner Landis to adopt a new trade deadline.

Editor’s note: some material unrelated to the trade deadline has been removed from the following excerpts.

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I received a lot of feedback about my Ted Williams article in which I opined that Williams was the greatest hitter who ever lived and presented my case by combining Williams’ real stats with five years’ worth of simulated stats that were generated by Micro League Baseball, a computer baseball game that came out in the early 1980s. I’ve responded to most of the feedback, but I wanted to use this forum to go into a little more detail and I thought it would be fun to compare Micro League’s output to the projections of others, including Richard Johnson and Glenn Stout, Steve Treder at The Hardball Times, and Bill James’ Brock2 career projection method, which James introduced in his 1985 Baseball Abstract.

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Ted Williams’ dream was to walk down the street and hear passersby say “there goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.” On the streets of Boston no one would dare say otherwise. In New York it’s Babe Ruth, who not only hit them far and often but occasionally would tell you when. Elsewhere, historians would argue for Ty Cobb and his gaudy career average of .366. Recently Barry Bonds, warts and all, has staked a claim to the title. Red Sox fans cite the fact that “Teddy Ballgame” missed five prime years of his career to fly planes in two wars and his statistics pale in comparison to what he might have done had he had those years to further terrorize pitchers.

I had often wondered the same thing myself. How would Ted Williams have done had he not missed those years? With the help of a computer and a baseball simulation program I have simulated the 1943-45 and 1952-53 seasons. The following article was written as if Williams had actually played those seasons. Some of the content is pure fiction based on the results of the simulation. My intent was to, once and for all, answer the age-old question “who was the greatest hitter who ever lived?” The answer, undoubtedly, is Ted Williams.

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While watching last night’s game in which the Red Sox copped their second World Series title in four years, Fox flashed a graphic on the screen that showed that Red Sox rookie Jon Lester was only the third pitcher in history to win the clinching game in his first postseason start, the others being W. Ford and T. Bonham. I immediately recognized both hurlers as Whitey Ford and Tiny Bonham and though I know plenty about Ford I’m only vaguely familiar with Bonham and only because he pitched in the Seamheads.com Diamond Kings Historical Fantasy League. So out of curiosity I thought I’d look into his career and his lone start, which came in Game 5 of the 1941 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers.

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“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

Former major league pitcher Jim Bouton ended his controversial book Ball Four with those lines in 1969 and the nation has been in his grip ever since. The book was a best seller and was named one of the “Books of the 20^th Century” by the New York Public Library, but its success didn’t come without a price.

When his career ended in 1970 (he made a brief comeback in 1978) the former Yankee hurler affectionately known as “Bulldog” was exiled from Yankee Stadium due to the book’s candid revelations about baseball players’ off field activities and how the Yankees front office conducted its business.

Only six years earlier at the age of 25, Bouton was coming off consecutive seasons in which he won 21 and 18 regular season games, respectively, earned a spot on the American League All-Star team in 1963 and beat the Cardinals twice in the ’64 World Series. He copped only sixteen more wins over the rest of his career, played for three different teams after leaving the Yankees, attempted a comeback as a knuckleballer in 1978, and became a pariah for breaking one of baseball’s cardinal rules by exposing the privacy of baseball clubhouses to the general pubic.

Bouton’s son Michael wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1998 asking that the Yankees let bygones be bygones and invite his father back to “The House That Ruth Built” for Old Timers’ Day. The Yankees acquiesced and Bouton returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time in 28 years.

I learned in 2002 that Bouton was trying to convince the Seattle Mariners to host an Old Timers’ Day for the old Seattle Pilots, so I contacted him about granting me an interview and he graciously accepted. The following is a transcript of our conversation five years ago:

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Yet another chapter excerpt from Mike Hoban’s book, Baseball’s Best: The TRUE Hall of Famers, has been added to the site.  In Chapter Five, Dr. Hoban asks whether or not it’s fair to use the same criteria to evaluate short but great careers, like that of Jackie Robinson, and longer careers.  He evaluates the careers of a handful of players who played in fewer than 1800 games—men like Hank Greenberg, Mickey Cochrane and Kirby Puckett—and also discusses several more Hall of Famers who did not meet the minimum requirements based on his NEWS Hall of Fame Monitor scores.  Check it out!

Another chapter excerpt from Mike Hoban’s book, Baseball’s Best: The TRUE Hall of Famers, has been added to the site.  In Chapter Four, Dr. Hoban discusses 38 position players who are in the Hall of Fame and uses his NEWS HOF Monitor scores to determine whether or not they have the numbers worthy of the HOF.  Check it out!