Two years ago the Yankees made a six-player trade with the Philadelphia Phillies the day before the July 31 nonwaiver trading deadline. The key player in the deal was Bobby Abreu, who proceeded to hit .330 for the Yankees and post assorted other impressive statistics.

The Yankees, who were in second place at the time of the trade, finished in first in the American League East so it’s fair to conclude that the deadline-beating trade was beneficial. It was not so beneficial to the other player the Yankees received in the deal, Corey Lidle, but that’s another story.

What about the players the Phillies got from the Yankees? They were all minor leaguers – pitchers Matt Smith and Carlos Monasterios, catcher Jesus Sanchez and shortstop C.J. Henry.

When teams make such trades, the team giving up the established player justifies the deal by saying the young prospects it received in return will help in the future. More often than not, though, the minor leaguers are never heard from.

In the case of the Abreu trade, Monasterios and Sanchez are in the Phillies’ minor league system and Smith is there, too, recovering from Tommy John (elbow) surgery. The Phillies released Henry last September, and the Yankees re-signed him in November, but he’s on the disabled list at the moment.

In other words, the Phillies shouldn’t expect to reap great benefits from the trade. The Pittsburgh Pirates should have similar expectations from their recent trade with the Yankees. The trade, in fact, created a chorus of head shaking among major league executives.

The Pirates gave the Yankees an established good-hitting outfielder (Xavier Nady) and a serviceable reliever (Damaso Marte), and what did they get in return? Three minor league pitchers, two of whom have spent time with the Yankees but didn’t stick, and a-once-but-no-longer-touted outfield prospect, Jose Tabata.

The trade prompted a friend of mine to ask if the Pirates have become the modern-day Kansas City team that years ago served as a major league feeder for the Yankees.

Between 1955 and 1960 the Yankees and the Athletics completed 16 trades involving about 60 players, including Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Ryne Duren and Ralph Terry, all of whom went to the Yankees.

Whether Nady and Marte help the 2008 Yankees win anything will be seen in the next couple of months, but more interesting to watch will be the teams that benefited from the Athletics, now of Oakland, and their trading practices.

Nine days apart earlier this month the Athletics traded Rich Harden to the Cubs and Joe Blanton to the Phillies. Last December they traded Danny Haren to the Diamondbacks. Three-fifths of their starting rotation gone in a seven-month span.

“We’re rebuilding,” Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager, said. “We set out to rebuild our farm system. We had exhausted our farm system the last decade. Now we’ve gone from the lower end to the upper end. We’ve made major strides in achieving what we wanted to do. Now the goal is to do that on the major league level.”

For anyone who wants to keep a scorecard and judge the Athletics’ success with their three trades, these are the players they received:

Pitchers Dana Eveland, Greg Smith and Sean Gallagher (all in their starting rotation), Brett Anderson, Josh Outman; catcher Josh Donaldson; infielders Chris Carter, Adrian Cardenas and Eric Patterson and outfielders Carlos Gonzalez (their center fielder), Matt Murton (a reserve), Matt Spencer, and Aaron Cunningham.

For much of the first half of the season the Athletics stayed with the Angels in the American League West, but their presence in the race turned out to be a mirage. Injuries to too many players undermined any chance of their continuing to contend.

“What we’re trying to do is create a team that teams are chasing, not a team that is in it halfway through the season,” Beane said. “We made a commitment to rebuilding and we’re not rebuilt yet. It’s not where you are but where you’re headed is the way I view it. We want to do it right and do it for the long term, not exceed someone’s expectation one year, then fall short the next few years.”

The teams that traded for Beane’s pitchers this month want to win this year. Harden posted a 1.04 earned run average in his first three starts for the Cubs but had only a loss to show for it on his won-lost record. The Phillies won Blanton’s first two starts but with no thanks to him. He emerged from those games with a 7.88 e.r.a.

The Milwaukee Brewers, on the other hand, hit the trading jackpot with their acquisition of CC Sabathia. Sabathia had a 6-8 record and 3.83 e.r.a. with Cleveland but produced a 4-0 record, three complete games and a 1.36 e.r.a. in his first four starts with the Brewers.

Sabathia and Harden will have much to say about the outcome of the National League Central race. Blanton could affect the N.L. East race but in a negative way for the Phillies if he continues pitching as he has so far.

Mets fans were disappointed that the Mets didn’t re-acquire Nady, who played for them in 2006 until the Mets had to make an emergency trade for a relief pitcher at the deadline because Duaner Sanchez sustained a shoulder injury in a taxicab accident.

But the Mets already had their Nady on their roster in the form of Fernando Tatis. Going into their final July series with Florida, Tatis had a .410 batting average, a .486 on-base percentage and an .820 slugging percentage in July. The surprising left fielder, who previously had been a third baseman, also hit six of his seven home runs in the month, including game-tying and game-winning home runs.

If the Mets had acquired Tatis in a trade July 1 and he had produced that performance, he would easily be the hit of the mid-season trading season. As it is, he will probably just be the N.L. player of the month. He is also the player who made it unnecessary for the Mets to give up a good young player or two for a much-needed outfielder.

The Angels, on the other hand, gave up a good young player, first baseman Casey Kotchman, and a minor league pitcher, Stephen Marek, for first baseman Mark Teixeira.
 
Three-hundred-sixty-four days earlier the Braves acquired Teixeira from Texas for five young players, including the catcher with the longest  name in the majors, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and a pitcher, Matt Harrison, who joined the Rangers starting rotation earlier this month.

Mariano Rivera may very well be the best relief pitcher in history, but his workload makes him a pampered pitcher compared with his Hall of Fame predecessor with the Yankees.

Rich (Goose) Gossage is being inducted into the Hall of Fame Sunday, where Rivera will be some day, but to appreciate the difference in the two standout closers it is necessary to consider what was and is asked of them.

Take Gossage’s first season with the Yankees for example. In his 63 appearances Gossage pitched more than one inning 38 times (60 percent). In Rivera’s 749 games (through July 25) in 12 seasons as the Yankees closer, he has pitched more than one inning 161 times (21 percent).

But what is more than one inning? According to Elias Sports Bureau, of the 161 times Rivera pitched more than one inning, he worked between 1 and 2 innings 112 times and exactly 2 innings 47 times. In other words he has pitched more than 2 innings only twice.

Gossage, in 1978 alone, pitched more than 2 innings 25 times and 2 innings 10 times. He had only three games in which he pitched between 1 and 2 innings.

Delve even deeper into Gossage’s record, and it becomes even more astounding by today’s measurements. Twice in that season he pitched seven innings, once against Toronto in a 13-inning game, once against Boston in a 17-inning game. In five other games he worked 4 innings or more.

The one-inning save developed later, with Tony La Russa adopting that strategy with Dennis Eckersley. In the first season (1988) in which he only relieved, Eckersley, also a Hall of Famer, pitched a total of 72 2/3 innings in 60 games. Ten years earlier Gossage worked 134 1/3 innings in 63 relief appearances.

Gossage earned 27 saves that first season with the Yankees. Rivera exceeded that total in each of his first 11 seasons as the team’s closer and gained his 26th save this season in the 1-0 victory over the Red Sox Friday night. Gossage, however, worked far harder for his saves than Rivera has for his. What that means basically is the productivity of the two relievers cannot be compared fairly.

Billy Martin, the Yankees manager when Gossage joined the team, wasted no time in piling on Gossage’s work load. Gossage pitched 3 or 3 2/3 innings in three of his first four appearances. He was the losing pitcher in two of the games. In fact, he was the losing pitcher in three of his first four games. He didn’t get a save until May 3 in the Yankees’ 22nd game. By that time he had a 1-3 won-lost record.

“I remember it as two months; I don’t know if it was that long,” Gossage said recently. “There was a lot that goes with putting on the pinstripes. It took me a while to adjust to that. I got booed and I got pelted with everything.”

He recalled that at that time relievers were transported from the bullpen to the mound in a car.

“We drove by and they pelted that little pinstriped car,” he said. “I‘d get to the mound and Thurman would say ‘how are you going to lose this one?’ I’d say ‘I don’t know you little …. Get your ass back there and we’ll find out, okay?’”

LOVING THE ONE LOVE GAMES

In today’s sports-watching society fans want to see runs and touchdowns and baskets and goals scored. Soccer has never made it professionally in this country because few goals are scored. But is there anything better than a 1-0 baseball game? I love a 1-0 baseball game.

The Yankees and the Red Sox produced the 26th 1-0 game of the season in the opener of their weekend series. Theirs was the third in the majors in six days.

The San Francisco Giants know about 1-0 games. They have played five this season, winning four. The Red Sox loss to the Yankees was their fourth 1-0 game of the season; they have won two and lost two. Toronto also has won two and lost two. Philadelphia and Washington have played a pair of 1-0 games against each other, each winning one.

The most interesting 1-0 development has been the games the Angels and the Dodgers played on consecutive nights in June. The Dodgers won the first one even though they didn’t get a hit, then lost the second one despite getting three hits.

NO BROOKLYN VOTES FOR O’MALLEY

When Commissioner Bud Selig was in New York for the All-Star game, an older man stopped him at his hotel and said he was an old Dodgers fan. “Man,” the gentleman said to Selig, “I hate that O’Malley.”

“You’re going to have to get over it,” Selig replied, meaning it has been 50 years since the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for Los Angeles.

“Not until the day I die,” the man said.

O’Malley goes into the Hall of Fame this weekend, probably for the same reason that man still hates him: the Dodgers move to Los Angeles. While it stunned and infuriated and devastated Brooklyn fans, the move drastically altered the baseball map, opening the entire country to the major leagues.

That was a significant step, one that benefited baseball and set the stage for it to become the truly national sport it is today.

Not that it will console old Dodgers fans who are still around, but Brooklyn’s sacrifice served the greater good.

RABBIT REDUX

As far as executives go, O’Malley should be in the Hall of Fame. But what possible excuse could the same committee that elected O’Malley have had for electing Bowie Kuhn? I would say that Kuhn is the Rabbit Maranville of baseball executives with his induction, but that would demean Maranville, a .258 hitting shortstop, who would never have been elected today.

Kuhn, however, was elected today, and it’s not just the fault of the members of the committee who gave him the necessary votes for election. They were doing the job the Hall of Fame expected them to do.

When they changed the voting system – again — and the makeup of the committees doing the voting, Hall officials knew what they were doing. They were stacking the deck in favor of former officials, like Kuhn, and against the one candidate they apparently wanted to keep out of the Hall, Marvin Miller.

I will not belabor the case for Miller’s election, which I have made before. I have been among the many writers – neutral observers – who have long advocated Miller’s entry into the Hall. After he received only three votes – the votes of three writers –from the 12-man committee in his latest election loss last December, Miller asked to be omitted from future ballots.

In the matter of Kuhn, on the other hand, his induction lessens the stature of the Hall, but Hall officials are getting what they wanted when they revised the voting format and assigned Kuhn to a can’t-miss committee especially when the committee at the same time could rebuff Miller.

By not voting for Miller, the management members of the committee gained their revenge for what he did for their players as head of the union, but they went one step beyond by electing Kuhn.

Kuhn was all negativity, a reactionary force in baseball. He did nothing positive in his 16 years as commissioner. He fought the progress that came in spite of him and has led to the successful state of the game it is today. If left to Kuhn, the majors would not be on the verge of 80 million in attendance and $6.5 billion in revenue.

When Kuhn died last year, some obituaries noted that free agency began during his tenure, as if he deserved credit for it.. Given his choice, though, free agency would have been created over his dead body. Instead of embracing free agency, Kuhn fought it and predicted the end of the game as we knew it. He was all doom and gloom. Fortunately he lived long enough to see how wrong he had been.

When he was elected commissioner in 1969, many people thought he was bright because he was a lawyer. He proved, however, that not all lawyers are bright. And when he finished being commissioner in 1984, he continued to demonstrate that fact by being part of a law firm that quickly collapsed.

Only then did he make a smart move, that is, for himself. He hurriedly moved to Florida, selling his house in Ridgewood, N.J., staying one step ahead of the sheriff. His collapsed law firm owed lots of money, and in Florida a debtor’s property cannot be seized for payment.

IS I IS OR IS I AIN’T

Among the e-mail this site has received in its brief existence have been two messages asking the same question: Who really is writing this site?

“My name is Alejandro and I write for a baseball blog, umpbump.com,” said the first e-mail. “Sorry to bother you but there’s great talk in the blogosphere about the authenticity of murraychass.com; mainly, is the man really behind it.

“We all know Mr. Chass isn’t too fond of blogs in general, but this makes for great fodder. But I personally think it would be great for Mr. Chass to be proactive in sharing his great work with the world. With all the speculation and mixed opinions, though, I’m just not sure if the site is for real or not….

“So, I’m curious, is Mr. Chass really behind all this? Could you share some details?”

This e-mail actually was written to someone connected technically to the site, and it was forwarded to the site’s project manager.

The second e-mail was also from someone at umpbump.com. Do the folks at umpbump not have anything better to do but wonder about the author of this site?

“To whom it may concern,

“There’s been some debate about whether or not former New York Times sports writer Murray Chass is actually writing the content for murraychass.com….

“Can you tell me who is writing the content for murraychass.com?

“Regards, Coley Ward Umpbump.com

Perhaps by now the umpbump guys have figured it out for themselves; they should be able to figure it out. If they haven‘t, though, they will have to wonder for a while longer.

The old scorebook doesn’t lie. Right there, for the game the Yankees played against the Chicago White Sox May 28, 1974, it has Elliott Maddox playing center field and Bobby Murcer playing right field. The game marked Bill Virdon’s shocking switch of Murcer, the successor to Mickey Mantle, from center field to right.

Murcer had received no warning or even a hint that the change was coming. The manager had not said anything about it that day or before that day. Murcer learned of it when he walked into the Yankees clubhouse at Shea Stadium and looked at the lineup card posted on the door. He had been the Yankees center fielder for five years and was nearly a third of the way through his sixth season in that hallowed spot in the Yankees defensive alignment.

But Virdon, an old center fielder himself now in his first season as Yankees manager, decided Maddox was a better center fielder and was not bound by the team’s tradition.

“That was different to him,” Lou Piniella said of the change for Murcer. “It really was. They put Maddox in center field and Bobby played right and I played left. He wasn’t happy about it, but he respected Virdon’s wishes.”

Piniella, a teammate and close friend, was talking about Murcer a few days after he died at the age of 62 as the result of a deadly brain tumor. All brain tumors are bad, but Murcer’s was the worst kind, a glioblastoma multiforme, the kind that also killed Dan Quisenberry, Dick Howser, Johnny Oates, Tug McGraw and John Vukovich.

Until Murcer’s tumor was discovered in December 2006, his worst year was 1974. The unceremonious eviction was not the first event to shatter his calm existence that year. His year began poorly and ominously April 6 when the Yankees opened the season at Shea Stadium.

Murcer was a Yankee Stadium hitter, taking advantage of the close right field fence. It was only 296 feet down the right field line to the low fence. But when the 1974 season began Yankee Stadium was closed for two years for renovation. The Yankees played their home games at Shea Stadium, sharing it with the regular tenants, the Mets.

Murcer quickly discovered he could not hit at Shea and let it psych him out completely; He never tried to hide his disdain for the place. “I hated Shea Stadium from the first pitch. Still do,” he wrote in his recent autobiography, “Yankee for Life.”

“He was used to the short porch at Yankee Stadium and all of a sudden the balls at Shea were going to the warning track,” Piniella recalled. “He tried different things. Crowd the plate a little more so he could pull it. He started to swing a little harder and created little problems with his swing. He just didn’t like it. With the airplanes flying and the winds gusting, it was an adjustment for him. He just didn’t like Shea Stadium.”

As if playing at Shea weren’t bad enough, Murcer soon had to play right field at Shea. The move was nothing his fellow Oklahoman, Mickey Mantle, had to make. It was embarrassing and insulting for the player the Yankees had touted as the next Mantle.

To digress, Bob Fishel, the Yankees’ classy and gentlemanly public relations man when Murcer joined the Yankees, subsequently took the blame for putting that kind of pressure on Murcer. It was unfair to him, Fishel acknowledged, creating a burden he should never have had.

But the fact that Murcer was always being compared to Mantle made his move rightward even worse. Virdon, a straight-shooting, no-nonsense manager, didn’t help as far as Murcer was concerned.

What annoyed him the most, he wrote, was Virdon’s failure to tell him in advance of his plan. “But you’d think he would have learned in Management 101 to tell your star player beforehand if you’re going to do something like change his job title…”

Playing at Shea Stadium was bad enough. Playing right field was more than bad enough. But the event of Oct. 22 of that awful year was worst of all. The Yankees traded Murcer to the San Francisco Giants for Bobby Bonds.

“I felt devastated, stunned and betrayed,” Murcer wrote.

In the end, though, Murcer would have gladly accepted all of the ills of 1974 for not learning on Christmas Eve 2006 that he had a deadly brain tumor.

Nobody has ever figured out why people get brain tumors. They simply grow quietly and insidiously until symptoms develop that tell their carriers something is wrong. In Murcer’s case, it was headaches and a loss of energy.

Tumors also develop differently. Larry Dierker, former pitcher and manager of the Houston Astros, had a brain tumor, and it was benign. Murcer, Quisenberry, Howser, Oates, McGraw and Vukovich had a different experience.

But even within the context of malignant brain tumors, differences exist. That is why I am sitting here writing this column.

Following his operation Murcer qualified for an experimental clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston. He got monthly shots of a vaccine designed to boost his immune system to fight off the return of cancerous cells. A year into the trial, Murcer was having success with it.

Things were going so well that his hair, which he had lost during radiation and chemotherapy treatments, began growing back. “I have to get haircuts now,” he said about a year after the operation.

But several months later Murcer began having trouble with his immune system, and on July 12 he died.

“He was a fun-loving guy, a very considerate man,” Piniella said. “He loved the game of baseball. He was a really good teammate and friend. He always had a smile and a good word. I never saw Bobby upset much at all. Just a wonderful human being.”