My Thoughts on Vintage Baseball

[z28jd]

Originally Posted by Mark

I read your article on Pirates Prospects. In fact, I read almost all of them. You do nice work. I didn't comment on it because it makes me mad to think how we lost him in such a lousy trade to Boston. Anyway, that site is helping me get through another January.

I read that part of the reasoning for that trade was because of the Italian population in Pittsburgh at the time, Barney Dreyfuss wanted an Italian player to take advantage of that and his choices were basically Ed Abbaticchio or waiting around for the DiMaggio brothers to be born. The funny, or not so funny from a Pirates fan standpoint, is that the Pirates went 93-60 in 1906 before the trade and they drew about 395,000 fans. The next year they went 91-63 and drew just under 320,000....so much for drawing in the Italian fans with a star.

It was also said the deal got more one-sided because the Giants got involved in the bidding and Dreyfuss wasn't a big fan of them so he added more to outbid them. They also thought Beaumont was done as a player due to injury and Flaherty wasn't anything more than an emergency starter so they figured they were upgrading at 2B and giving up a couple of bench/bullpen options but they were obviously wrong.

The other thing I saw was that Abbaticchio was hyped up a bit so during a time with less scouting options and stats to go on, they may have fell for it. A perfect storm of poor reasons to overpay for a guy who sat out an entire season in 1906, you would think as a non-superstar that would've lowered his price! Especially since he was 30 years old at the time during a period when skills declined rapidly at that age for many