Trading for a manager
(Neil Leifer photo)
Looking for a new manager after the retirement of Danny Murtaugh, the Pittsburgh Pirates 48 years ago today trade popular catcher Manny Sanguillen and $100,000 to the Oakland Athletics for manager Chuck Tanner.
To give up his manager of just one season in 1976, Oakland owner Charlie Finley insists on getting a front-line player and a lot of money – which both Sanguillen and $100,000 are at the time – in return for a front-line manager like Tanner.
“If I’m going to run a finishing school for managers, I want to be paid for it,” Finley tells reporters at the time.
“I would trade a manager any day of the week for Manny Sanguillen and $100,000,” Finley says. “I can get $250,000 for Sanguillen. That means I would be making $350,000 for having a manager somebody else wants.”
The trade of a player for a manager happens only one time before in baseball, that coming in November 1967 when the woebegone New York Mets send a 21-year-old pitcher named Bill Denehy to Washington in exchange for Senators manager Gil Hodges.
Within two years, Hodges straightens out the mess that is the Mets and leads them to a stunning upset of the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series.
Chuck Tanner with Willie Stargell
Tanner does just as well in Pittsburgh, where in 1979 the Pirates rally from a 3-1 deficit in the World Series to beat the Orioles in seven games.
By that time, the Pirates reacquire Sanguillen from Oakland on the eve of the 1978 season, not for the $250,000 Finley predicts he can get for Sanguillen but for a trio of spare parts in outfielder Miguel Dilone, relief pitcher Elias Sosa and second baseman Mike Edwards.
With the exception of the 1977 season with Oakland, Sanguillen spends his entire 13-year career in the majors with the Pirates, batting .296 overall with three All-Star Game selections.
He also hits .375 in a pair of a pair of World Series, helping the Pirates win the championship in 1971 and ’79.
The first title comes with Murtaugh as the manager, the second with Tanner.
“I’m proud of the fact that I won the World Series in my backyard,” Tanner, the New Castle native, tells Pittsburgh Magazine in 2008. “Not many managers can say that. Winning the World Series in your own hometown – oh, what a feeling that is.”