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Saturday, March 31, 2007
Trading Dye was Braves’ second-worst move
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Early during the 1997 season, I was in New York a few weeks after the Braves’ Designated Geniuses made the second-worst trade in their Atlanta history (David Justice was the worst). Anyway, there was Barry Bonds, pulling me aside in the visitors’ clubhouse at Shea Stadium and asking a question with wide eyes.
“So what the heck were they thinking when they got rid of the next Dave Winfield?” said Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger, referring to Jermaine Dye, shipped to Kansas City for Michael Tucker and Keith Lockhart, neither going to the Hall of Fame soon.
The next Dave Winfield has evolved into the splendid Jermaine Dye, and that’s been enough to make the Braves’ DGs look even sillier. Take Saturday, for instance, when Dye hinted at Turner Field of remaining among baseball’s elite. During the final spring game for his Chicago White Sox, he went 2-for-2 with an RBI to end the exhibition season hitting .361. Not bad. The same goes for his exploits last year that had the Players Choice Awards naming Dye the American League’s Outstanding Player (.315 batting average, 44 home runs, and 120 RBIs, along with his stellar fielding and throwing in right field).
All of that was after Dye helped the 2005 White Sox win their first world championship in 88 years. He became the most valuable player of that World Series after going 7-for-16 (.438) with a home run and three RBIs during a sweep of the Houston Astros.
But the Braves’ DGs didn’t want him, and get this: During Dye’s first and only season with the Braves in 1996, he resembled, well, the next Dave Winfield.
Or another Andruw Jones.
Said Marquis Grissom, the Braves’ center fielder when Jones and Dye came along back then, “You look at what those two guys did at an early age and at how they played the game, how they weren’t scared, and you look at the fact that Dye was 6-foot-5, could swing the bat, could run and had one of the top arms in the game with accuracy.” Then Grissom paused, before adding with a sigh, “Everybody knows that dude can hit in a wheelchair, man. Why trade somebody like that?”
You don’t. Remember, too, Dye finished his 98 games with the Braves that season batting .281 with 12 home runs, 37 RBIs and a shiny future, heavily illuminated by Grissom.
The relationship between mentor and pupil was so close that Dye accepted an invitation to move into the Fayetteville home of Grissom and his family. The mentor even gave the pupil a curfew of midnight, which Grissom said Dye violated. “He was just like any other kid. A little giddy, wanting to go out there and experience life, but he listened,” said Grissom, now retired and living in his native Atlanta. “He was well-behaved, but he needed a little more toughness. As the years went on, he went out there on the field and did get a little tougher.”
There were several trips to the disabled list, though. The worst came in the 2001 playoffs when Dye broke his leg while playing for the Oakland Athletics after he was dealt from Kansas City. There also were three more injury-plagued seasons after that for Dye in Oakland. Then the White Sox sealed their destiny for winning it all by signing Dye to a free-agent contract before the 2005 season.
Just think. That season, along with the eight before it and the ones afterward, could have featured Dye in a brilliant outfield with Jones and whoever else.
“I mean, I was a rookie back then, so I didn’t know what getting traded really was about,” said Dye, 33, famously quiet, who now shares a home with a wife and three kids instead of a mentor. “My thought process was to just go over there [to Kansas City] and do what I can do. When you’re that young, you don’t realize baseball is just a business. Things happen.”
Yeah, but some things shouldn’t happen, especially when it entails dealing goodness that has a chance for greatness.
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