The pennants have been decided, largely without my attention, because never in recent memory have four teams I less care for been vying for the title. The Dodgers and Red Sox are OK I guess but they just won. The Astros keep winning pennants and are holders of a recent world championship tainted by sign-stealing. And the Braves are a just-OK team that knocked out the Brewers. If they still had Kevin Gausman and Nick Markakis, I’d root for them anyway, but now? In fact, unless I’m forgetting somebody, there is no ex-Oriole playing on either side of the World Series this year. So much for that metric.
But the Series must go on, and with it, this annual feature: which player had the greatest combined contribution to the two teams that remain? I have to admit, I couldn’t think of a single player who played for both. (Has to do with growing up an AL fan when both of these teams were on the other side.) When I ran the numbers, there was a pretty close race for first, and here’s what’s cool — the two players, Denis Menke and Denny LeMaster, both came up with the (Milwaukee) Braves in 1962 and went to the Astros in the same trade in 1968! Menke was a shortstop, who had a couple of All-Star years in Houston but never fielded as well as he had for the Braves. He was later the hitting coach for the pennant-winning 1993 Phillies, and he died about 10 months ago in Florida. LeMaster was a starting pitcher for most of his time with both teams, never a star, always a reliable innings-eater.
And who was on the other side of the trade for these two great Astro-Braves? Chuck Harrison, who didn’t amount to much, and Sonny Jackson, who never really equalled his 49-steal age-21 rookie season, but who stuck around for 12 years playing kind-of-OK baseball, 7 years with the Braves following his 5 for Houston. He’s probably the player with the longest combined career for both this teams. And he went to Montgomery Blair High School in my home county of Montgomery County, Maryland. Maybe that’s the closest connection I can make between the Orioles and the 2021 World Series.
