Time
to spotlight an airbrush job of a card that had an impact on my young
baseball days back in the mid-70’s: the 1976 Doc Medich traded:
For me, this was the trade that brought a young fellow-Brooklynite,
Willie Randolph, to the Bronx, where he’d become a soft-spoken fan
favorite, including mine.
However at the time Medich was a young stud coming off of win totals of
14, 19 and 16 in his first three years of Big League ball.
He was an inning-eater, tossing over 270 in both 1974 and 1975 after
starting 38 games each season, and looked like a solid arm that would
have a very nice Major League career ahead of him.
He would go on to play eleven seasons in the Majors, finishing up with a
career 124-105 record, with 16 shutouts over 312 appearances and 1996.2
innings pitched through the 1982 season.
However that early promise wasn’t really met, never winning more than 14
games in any season the rest of the way after this trade, and that was
with the Texas Rangers in 1980.
Nevertheless, that trade that sent him to the “Steel City”, while the
Yankees received Randolph, Ken Brett and Dock Ellis, helped New York
forge a mini-dynasty that brought them two straight World Series
championships in 1977 and 1978, and a second baseman that would become
of the organizations most dependable players.