WARNING: Affection for individual players may be stronger than expected. Possible heartbreak ahead.
@AllThatJazzZ I'll tell you a little secret: it might be applied to old baseball fans, too. Just ask, among others . . .
* Indians fans heartbroken over trading Rocky Colavito for Harvey Kuenn, 1960. (When Indians GM Trader Frank Lane, who was as addicted to making trades as some people are to coffee at the breakfast table, said he'd just traded hamburger for steak---never mind that hamburger was more than twice the run creator/run producer steak was.)
* Cub fans.
Brockforbroglio. (It was said with such coordination that it sounded a) like one word; and, b) almost as though it were the actual surname of ill-fated Ernie Broglio, God rest his soul.)
* Astros fans who couldn't quite believe Trusty Rusty Staub was left to be snatched in the expansion draft that made him a Montreal Expo. (Where he became nicknamed, memorably,
Le Grande Orange.) Or, that the Astros would trade solid double-play combination Denis Menke and Hall of Famer Joe Morgan to the Reds, where Morgan became one of the big keys to the Big Red Machine's mid-1970s success (not to mention a couple of World Series rings) and Menke would shift to third base. (Menke, as it turned out, was aging rapidly enough, but not before he suited up for the Reds and set a still-standing World Series record for fielding chances at third base without an error in the 1972 Series.)
* Mets fans over the "Saturday Night Massacre" trades involving Hall of Famer Tom Seaver and slugger Dave Kingman. (Said one banner at Shea Stadium after the Seaver trade:
I WAS A BELIEVER/BUT NOW WE'VE LOST SEAVER. Even future commissioner and then-Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti mourned the deal, writing---with a reference to that banner---"that among all the men who play baseball there is, very occasionally, a man of such qualities of heart and mind and body that he transcends even the great and glorious game, and that such a man is to be cherished, not sold.")
* Royals fans who thought then-manager Whitey Herzog lost his mind running slugging first baseman John Mayberry out of town and to Toronto. (They didn't know what the White Rat knew: Mayberry showed up hung over and high on pot for a critical American League Championship Series and was in no shape to play; the Royals got knocked out of the pennant and Herzog blamed Mayberry, spending the next season looking for a taker for him.)
* Cardinal fans who wanted to broil and baste Herzog (then the general manager as well as the manager) in due course for trading Keith Hernandez for three also-rans and allowing Hernandez, as the White Rat himself eventually acknowledged, "to get in our kitchen and rattle our pans" as the leader of the resurrecting 1980s Mets. (Those fans weren't aware of just why Herzog made the deal: Hernandez then had trouble with cocaine and, unlike other such players by whom Herzog stood if and when they cried for help, most notably catcher Darrell Porter and outfielder Lonnie Smith, didn't yet think he needed it. The trade scared Hernandez straight enough that he featured at the notorious Pittsburgh drug trials testifying that cocaine was "the devil on earth.")
* Angel fans watching the team let its most popular player of the mid-to-late 1980s, Wally Joyner, walk as a free agent. Unaware of team officials accusing Joyner of malingering when a staph infection took him out of most of the 1986 American League Championship Series, or of being a softie when he suffered rounds of injuries to follow, accusations that didn't exactly amuse Joyner. After Joyner signed with the Royals for 1992, Whitey Herzog himself---who'd been hired to examine the Angels' farm system and help with contract talks---said Joyner could have been kept an Angel, except that, "If there wasn't animosity on all sides, this deal would have been done by now. I feel like a damn divorce lawyer trying to decide who gets custody of this kid."
Among others . . .
