On Further Review

As a rule, I skip over the obituaries for all the usual reasons of a person my age. But as they say, rules are made to be broken, and I do check baseballreference.com for ballplayers called to that big league in the sky. This is how I found out about the death of ex-Sox pitcher Juan Pizarro last month. Pizarro belonged to the first great starting staff I became aware of with the White Sox, along with Gary Peters and Joel Horlen. (We won’t talk about Denny McLain or Dave DeBusschere here.) He came over in a trade in the 1960 offseason. Pizarro won 75 games for the Sox from 1961-1966. The first four years, he won 14; 12; 16; and 19 games, respectively. That first year, 1961, the Sox got 24 wins out of the deal, with Cal McLish chipping in with ten. And what did all these wins cost us? Nothing more than Gene Freese. Bill Veeck, ever in rush for pop, traded Johnny Callison for Freeze in an effort to out-bash the Yankees and win back-to-back pennants in 1959-60. Not only didn’t it happen, Callison went on to have a far better career, mostly with the Phillies, than Freese. Think along the lines of 840 career RBIs vs. 432 and an outfield arm so strong it recorded as many as 26 assists in a season. Or as the kids like to say these days, we’re talking a 38.4 WAR vs. 8.7. You can see why that trade might rankle me. But no more. Not only did Freese-for-Pizarro work out, Pizarro-for-Wilbur Wood was even better. Wood had all of one major-league win over parts of five seasons with two organizations before the Sox secured him from the Pirates for Pizarro. With the Sox, Wood won another 163 games over twelve seasons, plus 57 saves. Four straight seasons, 1971-74, he won 20 or more games. Only a shattered kneecap off the bat of Ron LeFlore in 1976 kept Wood from going on and on the way really good knuckleballers do. That means it’s not really Gene Freese for Johnny Callison anymore but Callison for Juan Pizarro with Wilbur Wood waiting in the wings. Would you make that deal? Wood’s WAR alone is 50.0, and Pizarro’s is in the neighborhood of 14.4 with the Sox. (Somebody should ask baseballreference.com why they have two different WAR numbers for Pizarro.) On further review, I think I would.