By Joe D. and Barry Duchan
As Brodie Van Wagenen gets set to navigate his second offseason as a general manager, my hope is that he learned a lot over the last 12 months and that it will serve the Mets well going forward.
Brodie certainly had his hiccups last winter as evidenced by that ill fated blockbuster trade with Seattle and questionable free agent deals for Jed Lowrie and Jeurys Familia.
But it wasn’t all bad and I did respect Van Wagenen’s aggressiveness and quick trigger. He wouldn’t take days and weeks to make a simple decision the way his predecessor Sandy Alderson did. I still have high hopes for Brodie.
One past Mets general manager who Brodie reminds me of is Bing Devine, whose tenure as GM of the Mets spanned the years 1965 to 1967 between stints with the St. Louis Cardinals.
I would hardly call Devine’s work with the Mets perfect, especially since he had the final call on drafting Steve Chilcott over Reggie Jackson, but he was certainly an aggressive executive who while building up the farm system was also always looking to improve the team with trades and waiver pickups
In his 2004 book, Memoirs of Bing Devine, he states that in 1967 alone, the Mets made FIFTY-FOUR deals.
While many of the players acquired did little or nothing to help the Mets, seven of those players were foundational, Tommie Agee , Ron Taylor, Cal Koonce, Art Shamsky, JC Martin, Al Weis and Ed Charles were later instrumental in helping the 1969 Mets win their first World Championship.
Earlier in Devine’s tenure with the Amazins, he had also engineered a couple of deals for Jerry Grote and Don Cardwell.
None of these players carried a high price tag or cost the Mets any promising young talent. But what the Mets got back was immeasurable as Cardwell would start 30 games for that ’69 team and post a 3.01 ERA, while Grote would go onto catch 12 seasons for the Mets and led his rotation to two World Series.
Add to Devine’s accomplishments that it was completely upon his recommendation that team president George Weiss agreed to put their name in the hat for the Tom Seaver lottery.
And along with his assistant Joe McDonald, Devine also persuaded Weiss to keep Jerry Koosman who he was ready to release after a poor season in the low minors.
Does 1969 and 1973 ever happen without Seaver, Koosman and Grote? Not often remembered for his contributions to those great teams, but Bing Devine’s fingerprints were all over those teams.
Devine’s time with the Mets was relatively short, but he certainly accomplished a great deal in that time. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2007 at the age of 90 at his home in St. Louis.
Did You Know?
It was a trade engineered by Bing Devine that had the greatest impact on Major League Baseball and changed the game forever.
On October 7, 1969, Devine traded star center fielder Curt Flood, along with Tim McCarver, Byron Browne and Joe Hoerner, to the Philadelphia Phillies for Dick Allen, Cookie Rojas and Jerry Johnson.
Flood refused to go to Philadelphia, ultimately challenging baseball’s reserve system that bound players to one team. His suit against baseball set the stage for free agency, and was undeniably one of the most pivotal events in the game’s history.
