The perspective history affords can be daunting.
“Thank you, thank you, oh, you lovely St. Louis Cardinals. Nice doing business with you. Please call again any time.”
Such were the words of Chicago Daily News sportswriter Bob Smith, penned on June 16, 1964. The source of Smith’s gratitude? The day before, the Cardinals had dealt one of the top pitchers in the National League, Ernie Broglio, to the Cubs. Broglio had gone 18-8 the year before, and had led the NL with 21 victories a few years before that. It was a six-player deal and all it cost the Cubs was Brock, who would turn 25 years old three days after the trade.
Little did Smith – or anybody else – know the “business” Smith was so gleeful about would soon be one of the most infamous trades of the 20th century.
“They wanted to run our GM Bing Devine out of town at first,” Cardinals star Mike Shannon told the Chicago Tribune. “But as players, we knew the possibility of Lou.”
At the time, no one – not even Devine — truly knew the possibility of Lou. A .251 hitter at the time of the trade, he would hit .348 with 33 stolen bases for the Cardinals the rest of that season. But that 1964 campaign was just a precursor to a historic career – going on to join the 3,000-hit club and become the greatest base-stealer, with a then-record total of 938 thefts, in baseball history.
Broglio, hampered by injury, would win a total of seven more games before retiring after 1966 season.
But the Lou Brock whose star is imprinted in the St. Louis Walk of Fame is not the same Lou Brock who started his big-league career at Wrigley Field on Sept. 10, 1961. For him, the game-changer was team dynamics. The Cubs’ managerial system of rotating coaches sent the young center fielder mixed messages, and gave him little room for growth.