Baseball Minutiae and Trivia Only

Shantz, Guidry & Stroman have something in common...

I think you've just about got it, Inger.  I know they are all under six feet tall.

I remember that trade vividly.  Cleveland fans were furious.  Rocky Colavito was and remains to this day (he'll be 91 in August) one of the most popular players in Cleveland history.  That trade was the brainchild of the lunatic Cleveland GM Frank "Trader" Lane who had an uncontrollable impulse to make trades.  In fact he had traded another pretty good power hitting RFer with a great arm, Roger Maris, from Cleveland just two years earlier.

Lane actually started off well as a GM with the White Sox in the 1950s, acquiring through trades star players like Nellie Fox, Minnie Minoso, Billy Pierce and Sherm Lollar.  But from there it was all downhill during stints in St. Louis (where he even changed the uniforms, taking the birds on the bat off the jersey), Cleveland and Kansas City.  Harvey Kuenn was a good ballplayer -- career .303 hitter, versatile defensively -- and he had a good year for the Indians in 1960, batting .308, which only inspired Lane to trade him too after the season for a washed-up Johnny Antonelli and a so-so OFer named Willie Kirkland (baseball card guy for some of us.)

Mudcat Grant, who was with the Indians at the time of the trade, had a great quote about it -- "You want to know why Lane traded Rocky?  That's easy.  Lane was an idiot."  The Tribe got Rocky back five years later in a three-team trade involving the White Sox and the Athletics, but they gave up a young Tommy John and Tommie Agee and a solid veteran catcher John Romano to do so.  Can't blame Lane for that one, he was long gone from baseball by then.

As you obviously know based on your avatar, Rocky Colavito was another of those players who was well-liked by all baseball fans, not just those of the team he was playing for.  A Bronx boy (how did the Yanks not sign him?) who you would often hear called by his full name Rocco Domenico Colavito.  He could throw the ball as far as anyone I ever saw.  When he hit four home runs in a game at Baltimore in 1959 -- a game I listened to on the radio after a friend called me to let me know he had three -- he was the first American Leaguer to do so in a nine-inning game since Lou Gehrig did it in 1932 (the unknown Pat Seary of the White Sox did it in an extra-inning game in 1948) and it would not happen again in the AL until Mike Cameron of the Mariners did it in 2002.

I got Rocky's autograph in Baltimore in 1961 when he was with Detroit.  I still have it in my stash since it was one of the survivors of our house flood in 2016.  He was very congenial and the main thing I remember is that he had the proverbial blacksmith forearms and he was quite hairy.  As they used to say in Cleveland, "Don't knock The Rock."