Um, Typo?

I only recently discovered that The Baseball Cube has historical minor league stats going back to some time in the 60s or 70s, albeit of spotty coverage. But this Dave Cochrane page must be a typo – I think I would have heard if a guy, especially a guy in the Mets system, had stolen 800 bases in the minors in the 1980s, including a single season high of 146. I suspect the walks, steals and strikeouts columns got transposed somehow (note his persistent single-digit walk totals).
Also, while looking through the site, I got to look at Dan Norman’s minor league numbers, and let’s just say that for a guy who was supposed to be the key guy in a trade for Tom Seaver, they don’t pass the smell test. Norman batted .297 and slugged .441 as a 19 year old in rookie ball in 1974, reasonable enough numbers, but in 1161 at bats between A, AA and AAA between then and The Trade, the man batted .269 and slugged .422. I know the Cube lacks walks and steals data for those years and Norman hit a ton of triples, so he presumably was quite fast, but nothing in his subsequent career suggests a budding Rickey Henderson. The Mets should have known, and probably knew, that Norman was at best a middling prospect with limited chances to become a major league regular.

2 thoughts on “Um, Typo?”

  1. The deal was about moving Seaver, and M. Donald Grant (who I ripped apart here some time ago), didn’t even have the good graces to have a Broadway musical to finance.
    He wanted to maintain his “authority” over the peon players, and Dick Young wanted to prove that even in is ususal boozy haze, he could wield a big stick.

  2. I agree. The Seaver deal should not be analyzed as if it were a normal trade. Somewhere at my mother’s house is the “Grant Must Go” tee shirt I wore to Seaver’s return appearance for Cinci in 1977.

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