Quote:
Originally Posted by CONN CHRIS
IWhich owner told Enos Slaughter, "Son, I've been losing with you, I can sure as hell lose without you"
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I never heard that for Country, but I think the first instance of that quote was Branch Rickey in 1953, trading Ralph Kiner to the Cubs for seven pieces of trash.
(I mean, the major return for Mr Slug, 7x HR King and future HoF, was Toby Atwell. You've never heard of Toby Atwell and rightly so. But Rickey was religious and never did like Our Beloved Ralph's being Los Angeles's favorite ballplayer and his going on dates with Hollywood movie stars in the off-season and driving fancy cars and that sort of thing.
Plus, Rickey had basically given up on the Pirates at that point and was doing weird things like signing the Heisman Trophy winner and basketball-star twins and playing a 6'6" pitcher at 2B. I think he'd checked out, and didn't wake up until his scouts [was it Howie Haak,
BradK?] caught the Dodgers trying to hide Roberto Clemente in Montreal…)
The occasion that I remember, since it was in my lifetime, is when Bob Horner tried holding out and Ted Turner was "we finished last with you, we can finish last without you". But Horner did eventually re-sign.
I suppose the first evidence may be the Boston sportswriter Bill James once quoted who tried to justify the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees after his record-setting 1919 season by writing that "Ruth's 29 Home Runs didn't prevent the Red Sox from finishing 6th" or similar. But that was an after-the-fact CYA excuse, not a face-to-face confrontation.
Statue of Our Beloved Ralph's hands, outside PNG Park in Pittsburgh:
It's modeled after the famous statue of Joe Louis's fists in Detroit, but in his later visits to the Mets' booth, Ralph admitted that he didn't prefer the "just-the-fists" treatment, preferring instead this more-traditional statuary in his hometown of Alhambra CA:
(I had to tweak the picture to get Ralph out of the shadows.)
No statues of Toby Atwell exist, to my knowledge.