Carlos Guillen didn’t sleep the night he got traded for Randy Johnson. He didn’t sleep on the 6 a.m. flight from New Orleans to Tacoma the next morning. He didn’t sleep, in his estimation, for two or three days after.
He watched TV after a late-July game for the New Orleans Zephyrs, then a Triple-A affiliate of the Houston Astros. He saw some big names getting thrown around for Johnson, the Mariners ace, as the 1998 trade deadline approached. Names that, he assumed, precluded minor leaguers from getting thrown into a deal. Then he got calls from members of both the Astros and Mariners organizations. He needed to be in Tacoma the next morning for a game.
The priority, at that moment, wasn’t packing or figuring out where he’d stay the next night, or any of the logistics of moving your life from one place to the next. Guillen was 21 years old. He did what any other 21-year old would do.
“We was having a lot of drinks,” he said. Then he clarified. “I was having a lot of drinks.”
As the baseball world focused on Johnson, who went on to post an absurd 1.28 ERA in 11 starts with the Astros, helping them to a division title before leaving for the Diamondbacks in free agency, Guillen found himself in the peculiar situation of trying to erase the appositive next to his name.
That’s what happens when you are the prospect who gets traded for a superstar. You land in a new city and cameras descend, asking how you plan on being better than the transcendent player the team just dealt. In that city, you’re the headline, the hope. In 29 others, you’re the footnote until proven otherwise. The reality of the business sets in.
“I think you realize it can happen at any moment,” said J.A. Happ, who got flipped to Houston in a 2010 deal that saw Roy Oswalt go to the Phillies.
Guillen and Freddy Garcia, one of the other prospects the Astros dealt for Johnson, were in the majors by the next season. Both were key pieces in Seattle’s 116-win season two seasons after that, Guillen as the everyday shortstop and Garcia as the ace of the pitching staff.
Still, the pressure is there, on both the players and on the executives, not to become the answers to trivia questions.
The story of the scramble that encompassed July and August 2008 for Matt LaPorta includes a trade that — for him — was out of nowhere, the Futures Game, the Olympic Games in Beijing and crashing on a teammate’s couch in Akron because finding a place to live amid all of that would have been near impossible. LaPorta, 11 years later, still comes with the notation: traded for CC Sabathia. At the time, he was one of the best prospects in baseball, a 23-year old who figured to be the Indians’ first baseman for the next decade. Injuries stopped his career from getting off the ground — he finished with a lifetime .238 average in parts of four seasons with Cleveland. That pressure, though, didn’t help.
LaPorta doesn’t feel that he put an undue burden on himself so much as the organization put an undue burden on itself in handling him. Executives get fired when guys like Sabathia — who won the Cy Young Award in 2007, then helped the Brewers to the 2008 NLCS with a 1.65 ERA after the early July deal — get moved and things don’t work out.
“(The Indians) might’ve had — not unnatural expectations, but just some higher expectations than maybe they should have,” LaPorta said. “Maybe not. Maybe their expectations were higher than mine.”
In Milwaukee, LaPorta felt like part of the young core the Brewers were building. Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun and Corey Hart were all up-and-coming stars. LaPorta didn’t need to be the guy so much as one of the guys. The Indians, he thought, wanted him to be great right away, and when he wasn’t, their frustration showed.
“They may have had some disappointment in how my career went with them,” LaPorta said. “After the first year, being hurt and trying to come back the second year, not really playing great. Now their guard’s up and now they’re going in, ‘We might not have made — or maybe we made a bad’ — I shouldn’t say bad decision — ‘but maybe we made an unlucky decision.’
“… It definitely puts a lot more pressure on you, as a ballplayer.”
Guillen felt the same pressures, but he says the Mariners did all they could to insulate him from the pressure the organization was feeling.
It helps that Guillen played well on the field. But he had his speed bumps, too, missing nearly the entire 1999 season with an injury. If that made manager Lou Piniella or general manager Woody Woodward nervous, they didn’t let it show.
“They’re gonna ask what you need to feel better, to have fun,” Guillen said. “So you don’t have (distraction) or any kind of pressure. They just want you to be yourself on the field.”
That July phone call can be a career catalyst or a reason you’re out of baseball a few years later. Guillen thinks it would have taken him at least two or three extra years to reach the majors in Houston; LaPorta might have slotted into an eventual Brewers lineup alongside Braun, Fielder and Hart and done everything expected of him. He doesn’t think the crossroads are that stark, though.
“Maybe I might’ve made it up to the Brewers in the big leagues in 2008, versus being in the big leagues in 2009,” LaPorta said, unspooling the ripple effects. “So, maybe I could’ve gotten arbitration sooner. Had another, call it ‘payday’, before I was done with the game.
“I mean, I replay that in my mind a lot. There’s no — nothing really would have changed. I still more than likely would’ve got injured. Then, that would have been it.”