PENNANT INSURANCE IS NAME OF THE GAME : Strong Teams Raiding Weak Ones Late in the Season Is a Time-Honored Tradition That Continues Today

In 1945, the New York Yankees put their best pitcher on waivers. This was no big thing, you understand. The Yankees surely didn’t mean to let him go, and any team that claimed him certainly was embarking on unnecessary paper work. But what did the Chicago Cubs know about the workings of baseball? Not much, of course, was the answer to that.

So in late July the Cubbies, alone in the major leagues, claimed Hank Borowy and, to their surprise, obtained him. It cost just $97,000 to have a bona fide pitcher on the staff. But then what did they know? The league laughed. New York’s Larry MacPhail had thought Borowy something of a stiff all along; he couldn’t finish games. Fourteen other teams, if they hadn’t guessed MacPhail wasn’t going to let Borowy go, had at least guessed there was a catch. Poor, guileless Cubbies.

Here’s what happened. Borowy won 11 of 13 games down the stretch, completing 11. He won the only three games the Cubs took from the St. Louis Cardinals out of 12 played after he joined the club, twice defeating the runner-up in extra innings. He pitched Chicago into the World Series is what happened.

Borowy would never be heard from again. He went 12-10 the next year and never was over .500 again. But he survives as one of baseball’s best examples of pennant insurance, the kind of policy you obtain late in the season to do what you should have done before the season began.

Borowy wasn’t the first such example, and he certainly wasn’t the last. The Cubs, proving even they can learn from history, repeated the procedure in 1984 when they acquired Rick Sutcliffe from the Cleveland Indians in mid-June. Sutcliffe went 16-1 to put the Cubs into the division playoffs. It was the first year the Cubs won anything since, well, Hank Borowy came aboard.

And this year the pennant races were crowded with guys obtained mid- or late-season on waivers or in trades.

The Angels got Don Sutton in September just to get them to a pennant. The Angels certainly aren’t building a franchise with this move; Sutton’s 40 years old. Earlier, the Angels saved John Candelaria from the Pittsburgh Pirates’ sinking ship.

The Dodgers, battling for a title themselves, got four-time batting champion Bill Madlock from Pittsburgh on Aug. 31 to finally nail down third base. This was after they got Enos Cabell mostly for the same thing. Madlock was hitting .251 with the Pirates, but then he wasn’t in first place. For the Dodgers, he’s hit .364.

Meanwhile, St. Louis was fortifying itself for a late-season rush to the title by getting Cesar Cedeno from the Cincinnati Reds. Cedeno is playing out the last weeks of an old contract, meaning he might never play for St. Louis again.

He’s just there for the chase, to win them a couple of ball games, that’s all.

So continues an old tradition of buying the pennant with a late-season balloon payment. Nobody remembers exactly when it started but Red Patterson of the Angels, who was a baseball writer in the 1930s before joining the Yankees for public relations work, seems to recall it was John McGraw who first started to raid weaker teams to strengthen his own in the last months of a season. “It was the thing to do,” Patterson says. “McGraw would get a club that was broke and get some players. Just look it up.”

Well, it’s hard to reconstruct the history of the New York Giants’ 1913 pennant but there were some curious roster changes that season. Doc Crandall, a pitcher-infielder, was brought back from the failing Cardinals late in the season, and Crandall hit .364 and won four of eight decisions down the stretch. Larry McLean, a .262 hitter, was also brought back from St. Louis. He caught 30 games and hit .320.

Still, no matter how long it went on, the practice wasn’t front-page news until the Yankees bought Johnny Mize from the New York Giants in 1949. Mize was 36 at the time, and his 40 home runs-a-year seasons were behind him. But his power nonetheless was undeniable, and the Yankees, who were setting records for injuries that year, were desperate.

At the time of the deal, nobody gave it too much thought. And looking at Mize’s numbers, you don’t get the impression anybody should have. Because Mize hurt his arm almost immediately after joining the Yankees, his role was mostly as a pinch-hitter. Yet a couple of those pinch-hits won games.

Buzzie Bavasi, who helped build the Dodgers and later the Angels, remembers that the outcry over the Yankees-Buy-a-Pennant was all after the fact, especially after Mize stroked a pinch-hit two-RBI single in the World Series to help the Yankees to a win. “Then,” Bavasi recalls, “there was objection.”

The Yankees got some late help again in 1951 when they acquired Johnny Sain from the Boston Braves for a minor league pitcher and $50,000 on Aug. 29. Sain helped the Yankees to the pennant by winning two games in September.

Sain also played a role in pennant-winning seasons the next two years, but the deal ultimately came back to haunt the Yankees. The minor league pitcher involved in the deal was Lew Burdette, who won three games as the Braves defeated the Yankees in the 1957 World Series.

Bavasi tried his hand at pennant insur-ance himself, buying the 1956 pennant for his Brooklyn Dodgers real cheap. “Got Sal Maglie from Cleveland for $100,” he says. “Hank (Greenberg) called me and said he was getting rid of him and did I want him.” That was in May. Maglie won 13 games, including a no-hitter the last week of September. Did Maglie make a difference? The Dodgers won the pennant by one game.

Maglie was nearly the difference in the World Series, but the Yankees got some timely hitting from a fellow named Enos Slaughter, among others. Slaughter, then 40, had been obtained from the last-place Kansas City A’s. Slaughter not only hit .289 in the final 24 games with the Yankees, but he hit .350 in the World Series.

They didn’t call Casey Stengel the old professor for nothing. While everyone else was thinking pennant insurance, he was thinking World Series insurance.

This didn’t always work but it worked often enough. “They almost always played better,” Bavasi says of the pennant insurers. “No. 1, they were playing for a contender, and No. 2, they were probably on their last legs at the time, hoping for a new contract.”

Certainly Al Campanis has rejuvenated Madlock and Cabell by bringing them to the Dodgers. Campanis, who tried a similar gambit in 1969, when he brought 37-year-old Jim Bunning over for the stretch run, says it’s harder and harder to do, though. “Some deals you just don’t want to make because the other team wants too much,” he says. “They want you to mortgage your future. But if you think you can give up some players that won’t make your team anyway then the short-term goal may be worth it.”

Of course, sometimes it just doesn’t work. The Milwaukee Braves obtained the late-season magic of Enos Slaughter for the final weeks of the 1959 season, weeks which led to a playoff with the Dodgers. In 11 games and 18 at-bats, Slaughter, by then 43, managed only three hits.

None of them, alas, came in his two appearances as a pinch-hitter in the two playoff games, won by the Dodgers. Sometimes, pennant insurance simply runs out.