He Was Robbed of Job by McGwire

Trivia buffs already have memorized the name of Steve Trachsel, the pitcher who surrendered Mark McGwire’s 62nd home run, the one that shattered the hallowed record of Roger Maris. But, for bonus points, can you name the first baseman who lost his job to McGwire during the slugger’s rookie season?

No one besides fantasy league freaks--and few of them existed then--paid much attention when the Oakland Athletics made an apparently minor roster move two weeks into the 1987 season. With two rookies sharing first base and neither hitting well, the A’s decided McGwire would play every day and Rob Nelson would go to the minor leagues.

“The rest,” Nelson said, “is history.”

One of the best decisions in baseball history, sure, but far from obvious at the time. McGwire hit 23 home runs and drove in 112 in the minor leagues in 1986, while Nelson hit 20 homers and drove in 108.

The A’s kept both to start the 1987 season, with each hitting .167 through the first 13 games. McGwire hit one home run, Nelson none, and each struck out about half the time.

“Nobody knew who was going to play,” Nelson said. “We both felt, given the opportunity to play every day, we’d take off.”

McGwire ascended to heights undreamed. He hit 49 home runs, still a rookie record, and was a unanimous pick as American League rookie of the year.

The A’s had predicted nothing of the sort. Before the season, they submitted Nelson as their nominee at first base for the all-star ballot. On opening day, Nelson started.

But with left-handed power hitters in Reggie Jackson, Dwayne Murphy and Mike Davis, the left-handed Nelson recalled he didn’t fit into the Oakland lineup as comfortably as the right-handed McGwire. Sandy Alderson, then the A’s general manager, recalled McGwire hitting three homers with nine RBIs in a September trial in 1986, numbers that projected to 30 homers and 90 RBIs over a full season.

More important, Alderson said, the A’s believed they could no longer juggle Nelson at first base and McGwire at first and third base. The A’s switched McGwire to third base after they drafted him from USC, but he made 47 errors in 1986 and three more in eight games there in 1987.

“We had taken the experiment of using Mark at third base as far as we could,” Alderson said. “We just decided we had to go with one or the other and gave Mark a full-time opportunity.”

So that makes you a genius, right?

“I don’t think it was that tough a decision,” Alderson said. “Taking McGwire in the draft was more of a landmark decision.”

In a 1984 draft studded with stars from an Olympic team that ranks as the best U.S. amateur squad ever assembled, Oakland picked 10th. The A’s narrowed their choices to three Olympians, McGwire and All-American outfielders Shane Mack of UCLA and Oddibe McDowell of Arizona State.

“We basically decided to go with the guy that had the most power potential,” Alderson said. “That was Mark.”

McGwire powered the A’s for a decade, appearing on the All-Star team nine times and in the World Series three times. Injuries deprived him of most of two seasons and much of a third. Still, he hit 363 home runs, the all-time leader for a franchise that started play in Philadelphia in 1901.

In the summer of 1997, with the A’s doomed to a fifth consecutive losing season and new owners unwilling to surround McGwire with high-priced talent in the face of plummeting attendance, Oakland traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals for three pitching prospects rather than risk losing him in free agency. McGwire subsequently signed a three-year, $28.5-million contract with St. Louis.

“We never made a wrong decision with Mark,” Alderson said. “We drafted him. We put him at first base over another player. We stuck with him through injuries and less-than-stellar seasons. He always came back and performed.

“The only thing that could have severed our relationship was the economics of the game, and that’s ultimately what did us in.”

Nelson never again played for the A’s. Four months after sending him to the minors to make room for McGwire, the A’s traded Nelson to the San Diego Padres for pitcher Storm Davis.

Nelson played parts of four seasons for the Padres, hitting .178 with four home runs in a major league career that lasted 76 games. He played four more seasons at the triple-A level before retiring in 1995, wondering all the while what might have happened had the A’s extended that full-time opportunity to him and not McGwire. “That’s always in the back of my mind,” Nelson said. “You never know. I’m sure every player that has been in that situation wonders about that. But it’s not something where I hold a grudge.”

Nelson, at 34 the same age as McGwire, attended South Pasadena High and Mt. San Antonio College. He now resides in Sierra Madre and runs baseball camps in the San Gabriel Valley.

If Nelson’s campers were rooting for McGwire to break the Maris record, well, so was he.

“It’s great for baseball,” Nelson said. “Baseball needed something like this.”