Tom Brunansky 1990 Score

In mid-September 2019 I received this card from the Baseball Card Bandit (BCB):

The first year I really started to obsessively follow baseball was 1986. Watching the Red Sox that year was total exhilaration, until it came to the second-to-last and last games of the season. Then it sucked. Hard. But you already know that story and I’m not going to talk about it because it doesn’t matter in the greater context of this blog entry. 

The thing that no one really warns you about, is that once the season ends; baseball pretty much disappears. When you follow the game every single day for eight months, this is god damn jarring. No longer is the sports page abuzz with team notebooks and game summaries and box scores. Maybe once or twice a week, you’ll get a few inches on what the Sox are thinking about and every Sunday Peter Gammons or Larry Whiteside filled a broadsheet of rumors, but that was it. You were supposed to go cold turkey on baseball. 

But eventually, things heat up a little bit at the beginning of December where all 26 teams (there was only 26 teams back then) came together in some hotel in a warm part of the country and they’d sit around and make deals and sign free agents and new uniforms would be announced. It was like a baseball Hanukah, because it happened over a week, and every day there were gifts as players were changing teams at a rapid pace. Anyway, during the Winter Meetings of 1986, it seemed that just about every team—except for the two teams* in the World Series—made moves. When they showed up to Spring Training in 1987, mostly everything was the same. 

* The Mets made one memorable move, sending a bunch of players (including Kevin Mitchell) to San Diego for Kevin McReynolds. The only thing that the Sox did was alienate Roger Clemens and colluded against catcher Rich Gedman.  

Using this first offseason as my template, I thought that was how champions and runners-up behaved. Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Of course, the Sox and Mets stumbled a bit in 1987 and didn’t make the postseason. So, I should have learned a lesson. 

What does this lengthy preamble have to do with Tom Brunansky? In 1987, Tom Brunansky was a key member of the World Champion Minnesota Twins. He was their rightfielder and was a key bat in the middle of their lineup. About a month into the 1988 season, the Twins sent him to the Cardinals (the team that they just beat the previous October!) for second baseman Tommy Herr. 

I had questions.

Tommy Herr? Why would the Twins make that deal? They had veteran Steve Lombardozzi, a Massachusetts native to boot, manning second base. They won a World Series with that guy, why would they trade for someone to replace him? Especially from a team whose ass they just kicked? And why would they trade a power bat like Brunansky? Who was going to play rightfield and hit 30+ home runs?  

Here’s the thing that I didn’t really get about baseball back then. The clichés are usually true. Especially the two that fit here: to get something good, you have to give up something good and the proverbial trade that helps both teams. 

In the late 80s, the Cards needed power, badly. All they had was Jack Clark hitting dingers and he took his bat to San Diego (along with former Sox lefty Bruce Hurst). The only power threat they had was former Brave Bob Horner, who was returning from a year in Japan. He was no Cecil Fielder and was pretty much running on fumes by this point in his career. With this trade, the Cards got their middle-of-the-order bat in Brunansky. However, even with Brunansky and his 22 homers in 1988, St. Louis managed 71 homeruns all year. I know that they were still in the midst of Whitey Ball, but that’s less homers than Barry Bonds hit by himself in 2001. Consequently, they finished behind the Mets for the National League East title. 

The Twins were looking for someone that could play second base and hit. Despite being born in Malden, Massachusetts, and starting for a championship team (I was obsessed with this for some reason, like I thought because you started and your team won, that automatically meant you were really good) Lombardozzi was a terrible batter. That World Series cornerstone slashed 238/298/352 in 1987, and those were some of his better numbers. They needed a second baseman who could hit and run a little. They had power with first baseman Kent Hrbek, third baseman Gary Gaetti and centerfielder Kirby Puckett. Therefore, Brunansky was the odd man out. So Herr, who was a few years away from finishing in the top five in the 1985 NL MVP race behind teammate Willie McGee, was slotted in at second and Lombardozzi roamed around the infield, not hitting but being a pretty good gloveman (I assume, I don’t have his defensive numbers in front of me). 

Even with Herr, the Twins finished second to the budding dynasty that was beginning in Oakland. Herr stuck around for less than a year and joined up with the Phillies in 1989 before ending his career with the Mets and Giants two years later. 

Brunansky was a Cardinal for about two seasons before he was sent to the Red Sox in exchange for Hall of Fame (that’s still really weird to write) reliever Lee Smith in 1990. Brunansky reunited with former Twin Jeff Reardon and made a spectacular catch in the corner of rightfield in Fenway Park off the bat of Chicago White Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen that clinched the 1990 AL East flag for Boston. It was probably the highlight of his Red Sox run. 

I’ve talked about this before, but I never understood why Boston GM Lou Gorman signed Reardon in the first place when he had Smith in the backend of his bullpen. And I was really angry when they shipped Smith to St. Louis for a fading power hitter in Brunansky. I talked about it here and here. 

For some really awful Red Sox teams in 1991 and 1992, Brunansky was the only one who supplied any sort of power with 16 and 15 round-trippers. That second number led the entire team. Fifteen home runs was the best that a Red Sox player could do in 1992, despite playing half of their games in Fenway Park. It was abysmal. Brunansky played with the Brewers in 1993 before coming back with to the Sox in 1994, where he hit his last 10 dingers. 

For a guy from West Covina, California (I wonder if he knows Josh Chan? Shout out to “Crazy Ex Girlfriend”) with mediocre power and a mustache, Tom Brunansky not only brought a lot of questions, but he also ended up teaching me a lot about baseball – mostly that nothing should stay the same. You have to keep moving, getting better and improving. And if that means trading your fourth-best power hitter.