The Hall of Fame speedster turns 71 today.
Although there are no books about Brock, per se, you can’t pick up any volume that analyzes baseball wheeling and dealing without a major mention of the 1965 transaction that switched Brock for St. Louis pitcher Ernie Broglio.
Such titles include Trade Him!: 100 Years of Baseball’s Greatest Deals, published in 1976 (picked this up in a used book store in Toronto many years ago); Pack Your Bags: Baseball’s Trade Secrets, by Marshall Cook (Masters Press, 1998); Going, Going, Gone!: The Art of the Trade in Major League Baseball, by Fran Zimniuch (Taylor Trade Publishing, 2008); and Traded: Inside the Most Lopsided Trades in Baseball History, by Doug Decatur (ACTA, 2009). This last one seeks to apply sabermetrics in determining which teams historically made the best deals by using Win Shares. It’s a fun read that seeks to rely on logic rather than philosophical/psychological implications (“He needed a change of scenery,” “Better to trade a year too soon than a year too late,” etc.) Traded doesn’t rate the Brock-Broglia deal register very highly in the grand scale of things, but try telling that to Cubs fans, who are still waiting.
is available on Amazon.com,
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