It was the 1986 season that broke the Kansas City Royals.
Until then, they were the model of how to build a new franchise from scratch. The Royals had been around for seventeen seasons and had eleven winning records and seven playoff appearances. They were routinely in the top half of the American League in attendance. Their front office had been a wonder, churning out great young homegrown players like George Brett and Bret Saberhagen, acquiring excellent talent like Amos Otis, Freddie Patek, John Mayberry and Hal McRae for peanuts, and innovating with their Royals Baseball Academy that produced Frank White and U.L. Washington. They played in a gorgeous stadium with lovely fountains that was built solely for baseball, bucking the trend of having a multi-use concrete monstrosity that looked the same as every other ballpark.
But things changed for the franchise in 1986, just a year removed from their first World Series title. Things got dark.
Founder and owner Ewing Kauffman had sold a minority stake in the team and planned to sell the rest by 1991, but the guy he sold it to ran into financial problems that hampered the team. Manager Dick Howser was diagnosed with a brain tumor and left the team midway through the season. He would be dead within a year. Popular longtime closer Dan Quisenberry lost his job with no clear reason why, and never got it back. Defending Cy Young winner Saberhagan had a terrible year, establishing what became a career-long pattern of having a fabulous season followed by a disappointment. The team finished just 76-86.
Still, it looked like it could just be a one-year glitch. The rotation was still young, and Brett, White, and Willie Wilson were still productive. They had exciting young players in their minor league system, like Kevin Seitzer, Brian McRae, Mike Macfarlane, Greg Hibbard, Melido Perez, and Tom Gordon, who would all go on to productive major league careers. And they had two of the best prospects in baseball, one a hitter, and one a pitcher.
The hitter was Bo Jackson. He had made his big league debut during that otherwise disappointing 1986 season, flashing the remarkable skills that would make him an All-Star and Pro Bowler.
The pitcher also made his brief debut that year. He struggled a bit, with a 5.56 ERA in 22.2 innings, but the potential was obvious. Plus, he was a hometown kid, having been born and raised in Kansas City and graduated from nearby Rockhurst High School. He’d been the Royals’ third-round draft pick in 1981, and had been good at every level. Now he was ready for the big leagues. His name was David Cone.
Then, inexplicably, the Royals panicked and traded him that offseason, and the reason given was pretty dumb.
After the end of the 1986 season, Royals General Manager John Schuerholz didn’t like his catching situation. The starter was veteran Jim Sundberg, and while he was still very good defensively, his offense had fallen off even more than usual. Through 1985, when Sundberg was one of the heroes of the Royals’ only World Series title run, he’d been a career .253 hitter with a subpar, but playable, 92 OPS+. For a premier defensive catcher, his offense was fine.
But in 1986, Sundberg was thirty-five and hit just .212/.303/.322 while catching 134 games for a team that was 13th out of 14 teams in scoring runs. His backup was veteran Jamie Quirk, and he was just as bad, hitting .215/.273/.370. Schuerholz decided to do something about that.
Why he made that decision is unclear. Mike Macfarlane, Kansas City’s fourth-round draft pick in 1985 out of Santa Clara University, had just had a really solid year at Double-A Memphis, posting an OPS of .873 and slugging 12 homers in just 40 games while dealing with an injury. He was slated to start the season in Triple-A Omaha (where he ended up having another good year, hitting .262/.324/.480), but could have been used as Sundberg’s backup, or even replacement, in a pinch. He would, in fact, make his big league debut later that season, and served as the Royals’ primary catcher for most of the 1990s, posting an above average 104 OPS+ and solid defense in eleven seasons with them.
But that’s not what Schuerholz wanted for some reason. Instead, he wanted to get someone else’s catching prospect, and he settled on the Mets’ Ed Hearn.
Hearn wasn’t really a better prospect than Macfarlane. For one thing, he was almost four years older than Macfarlane. Also, by the time Macfarlane was twenty-two he had an OPS of .873 in Double-A, while Hearn at the same age was still splitting time between A-ball and Double-A and posting a .758 OPS. Then Hearn spent all of the following year at Double-A and still didn’t hit as well as Macfarlane, and then hit much worse (OPS marks of .679 and .686) in two seasons at Triple-A. He hit just about the same in 49 games with the Mets in 1986.
Schuerholz, though, felt that Hearn was a good defensive catcher. “Some felt that the Mets’ pitching actually was better with him behind the plate instead of Gary Carter,” Schuerholz claimed. If “some” actually felt that way, “some” were wrong. The Mets had a 3.07 ERA and allowed 3.45 runs per nine innings when Carter was catching in 1986, compared to marks of 3.53 and 3.93 when Hearn was catching.
Instead of letting the facts get in the way of that conviction, Schuerholz pursued discussions with the Mets at the December winter meetings about acquiring Hearn, and the price that the Mets were demanding was David Cone. Schuerholz would have done that deal right then, but the Mets wouldn’t pull the trigger. They were dealing with some of the postseason hangover of having just won the World Series and also other areas of need, like trading for outfielder Kevin McReynolds. As they temporized, Cone was destroying the Puerto Rican Winter League with a 6-2 record and 2.42 ERA. The one-for-one swap of Cone for Hearn was no longer on the table, and it looked like Cone would be the Royals’ fifth starter in 1987.
But that nagging catching problem didn’t get any better for the Royals in Spring Training. Sundberg batted .154. Quirk hit .111. The only other option being considered was veteran backup Larry Owen, but he couldn’t hit either. Ownership, both Kauffman, who was angling to sell the rest of his stake, and Avron Fogelman, who wanted to buy it but was having financial difficulties, were anxious about having another losing season.
So, in late March, Schuerholz contacted the Mets again. He still wanted Hearn, but recognized that Cone’s value had gone up and now wanted more in return. The Mets were more than happy to oblige, throwing in a pair of pitchers, reliever Rick Anderson and minor leaguer Mauro Gozzo, that they had no use for. That was enough for Schuerholz to agree and close the deal.
When it was announced, Cone was stunned. He cried at his locker as he held his head in his hands and starting packing his bags. “It’s a shock,” he said. “I thought they were kidding me.” Quirk was just as surprised, thinking this meant the end of his time in Kansas City. “I know this doesn’t help me, let’s put it that way,” he said. “I’m going to talk to John and see what’s going on.”
Everyone assumed that the plan was for Sundberg to still be the primary backstop, but for Hearn to assume more of the load and eventually become the starter. Schuerholz said as much. “From all our reports, Ed Hearn is not just a backup catcher,” Schuerhoz claimed. “There are people in our organization that think he will evolve as the No. 1 catcher.”
I don’t know if those were the same people who thought the Mets’ staff was better with Hearn than with Carter behind the plate, but that comment qualifies as damning with faint praise. Schuerholz didn’t align himself with that thinking, he simply said that’s what the reports said and that some people in the Royals’ organization thought that way. He also firmly said Hearn still had to “evolve” into a starter, meaning he wasn’t one yet.
In other words, according to the Royals’ general manager at the time the deal was announced, they had traded arguably the best starting pitcher prospect in baseball for a backup catcher and two middling arms, neither of which were expected to fill the hole they had just created on their staff. It made no sense. It made even less sense given how Schuerholz described Cone.
“David Cone is a fine prospect, and we didn’t want to trade him, but we felt (catching) was an area we needed to strengthen…David was not going to be one of our top four starters. He probably would have had to go to the bullpen, and he’s never really filled that role.”
That part about his projected role was simply not true. The Royals, like every other team by 1987, used a five-man rotation, and there was no reason Cone couldn’t have filled the fifth spot. In the Kansas City Star article about the trade it was noted that Cone’s departure opened a hole at that spot. The only person they had to fill that role besides Cone was veteran Bud Black, who had been moved to the bullpen the year before and was the team’s only lefty reliever, which Schuerholz acknowledged was a problem. “There are some things that we still have to do,” he said. Trading Cone might have filled a catching hole, but it opened a hole in the pitching staff that was never filled.
And, as it turns out, they didn’t fill the catching hole either. Three days after acquiring Hearn, they dealt Sundberg to the Cubs for backup outfielder Thad Bosley and righty reliever Dave Gumpert. That made Hearn the new starting catcher, but he tore his rotator cuff just six games into his Royals career and didn’t play for the rest of the season. Essentially, the injury ended his career. Owen was re-signed to platoon with Quirk. For the year, Royals catchers hit a combined .223/.296/.341 and the team finished dead last in offense.
They somehow managed to have a winning record for the season, mostly because Saberhagen returned to form and the pitching staff had the second-best ERA in the league, and the remaining talent on the roster kept them in contention for a few more seasons, but the days of the Royals front office simply outworking and outthinking their opposition had ended. The Cone trade marked the beginning of a series of questionable decisions, like trading away Danny Jackson for Kurt Stillwell, signing Storm Davis and Mark Davis for far too much money, trading Melido Perez and Greg Hibbard for a washed-up Floyd Bannister, and sending Charlie Leibrandt to the Braves for light-hitting Gerald Perry.
By 1990, Schuerholz had moved on to Atlanta, where he built a consistent winner that saw him elected to the Hall of Fame in 2017. Fogelman eventually sold his share of the team back to Kauffman, who struggled to field a competitive team in the age of exploding payrolls and would be dead of bone cancer by 1993. The Royals would sink into a horrific stretch of seventeen losing seasons in eighteen years between 1995 and 2012, burning through eight managers and eight last-place finishes during those years.
As for Cone, he had a 3.71 ERA in nearly 100 innings for the Mets in 1987, and was 20-3 with a 2.22 ERA and third-place finish in Cy Young voting the year after that. In a seventeen-year career he won 194 games, made five All-Star teams, won a Cy Young Award in 1994 (in Kansas City, ironically, having signed there as a free agent only to be traded away again the following year), threw a perfect game in 1999, and was part of five teams that won the World Series.
The Royals, needless to say, weren’t one of them.
Oh, to know what happened in the alternate universe where KC did not make that deal. Did Schuerholz just get out all his bad decisions in Kansas City, then move to Atlanta?