My First Cards

How Jeff Leonard got to 1982 and his effect on the entire NL West that season, is a pretty interesting story that raises a lot of questions.

In ’79, he had a breakout season, being awarded the Sporting News’s NL ROY. Then in 1980 expectations were high, but he regressed petty badly, leading the Astros to think he wasn’t part of their future and that he’d never develop and they needed to dump him on some other team.

Remember, that was a Houston club who’d forced a 1 game playoff with the Dodgers and were looking to reach the World Series in 1981. They couldn’t have a .213 hitter with a pithetic .274 OBP messing up their chances everyday.

Fortunately the Giants had a player they wanted to dump too, a discontented first baseman by the name of Mike Ivie. So on April 20, 1981, the Astros traded Jeff Leonard to the Giants for a discontented first baseman. That made the trade work for both teams, and they probably both figured they were dumping a never-will-be onto a division rival.

As soon as Jeff was a Giant, they assigned him to their AAA club in Phoenix where he promptly smacked the ball around batting .401 and slugging over .600! Yeah, this is that same player Houston didn’t think would be worth keepin’ around.

After the ’81 strike, Jeff was recalled to the majors and became a regularly important part of the Giants offense. In just 140 plate appearances, he earned 1.8 WAR (Wins Above Replacement Player), which ain’t too shabby.

So then ’82 comes around, and expectations are high for Jeff again….just like a year earlier. This time, Jeff started the year out hot despite the Giants struggling to win games.

On April 25th, the Giants went into their game against their longtime rival Dodgers with a mere 4-10 record and trying to stop a 5 game losing streak. By the 8th inning, they were losing again, 3-2, when Jeff came up to the plate with two outs & the bases loaded, and hit his 1st career grand slam! Giants win.

Unfortunately, just a few days after that, Jeff injured his hand diving for a ball in the outfield and would barely play again until July. He still didn’t really get his swing back ’til September though. If we split up his season stats, you can see just how hard the injury affected his whole season—

From that, we can conclude that if he didn’t injure his hand, he probably would’ve batted around .305 for the whole season, and slugged around .460. Although, we’ll never know.

What we do know though, is that when he got hot, the Giants got hot.

This is important, because as was recently pointed out, this was a great division race. In what was largely a division race between the Braves and the Braves and the Atlanta Braves, with the Dodgers sneaking in there. The Giants started slippin into the mix too in September, by going 23-10 after August 27.

What makes this incredibly interesting, is the fact the Giants ended up only 2 games back of the division title when all was said and done. It raises a bunch of questions like — Would the Giants have won just 3 more games during the summer if Jeff Leonard didn’t injure his hand and miss 82 games of the season? If the Giants won the division, could they have beaten the Cardinals or Brewers in the postseason? If the Giants had made the playoffs or won the World Series, would they have still chose to rebuild? Would they have chose to try to keep the winning ways going by signing expensive free agents, or making different trades? How could that have affected the entire National League through the 1980′s?

All the Giants needed was 3 games.