Bob O’Farrell is one of the earliest examples of a Cubs player who was very good for the team — posting seasons of 6.0 and 4.7 bWAR in 1922 and 1923 at ages 25 and 26 — and then was traded away because the Cubs had a catcher they thought was going to do much better.
In this case, they were right. Gabby Hartnett was that new catcher and yes, he had a much better career than O’Farrell, eventually ending up in the Hall of Fame.
But the Cubs didn’t get much for O’Farrell when they traded him to the Cardinals
May 23, 1925. The players in return: Howard Freigau and Mike González. Freigau was a decent player for a couple years, but by the time the Cubs won their next pennant in 1929, he was gone. González backed up Hartnett and was capable, but… if they’d kept O’Farrell, they’d have had an almost unbeatable catching tandem.
O’Farrell, a Chicago-area native (Waukegan), played 12 years for the Cubs, though as a teenager he played in only six games for the team in his first three seasons. He posted 14.5 bWAR as a Cub, and his best year was that 6.0 bWAR sason in 1922, when he batted .324/.439/.441 in 126 games. The next year he hit 12 home runs while batting .319/.408/.471 in 131 games. An injury helped the Cubs want to move on to Hartnett, as described in O’Farrell’s SABR biography:
In a game on July 22, 1924, an injury to O’Farrell knocked him out of the Cubs lineup for three weeks. Essentially, it cost him his starting job. In the first inning of the first game of a doubleheader, a foul tip off the bat of Stuffy McInnis struck O’Farrell’s catcher’s mask. The impact caused the steel support rods to jam right into O’Farrell’s forehead far enough that he suffered a concussion. He was rushed to the hospital where he would remain for two to three weeks.
“It was my own fault,” O’Farrell said to [author Lawrence] Ritter. “It was an old mask and I knew I shouldn’t have worn it. You know, a lot of times a catcher’s mask gets so much banging around it gets dented here and there. If you try to bend it back the way it’s supposed to be, it weakens it. Well, I got on an old mask that day and asked the clubhouse boy to go get me my regular one. Before he could get back with it, the ball had spun off the bat, smashed through the mask, and knocked me unconscious.”
O’Farrell was NL MVP in 1926 with the Cardinals, batting .293/.371/.433 in a career-high 147 games and throwing out 51 percent of runners trying to steal. That’s something he was really good at, and O’Farrell was the catcher who threw out Babe Ruth trying to steal second in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 1926 World Series, winning that Series for St. Louis.
O’Farrell played in MLB through 1935, even returning briefly to the Cubs in 1934. After his career he returned to Waukegan, where he ran a bowling alley/billiards center. He died Feb. 20, 1988 in Waukegan, aged 91.
