Good news: the Yankees acquired a future Cy Young Award winner as the Player To Be Named Later in a deal in 1984 that sent their 31-year-old veteran first baseman to the Chicago White Sox.
Bad news: the Yankees traded said Cy Young winner away long before he won the greatest accolade of his career.
Today’s birthday honoree, Doug Drabek, was drafted twice and then traded before ever making his MLB debut. His tenure in the Bronx was brief, but he went on to have a long and successful career and the Yankees
almost brought him back when he hit free agency in the early 1990s. It all goes down as a miss for the Yanks.
Douglas Dean Drabek
Born: July 25, 1962 (Victoria, TX)
Yankees Tenure: 1986
A Texas native, Drabek attended St. Joseph High School in Victoria where he excelled as a multi-sport athlete, playing football and baseball. The right-handed hurler caught the eyes of major league scouts, and in the 1980 MLB Draft Cleveland drafted the teenager in the fourth round.
Drabek, however, opted to head to school and hone his craft there rather than toil in the minor leagues. So off he went to the University of Houston, where he was nothing short of spectacular. Drabek set a Cougars record with 27 wins in 268 career innings (including six shutouts). Twelve of those wins came in 1983, and one was a no-hitter. Drabek is a Southwest Conference Hall of Famer and a member of the Houston Athletics Hall of Honor; his No. 16 is now retired.
Three years after choosing the University of Houston over Cleveland, Drabek’s name was again called during the Amateur Draft. This time, the Chicago White Sox chose Drabek in the 11th round of the 1983 edition, and he signed.
Drabek reported to the Niagara Falls Sox of the New York-Pennsylvania League, the White Sox’s Low-A affiliate. The 20-year-old made 16 appearances for Niagara, primarily pitching out of the rotation, with sporadic relief appearances. The following season, he began at A-Ball but after only one start Chicago promoted him to Double-A, where he pitched for Glens Falls in the Eastern League. Before long, however, he found himself on the move again, this time to a new organization. On July 18th, the Yankees sent first baseman Roy Smalley to Chicago for two players to be named later. On August 14th, those two PTBNLs were made public: southpaw Kevin Hickey and Drabek were headed to the Bronx.
New York’s brass immediately assigned Drabek to Nashville, the club’s Double-A affiliate. Drabek pitched the remainder of the 1984 and ‘85 seasons at Double-A, though he was evidently promoted to the Triple-A Columbus Clippers for the International League playoffs.
Unfortunately, Drabek was on the losing end of the ‘85 International League Championship. The Tidewater Tides, the Triple-A affiliate of the crosstown rival Mets, beat Columbus three games to one. The fourth and final game was scoreless into the sixth inning until Drabek walked a batter, then surrendered hits to future major leaguers Dave Magadan and Kevin Mitchell, the latter of whom went on to win the 1989 NL MVP Award.
Heading into 1986, Drabek was ranked by Baseball America as the No. 5 Yankees prospect. New York skipper Lou Piniella signaled that Drabek would get a serious look in spring training to see if the young hurler, who’d excelled the past two seasons in the minors, could force his way into the big league rotation. Alas. Drabek was sent back to Triple-A to start the ‘86 campaign, where he struggled mightily.
Despite his struggles, New York called Drabek up to The Show, where he debuted on on May 3rd in Oakland. Entering the game in relief, Drabek hurled 4.1 frames of one-run ball in his initial taste of the big leagues. Two weeks later, he made his first start in Baltimore where he authored four shutout innings. All told, Drabek pitched well for the ‘86 Yanks, who went on to win 90 games, finishing 5.5 games back of eventual AL pennant winner Boston. Maybe he pitched too well.
That offseason, veteran pitcher Rick Rhoden expressed his desire to get out of Pittsburgh. Rhoden was coming off a career season in the Steel City and to get him, the Yankees evidently had to include Drabek in the trade package. The full damage: Drabek, Logan Easley, and Brian Fisher to the Steel City in exchange for Rhoden, Pat Clements, and Cecilio Guante. Rhoden pitched well for New York in ‘87, though he never came close to his lofty 1986 season. He pitched one more year in the Bronx before finishing his career in Houston in 1989.
Drabek, meanwhile, went directly into the Pirates’ rotation in 1987 and began an eight-year streak with an ERA+ above 100. The following year, he won 15 games and kicked off a six-year stretch of throwing at least 219 innings each season.
1990 was the height of Drabek’s career from a personal standpoint. The righty won 22 games en route to an eighth place finish in NL MVP voting and his first and only NL Cy Young Award. That year also started a three-year stretch of Drabek and the Pirates reaching the NLCS only to go down in defeat each time.
After the 1992 season when the Pirates bowed out to the Atlanta Braves in the NLCS, Drabek reached free agency. The Yankees, where he’d gotten his professional start, were among the interested suitors. But after making an offer to Drabek, along with David Cone and Jose Guzman, general manager Gene Michael pulled all the offers from consideration and started looking elsewhere for starting pitching.
“I tried to get answers quickly from the three,” Michael told the New York Times. “I didn’t want them to take a week and then shop it around to get other clubs to meet it or top it.”
Whether Drabek ever seriously considered the Yankees or not, the path back to the Bronx was gone. Ultimately, he ended up signing with the Houston Astros on a four-year deal. His first two seasons in Houston were up to par, though through some hard luck he led the Senior Circuit in losses in 1993 with 18. Drabek’s 1994 was more conventionally effective, as he went 12-6 with a 2.84 ERA and 140 ERA+, making the NL All-Star team and finishing fourth in Cy Young voting during the strike-shortened campaign.
But Drabek’s final two Houston campaigns were disasters. He departed in free agency and pitched two more seasons—1997 with the White Sox and 1998 with the Orioles—before retiring. Now 64 years old, Drabek is currently the pitching coach for the Reno Aces, Arizona’s Triple-A affiliate.
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