Backing Up the Truck: Glenn Beckert

A month after Fergie Jenkins was traded, Glenn Beckert was the next to go. I’m sure that he saw the handwriting on the wall when the Cubs acquired Vic Harris in the Jenkins deal. Beckert was aging and had an injury-filled 1973 season.

Beckert was moving west, to the Padres. In return the Cubs got outfielder Jerry Morales.

 

The deal led to a couple of the oddest-looking cards in the 1974 set. Topps spared us the bad airbrush job.  But it doesn't look right to have a Cub uniform on a Padres card and vice-versa.  Also, on the Morales card Topps forgot to change the border color from yellow to blue.

The strange thing with all of this is that the deal was made fairly early in the off season, November 12. Topps put trades made later into the traded set. I’m wondering why this deal was left out.

Here’s another weird thing with the trade. The baseball-reference page for the players list the trade date as November 7, 1973. I looked in the Tribune from the following day for information on the trade, but found nothing. Maybe the deal was made late in the evening of the 7th, past the paper’s deadline. I checked the paper from the 9th --- nothing there either. An article on the trade didn’t appear until November 13. And from reading the article, it seems like the trade was just made. So was the trade made on November 12 or November 7?

I always assumed the deal was a straight up swap of the two players. But according to baseball-reference, the Cubs also included another player, Bobby Fenwick.

Who???

Bobby Fenwick is a name I had never heard of before. Turns out that the Cubs had him for a very short time. In 1973, Fenwick spent time in the Cardinal and Astro organization before the Cubs signed him off of waivers in July. Three organization in three months is not usually an indication that your career is going well.

Fenwick spent the rest of 1973 in AAA and then was included in the Becket trade. He played in 52 games for the Padres AAA team in 1974 and that was his final professional season.