When the New York Mets spent the first pick of the 1961 expansion draft on a catcher, manager Casey Stengel explained why.
There was a similar mystery, if not a treasured quip, when the Florida Marlins selected Bryan Harvey from the Angels in the 1992 expansion draft. Why would a team bound to get its butt kicked the first year want a high-priced closer?
“Anytime we’d have a really good chance to win a game, we didn’t want to blow it,” Rene Lachemann, the Marlins’ first manager, said in an MLB Trade Rumors interview last year. “We knew we might only have a chance to win 60 games — so we better have somebody at the end who could save them.