That time the 1993 Phillies almost traded for Randy Johnson

Tim Kelly

June 8 2018

By Tim Kelly, Sports Talk Philly editor

While the Philadelphia Phillies acquired a pretty damn good left-handed pitcher at the 2009 trade deadline in Cliff Lee, even Lee pales in comparison to the trade that the Phillies reportedly discussed 16 years earlier.

Prior to his 2011 induction into the Phillies Wall of Fame, John Kruk told Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News that the Phillies nearly acquired future Hall of Famer Randy Johnson prior to the MLB non-waiver trade deadline in 1993:

"If you remember the trade deadline, we had a chance to get Randy Johnson and they didn't want to give up, I think, Mike Lieberthal," the Krukker was saying yesterday. "Either him or Tyler Green . . . "

Kruk paused.

"Look, I love Lieby, he's one of my favorite people. But, at the time, I wish he was a Mariner."

"We were all gung-ho because we heard Randy Johnson was coming here," Kruk said. "That puts us over the hump. That's a win that day. Now you have him and Curt Schilling and Terry Mulholland? There's wins there. They didn't pull the trigger. So, there was some animosity, yeah."

If you don't remember the 1993 trade rumors, Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times reminded us of the rumors in a 1998 article:

"It seems like every spring they've talked about trading me," said Johnson, who was, indeed, the focus of trade talks in 1993 and '95. "How's that going to make me feel? I have legitimate reasons to be upset, but I'm trying to be the bigger man here."

The Seattle Mariners instead ended up holding onto Johnson until 1998, when they traded him to the Houston Astros before he eventually signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks after that season. As pointed out by Kruk in the Donnellon article, the Phillies had a chance to pair up Johnson and Schilling eight seasons before they won co-MVPs of the 2001 World Series, arguably the most competitive World Series of this century.

While Kruk seemed to suggest that Johnson would have been purely a rental piece, it's hard to just brush off adding a Hall of Famer to a team that made it to Game 6 of the World Series. Perhaps Johnson would have left in free-agency after the season, but it's also possible that if he was on the team, Mitch Williams wouldn't have been as heavily used during the team's 1993 playoff run. Or perhaps he wouldn't have been pitching to Joe Carter in the ninth inning of Game 6 when he ultimately allowed the series-winning walk-off home run.

Mike Lieberthal became arguably the greatest catcher in franchise history, but in parts of 13 seasons with the club, they never made the playoffs. And if the deal had simply been centered around Tyler Green, who only ended up pitching in 70 Major League games, it would have been a bigger steal than Johnson's Diamondbacks ultimately got in 2000 when they acquired Schilling for Travis Lee, Vicente Padilla, Omar Daal and Nelson Figueroa.

Instead, the story of the time that the 1993 Phillies nearly acquired one of the greatest left-handed pitchers in league history is just a funny story to tell around the league's non-waiver trade deadline.