Trades Ten Years Later - Angels trade Scioscia for Gretzky
No, not the ones you're thinking of, but yes, their sons.
The Names: Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim receive: Trevor Gretzky. Chicago Cubs receive: Matt Scioscia.
The Team Context: On November 18, 1999, the Anaheim Angels held a press conference to announce their new manager. Mike Scioscia was new to the organization, but already well-known in Southern California after a distinguished decade-long career as Dodgers catcher. He coached in the Dodgers organization for a few seasons before getting the call to manage the Angels. “I’m very excited to have this opportunity at such a young age,” said the 40-year-old Scioscia at the time of his hiring. He took over a last-place Anaheim team and won the 2002 World Series in his third season at the helm, cementing his status as an Angels managerial legend. By 2008, he was the longest-tenured and winningest manager in franchise history. Ahead of the 2009 season, he received a 10-year contract extension, which I had to double-check with multiple sources because that seems like a crazy long extension to give your manager!
In short, the Angels were very invested in Mike Scioscia and I don’t think the Cubs really mattered that much for purposes of this trade.
The Player Context: Baseball in 2024 is replete with stars that descend from yesteryear’s stars. Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr. are among the more successful and obvious examples, but we can include guys like Bo Bichette and Jackson Holliday without diluting the point too badly. It’s impossible to identify a single reason why these sons were able to so successfully follow in the footsteps of their fathers, but it’s really easy to brainstorm a bunch of plausible reasons. We can start with a foundation of good genetics, then include the obvious material factors such as family wealth and access to uniquely qualified mentors. Bo Bichette probably came out of the womb better at hitting than I have ever been, then he received hitting instruction that far surpassed anything I learned from my youth baseball coaches.
But the trickier component to tease out is psychic — the son of an MLB player doesn’t view being a baseball player as an impossible childhood dream, he views it as a job that lots of people get each year, including his dad and several family friends. Sure, it requires hard work and a few lucky breaks, but the clear roadmap is what inevitably runs in the family. That psychic shield presumably extends to evaluators as well. If an amateur scout looks at 5,000 teenage baseball players per year, the burden is typically on the teenage baseball player to flash talent that clearly separates themselves from the pack. When that teenager is named Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the scout watches him hit a home run, it sticks in the memory more than if the teen is named Yordan Alvarez.
This could all be lumped into the clunkier umbrella concept of “opportunity.” It’s impossible to believe that the talent pipeline in baseball (or any sport) is perfectly efficient to select the individuals born with the highest potential for baseball aptitude from around the world (if it were, it would be tougher for a country of 11 million people to produce such a high proportion of the elite talent). The subset that actually gets “scouted” is weeded out to an infinitesimal percentage by the general conditions of life. Maybe the next Babe Ruth got sick and missed tryouts for his high school team, then didn’t follow up. Maybe his family moved and signups were closed for the travel team in the new city. Maybe he was born in a town with such lousy baseball players that his skills never developed until it was too late. Maybe he never picked up a baseball bat at all. All the circumstances need to be just right for someone to develop as a professional athlete, and those circumstances are much more likely to be in place for someone whose parent has already done it.
Wayne Gretzky was born in Brantford, Canada, where he played hockey on an ice rink that his dad built in the backyard. Through some combination of divine gifts and perfect circumstances, Gretzky became the greatest hockey player in history. By 1988, he had been traded from the Edmonton Oilers to Los Angeles in a move so controversial that Oilers owner Peter Pocklington was burned in effigy. In 1992, Wayne’s son Trevor was born into radically different circumstances than his father. For one thing, Wayne’s dad worked for the phone company and Trevor’s dad worked for the Los Angeles Kings, where his job title was “greatest hockey player in history.” For another, Wayne was born in a city that receives 98.4 cm of snowfall each year, while Trevor was born in a city where it hadn’t snowed since 1962. Wayne’s career included a couple more moves to St. Louis and New York before retirement, and during the stint in New York, his son fell in love with baseball. “I remember him taking me to a Yankee game, and ever since then I wanted to play and it’s been my dream to be in the Major Leagues since then,” Trevor said as a senior in high school.
There are already a couple of sliding doors moments here. Trevor Gretzky would likely have been born in Canada if not for the financial circumstances of Peter Pocklington. Instead, he was born in Los Angeles, then moved to St. Louis and New York before the age of 8. After getting early childhood conditioning in strong baseball towns, he began attending Yankees games when his father played for the New York Rangers (1996-1999), a stretch in which the Yankees won three World Series titles (to be followed by a fourth in 2000, the year after Wayne retired). Trevor played some hockey in his youth, but when his family returned to sunsoaked Los Angeles after Wayne retired, baseball was the sport of choice for Trevor and every other kid he knew.
We have an interesting opportunity to investigate how the factors of inherited athletic success applied to Trevor Gretzky’s development as a baseball player. The biological gifts conducive to success in hockey versus baseball probably vary somewhat, but not so much that you wouldn’t choose to swap Wayne Gretzky’s genes in for your own father’s if you were trying to optimize your baseball career (sorry dad, it’s not personal). And the other helpful factors are probably present in roughly equal amounts. Having the last name Gretzky might not be quite as conspicuous as being named “Vladimir Guerrero Jr.,” but it’s an extremely famous hockey player and a pretty unique last name that surely opened its fair share of doors. In strictly material terms, Trevor attended Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, a school founded in 2000 where tuition is around $40,000 for the current academic year and the 24-name list of “Notable Alumni” on Wikipedia features 19 athletes (including Nick Montana, son of Joe and classmate of Trevor). It seems safe to assume that Oaks Christian School fosters a great environment for students pursuing careers as athletes. Wayne also understood the habits necessary for elite athletes and contributed to Trevor’s success both physically (“carting him back and forth to the batting cages on a near-daily basis”) and psychically (imbuing his son with the lesson that “the guys who work the hardest and play the hardest come out on top”).
It’s important to emphasize that these advantages are nowhere near sufficient to propel somebody to any sort of career in professional athletics. The list of athlete sons who never made careers in sports is certainly longer than the list that made it, even in a framework that puts these two career minor leaguers on the latter list. Trevor Gretzky wasn’t given a career in baseball, he was given opportunities and was able to make the most of them. His path to a meaningful batter’s box may have been easier, but once he got there he had to hit the same baseball as everybody else. Trevor did so quite frequently in high school, hitting .341 with 33 RBIs as a junior to earn a scholarship to play at Tony Gwynn’s San Diego State University. Instead of going to college, he started his professional career when he was taken by the Cubs in the 7th round of the 2011 draft, even after suffering a partial labrum tear that limited him to DH duties for his senior season.
Of course, sometimes these structural advantages from an athlete parent play out a bit more directly.
Matt Scioscia was born in Encino, California in the 9th year of his father’s 13-season tenure as Dodgers catcher. He attended Crespi Carmelite High School, an all-boys school established in 1959, where tuition is a comparatively cheap ~$25,000 for this year and the “Notable Alumni” athletes run thirty deep (Max Heidegger is on both of these schools’ Notable Alumni lists). Matt graduated from high school in 2007 with a firm commitment to play baseball at Notre Dame after a reasonably successful high school career. Then, for reasons that are simultaneously obvious and unclear to me, the Angels drafted Matt Scioscia in the 41st round of the 2007 MLB Draft. He did not sign with the team. Matt Scioscia’s Notre Dame Athletics biography assures us that he “would have been drafted much higher if not for his strong commitment to Notre Dame.” Assuming that’s true, wouldn’t the team that had employed Matt’s father for seven seasons be exceptionally well positioned to know that they had no shot at signing him? Did they not ask? The 41st round sounds hilariously late, but the Angels made nine picks after that and one (Efren Navarro) even made the majors. Why waste this particular draft pick on an unwanted favor?
(Maybe it didn’t matter given how bad the Angels’ draft was that year. Only four players that signed with the Angels in their 49-person 2007 draft class made it to the MLB, and Ryan Brasier has had the most successful career, and it’s not particularly close. If we include guys who were drafted but didn’t sign with the team, one additional MLB player makes the list and it’s Matt Harvey.)
Scioscia posted his best numbers in his freshman season in Notre Dame, took a step back in his sophomore year, lost his job at catcher as a junior, and limped to the finish with a senior season where he had six hits (all singles) in thirty at bats, good for a .200/.226/.200 slash line (no walks, but he got hit by one pitch). Scioscia seemed to be overmatched by pitching in the Big East and unlikely to have success in professional baseball. But this is where we can distinguish between “hard nepotism” and “soft nepotism.” Trevor Gretzky’s baseball career could only be said to benefit from the soft form of nepotism; drafting Wayne Gretzky’s kid is a fun gimmick, but no baseball franchise is seriously consulting with Wayne Gretzky on their draft picks and no front office is spending a single-digit-round draft pick on fun gimmicks (at least not intentionally). Trevor Gretzky had to sink or swim on his own merits, even if his water was particularly smooth and shark-free.
By contrast, Mike Scioscia was perhaps the most powerful employee in the Angels organization. The 2011 Draft was overseen by then-GM Tony Reagins, but he would resign at the end of the season and be replaced by Jerry Dipoto, who would eventually resign after he lost a power struggle with Scioscia. Put yourself in the shoes of Reagins, or whichever underling he put in charge of the meaninglessly late rounds of the 2011 Draft. 1,300 amateur baseball players have already been selected. You’re having another typically Angels draft and have only selected two future MLB players since round 5 (and they’re Joey Krehbiel and Jett Bandy, so you shouldn’t take actual pride in picking them). You or your predecessor has already taken the precedential dive, drafting Matt Scioscia when he had no intentions of signing with your team. Now he’s a Notre Dame graduate who slugged .200 in his senior season. Do you want to take another of your scouting department’s guys, like the probably AI-generated 42nd-round pick Jason Nappi or potentially mythical 47th-round pick Brandon Lodge? Or do you want to do a solid for Mike Scioscia, the living and working franchise legend who recently signed a ten-year extension that gives him way more job security than you have?
The Angels selected Matt Scioscia in the 45th round. “Honestly, I was kind of excited just to get a chance anywhere,” he told the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Just like in college, Scioscia’s best stat line came at the beginning of his career. Unfortunately for him, this peak was a .239/.271/.304 line that he posted at rookie ball in the 12 games he played after being drafted in 2011. He posted remarkably similar numbers in a larger sample at A-ball the next year (.234/.271/.303) and it only got worse from there. Hard nepotism was enough to get Matt Scioscia all the way to a professional batter’s box, but it didn’t get him past High-A.
The Trade: Fast forward to 2014 and put yourself in the shoes of Jerry Dipoto, who had taken over as Angels GM after the 2011 season. Rumors of discord between Dipoto and Mike Scioscia had grown after Dipoto fired assistant coach Mickey Hatcher in 2012, but the two denied that there was any rift going into the 2014 season. Empirically, this was false; if you’re wearing Jerry Dipoto’s shoes in March 2014, you’re about 15 months from resigning as a result of your disagreements with Mike Scioscia. You have his 25-year-old son Matt bumming around spring training after a season where he had three extra-base hits in 146 low-minors plate appearances. And you’re debilitatingly addicted to trading, such that you’re going to be the subject of another post on Trades Ten Years Later this week and were already the subject of a post in December, when you traded for a guy that you had previously traded for when you were Diamondbacks GM. It’s a bad look to cut Matt Scioscia, especially since you might be making his dad deliver the news. But trading “Mike Scioscia’s kid” for “Wayne Gretzky’s kid”? When Trevor played high school baseball in Westlake Village and was selected in the 7th round of the same draft where Matt was a courtesy 45th round pick? Who could say no? Apparently not the Cubs!
By 2014, the new economics of the Internet had started to calcify, as formerly respected media organizations worked aggressively to generate clicks and the accompanying ad revenue. “Clickbait” was even a candidate for Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2014 (losing to the verb “vape,” which is hard to argue with). Understandably, the click-seeking Internet was ablaze with news of a trade involving Mike Scioscia’s kid being traded for Wayne Gretzky’s kid. At CBS, Mike Axisa’s second paragraph is a simple “How about that?,” which basically covers the tone and content of all the articles that were published on this subject. Jerry Dipoto didn’t elucidate matters much, saying only “we had an opportunity for Gretzky. They had an opportunity for Matt.” How about that?
The Results: It’s not clear what the opportunity was for Matt; the Cubs released him on May 2 before he played any games with the organization. Presumably, Jerry Dipoto explained the perilous workplace dynamics he found himself in to Cubs GM Jed Hoyer, who was willing to do his colleague a solid by making the swap and doing the dirty work of ending Matt Scioscia’s faint MLB dreams, all while giving up a marginally better prospect. Presumably, Jed had a solid idea that Trevor Gretzky wasn’t going to make it, either.
The opportunity for Gretzky is at least demonstrable in hindsight; he played two more seasons in the minor leagues, but was unable to advance past A-ball. The Angels released him at the end of Spring Training in 2016.
The Aftermath: With his affiliated baseball career over, Matt Scioscia turned to the independent leagues and signed with the Frontier League’s Windy City ThunderBolts. His first game was on May 18 and he became a hero on May 28, when he hit a single in extra innings to walk off the Southern Illinois Miners in game one of a doubleheader. But an 0-for-3 game on June 12 brought his slash line down to .238/.258/.270, and he was released by the ThunderBolts on June 14. I am unable to find any record of Matt Scioscia’s activity since then, but as of May 2023, Mike Scoscia had a granddaughter named Jayce with a grandson on the way, so it seems safe to assume that Matt is either a father or an uncle. Potentially both.
After he was released by the Angels, Trevor Gretzky leveraged the last vestiges of his soft nepotism in the country where it would go furthest, signing for the Capitales de Quebec of the Canadian-American Association (where he teamed with former Trades Ten Years Later subject Maxx Tissenbaum). Gretzky slashed .228/.241/.281 in 16 games with the Capitales, but his name was still Gretzky and he was playing in a Canadian baseball league, so he got a contract with the Aigles de Trois-Rivieres for the 2017 season. After 363 plate appearances that produced a .206/.287/.259 line, Gretzky hung up the cleats. He quickly turned to a new career in front of the camera as an actor, appearing in the 2018 film Mile 22 (as “Mike Vogel”) and an episode of the TV series Loudermilk (as “Drunk Guy”). I have not heard of any of the works he has appeared in except for Madden NFL 21, and nothing new has come out since 2022.
Miscellaneous: Wayne Gretzky was originally an Indianapolis Racer and became an Oiler after the team owner put him on a private plane (without advising on destination) and tried to gamble his contract in a backgammon game? Nostalgia blog piece reflecting on Mike Scioscia’s long career as Angels manager from 2018; it doesn’t seem like these age well. I thought there might have been a South Bend Cubs angle, where Matt Scioscia was sent to a farm team in his college town, but the South Bend franchise wasn’t affiliated with the Cubs until 2015. Matt Scioscia was drafted in 2007 16 picks after Richmond high schooler, new Steelers quarterback, and future Trades Ten Years Later star Russell Wilson. The Kane County Cougars, the minor league team where Gretzky was playing, announced the trade prior to the Cubs confirming it. On April 18, 2022, Trevor Gretzky and his brother-in-law Dustin Johnson caught some absolutely massive fish.
March 21, 2024:
Angels receive: Jose Alvarez
Tigers receive: Andrew Romine
March 22, 2024:
Raiders receive: Matt Schaub
Texans receive: 2014 6th-round pick (#181, Alfred Blue)