In one of the most anticipated promotions in recent Houston Astros memory, Yordan Alvarez finally got his long-awaited MLB debut, Sunday, June 9 against the visiting Baltimore Orioles.

It didn’t take long for the Astros’ third-ranked prospect to make an impact, blasting a two-run homer to left-center field in his second plate appearance to provide all the padding Houston would need to take the game, 4-0, and secure the three-game series win.

The left-hand batting Alvarez has pounded Pacific Coast League pitching to a .343/.443/.742 slash line (175 wRC+), with a minor league-leading 23 home runs and 49 walks (including 11 intentional walks). He struck out 50 times in 253 plate appearances at Houston’s Triple-A Round Rock Express this season.

20-20 Hindsight and Foresight

For one trade, pulled off almost three decades ago, we have the advantage of full-view 20-20 hindsight. One team wanted instant gratification of what they thought would be a key bullpen cog for a playoff run. The other team got a decade-and-a-half of transformative Hall of Fame performance that nearly single-handedly defined a franchise.

The other trade, consummated just three years ago, has the advantage of providing fans the opportunity of one of the fun things about the sport: Imagining the possibilities of what could be… and, at the very brink of the MLB debut of one of them.

Surface Similarities

The nearly-laughable Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen trade and the already-chuckle-worthy Yordan Alvarez for Josh Fields trade were deals where Houston obtained offensively promising corner infielders and dealt veteran right-handed pitchers, each of whom could be described as in various stages of journeyman status.

How two middling, yet experienced, pitchers could be lured away from Houston twice within a generation in exchange for merely the perception and hope of looming offensive production is not just a study in an opposing team’s short-sighted, but understandable, win-now vision.

It’s a revealing probe into the understanding of the ownership reins of the time, twinned with the dogged determination of two scouting teams, and the unquestioning trust Astros’ brass placed in both.

“I Was Devastated”

Only a handful of baseball trades in diamond history have reached the outlandish outcome of the infamous Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen larceny the Houston Astros pulled off at the expense of the Boston Red Sox on August 30, 1990.

In the laudable hopes of securing a proven veteran reliever for their pennant run at the turn of that decade, the Sox eagerly relinquished their grip on a skinny, line-drive hitting third baseman they were certain would amount to little more than a serviceable guardian of the hot corner.

Couple that with the fact Boston was backed-up at third base with future Hall of Famer Wade Boggs, with Scott Cooper and Tim Naehring waiting in the wings; Bagwell was understandably expendable.

Andersen, for his part, appeared in 15 September games for the Fenway Park-ers, turning in a sparkling 1.23 ERA (while blowing three out of four saves) on their way to an AL East crown by two games over the Toronto Blue Jays. This, after Andersen had gone 5-2 with a 1.95 ERA, striking out 68 batters in 73.2 innings for Houston, converting on all but one of his seven save opportunities.

Andersen spent four more years in the National League with the San Diego Padres and finally ended his career with two years as a reliever with the Philadelphia Phillies. Andersen has been providing color analysis for the Phillies’ radio broadcast team since 1998.

Bagwell, growing up a Red Sox fan, was elated at being selected in the fourth round by Boston in the 1989 draft out of Connecticut’s University of Hartford. He had just finished his second pro season at the Red Sox’s Double-A Eastern League New Britain affiliate. While Bagwell hit .333 with a .422 OBP, the most telling stat in his 136 games that year may have been his four home runs.

As longtime Houston announcer Greg Lucas reminds readers in his new “Astro Legends” book, “Home runs were rare in the Eastern League in 1990. The league leader, Rico Brogna, hit just 21, and only ten players in the whole league reached double figures.”

Astros scouts, at the time, could already recognize Bagwell’s solid work ethic and his propensity to hit line drives with a high contact rate. Houston already had budding star, Ken Caminiti, riveted at third, so ideas of a corner switch for Bagwell must have been gestating early.

“I was devastated,” Bagwell told writer Leigh Montville in 1993, remembering the trade: “I was one of the saddest guys you’ll ever see. All my life, everything had been Boston. I was born in Boston. Our house was one of those places where you couldn’t mention the word Yankees. My grandmother was a huge Red Sox fan. I called to tell her the news and she started crying.”

Of the above average young third baseman, Lucas recounts, “Jeff Bagwell’s skills were discovered early in spring training. Manager Art Howe determined he could be shifted to first base to get his bat into the lineup,” thus supplanting both Glenn Davis and Franklin Stubbs at that position.

By 1991, both players were off Houston’s roster, with Stubbs leaving via free agency in late 1990, and Davis being traded to the Baltimore Orioles a month later, in January.

“He Looks Even Better”

Bill Wood was the highly-regarded GM of the Astros at the time. Lucas: “As he recalled to [longtime Astros broadcaster] Bill Brown in the book Deep in the Heart, ‘When we got Bagwell, he went to the Instructional League. I got a phone call from Jimmy Johnson [coordinator of instruction]. He said, ‘You can’t believe this kid Bagwell and his hitting ability. He looks even better than the praise he got from out scouts.’ Manager Art Howe saw in the spring that he had to find a spot for Bagwell right away.”

Bagwell proceeded to transform himself from a lithe line-drive contact hitter with a straight-up stance to a gym-living, weight-pumping behemoth “Killer B,” adopting an exaggerated squat stance that made it look like he was sitting awkwardly on a stool. No one taught him that, some coaches wanted him to adjust or abandon it, and no one dared emulate it.

“‘If it’s not broke, why fix it?’ Bagwell says now of the advice he was given as early as the Cape Cod League, before the evolution of the stance no one fully understands began in earnest,” recounted MLB.com’s Alyson Footer in 2017, Bagwell’s long-deserved Hall of Fame induction year.

“There were certain times during that evolution of my stance that it worked,” Bagwell said at the time, with equal parts modesty and muddiness. “I stuck with it. It’s all I got. It worked out.”

“A few coaches said, ‘We need to change him, he’s not going to be able to hit like that in the big leagues,’ first year Astros coach Phil Garner recalled to Footer. ‘I was a young coach; I had only been with the Astros a week. But I sensed he was going to be able to hit.’

“Garner wasn’t focused on the stance as much as the swing. He noticed how long Bagwell’s bat stayed in the hitting zone and knew right then he was special. ‘Bagwell was one of those guys who, regardless of how he started or how he looked in his stance, when the swing started, he got the bat on the ball and stayed on the ball,’ Garner explained.”

Related: Bagwell and His Use of Performance-Enhancing Talent

Astro fans know that any mention of Bagwell can’t continue for too long without special attention being brought to Craig Biggio, Houston’s first Hall of Fame inductee in 2015.

As ubiquitous a pair as peanut butter and jelly, Lucy and Desi, Frank and Dino, Fred and Barney, and Mantle and Maris, Bidge and Baggy fed off each other, goaded each other, and were the quiet clubhouse leaders that propelled many Houston teams through losing seasons, the franchise’s first World Series, and at least three uniform iterations.

A catcher when Bagwell arrived, Biggio famously made his own transformation (to second base, and much later, center field)… one no less serendipitous than Bagwell’s, but had it not happened, it’s possible one less Killer B would be in the Hall.

Fields For Alvarez

Josh Fields had been a serviceable reliever for Houston for over three years before GM Jeff Luhnow decided to jettison the 30-year-old right-hander’s $900,000 salary on August 1, 2016, for a recently-signed Cuban kid who’d never played an inning of minor league ball for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Sent to the Astros’ AAA Fresno affiliate in mid-May in 2016 after posting a 6.89 ERA in 15 appearances for Houston to start the year, Fields became attractive to the Dodgers after he put up a 1.65 ERA in his 23 Fresno games.

Fields’ 32 strikeouts and seven walks in 27.2 Pacific Coast League innings must have looked like found money they’d be happy to grab for an unproven 180-pound, 19-year-old first baseman who cost $4 million (half of that was an overage penalty) to sign on the last day of the international signing period, June 15, 2016.

Fields turned in a couple of decent years with the Dodgers, totaling 98 innings in relief in 2017 and 2018, for a combined 2.52 ERA, converting half of his eight save opportunities.

Fields has managed to postpone the inevitability of his career finish, signing a minor league free agent contract with the Milwaukee Brewers this spring, 10 days after the Dodgers released him. After Spring Training, and a few weeks with the Brew Crew’s AAA San Antonio affiliate, the Missions released Fields April 30, 2019.

Benevolent to a “T,” the Texas Rangers rescued Fields on May 10, signed him to a minor league pact, and promptly assigned him to their AAA Nashville Sounds.

Changes in Alvarez

This excerpt from MinorLeagueBall.com gives us a peek into the early Alvarez buzz the day after the trade: “He’s quite strong, but apparently has yet to fully tap his power in live games. He’s said to have good strike zone judgment, but his range and arm strength limit him to first base.”

The changes in the three years since his acquisition include the Astros’ preference to have Alvarez, upon his promotion, man the shoebox left field at Minute Maid Park. The other noticeable change echoes the body metamorphosis that marked Bagwell’s growth from a solid six-foot, 195-pounder to a longshoreman-like 215 pounds shortly after his 1994 NL MVP season.

Since his initial signing, three years ago by the Dodgers, Alvarez has packed on 45 pounds of what appears to be steel-banded sinew, and sent bruised horsehides into PCL scoreboards and onto verdant berms throughout several states.

Related: AL Pitchers: Yordan Alvarez’s Bat Would Like a Word With You

The Down Low on the Upshot

Both Bagwell and Alvarez made defensive switches from corner infield spots, the former notably from third base to first, and while the latter may make occasional starts at first, early signs point to DH and left field as being homes for most of his big league time.

Andersen has long been the curious punchline to many a barroom quiz over the years, while Fields, I suppose, did what the Dodgers asked of him for the amount of time he was able. His career, now, hangs by an almost literal thread at the moment a freight train named Yordan is chugging out of Houston’s Union Station just behind his new home field.

Will he have a Hall of Fame career? It doesn’t matter.

Did the Bagwell for Andersen trade make the Red Sox forget the Babe Ruth trade to the Yankees for $100,000 a century ago? Unless you’re a Red Sox fan, who cares?

Will the Alvarez for Fields trade make the Dodgers forget their 1993 trade of a young, eventual Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez to the Montreal Expos for Delino DeShields? Time will tell.

Did the Houston Astros scouts and management do their homework and pull a fast one on another team, separated by nearly three decades, and steal an undervalued prospect from an unsuspecting team?

They did once.