Indubitably, Babe Ruth’s trade from the Red Sox to the Yankees for $100,000 ranks as the worst baseball swap ever. Still, serious fans of every major league team can emphasize with cursed Boston rooters over ruinous trades involving a parade of franchise icons. 

My San Francisco Giants’ trade which still lives in infamy for my boyhood friends and me is, however, wrapped with good memories about a parade, fezzes, and a proverbial tip of another type of hat from the city’s preeminent columnist.

The trade centered on Ray Sadecki, infamously traded for Giants’ legend Orlando Cepeda in 1966, our senior year at Sacred Heart High School. For Larry, Pete, and me, it will never be topped in our lifetimes. 

We resurrected our decades-old discussion of bad Giant trades this past May. The Black and Orange beat Zack Wheeler and his Phillies, letting us breathe a huge sigh of relief because it’s always disconcerting losing to a pitcher once in your farm system but traded away before enjoying an all-star career elsewhere. 

We reiterated, however, that trades of future stars didn’t rank down there with trading away favorite, much-loved stars still in their prime.

With that in mind, we concurred our all-time worst SF Giant mistake wasn’t the infamous trade bringing back Frank Duffy for George Foster, as bad as it turned out. Foster became a central part of Sparky Anderson’s Big Red Machine and won an MVP award while bashing 52 homers in 1977. Foster, though, hadn’t yet shown much in his first couple seasons in the show, even while being mentored by Bobby Bonds.

We agreed that Bonds himself and Gaylord Perry were two heroes sent away when past their prime by the hometown nine.

The incomparable Willie Mays also got sent to the Mets, Juan Marichal ended his career with the Dodgers, and Willie McCovey got exiled to the Padres, but all three moves came as their careers neared the end. 

Likewise, the Giants acquired Duke Snider, Warren Spahn, and Randy Johnson as they wound down incredible careers. Famously, Jackie Robinson was traded from the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Giants, but chose not to report.

Orlando Cepeda, however, still in his prime in 1966, won the National League Comeback Player of the Year Award that season while hitting .303.

N.L. rookie of the year in his first S.F. Giants’ season and long-time fan favorite, Cepeda did even better the next year. The Baby Bull won the National League MVP in 1967, the second National League player, after Carl Hubbell, to win the award unanimously. He led Sadecki’s former team, the Cardinals, to a World Series triumph, a feat my friends and I would have died to see our Giants achieve. The Giants finished second every year from 1965 to 1969.

Cepeda for Sadecki? A twenty-game winner for the 1964 Cardinals’ World Series winners, the new Giant lefty finished 1966, after the May trade, with a 3-7 record and 5.40 ERA as the Giants still came within a game and a half behind the pennant winning Dodgers. 

Sadecki did win twelve games each in ’67 and ’68, with ERAs under 3.00. His 18 losses in 1968, however, were the most losses in the majors during “the year of the pitcher,” and the most losses in any season in San Francisco Giants’ history.

Larry, Pete, and I, with Gil who recently passed away, didn’t need to wait until 1968 to conclude the Cepeda trade had stung our beloved Giants and that Ray Sadecki, a seemingly wonderful person, was the asp who had done it. We marched to protest that decision as I would later march to disavow the Vietnam war before enlisting in the Reserves after college.

San Francisco has always loved large public gatherings and parades. Vigilantes played to crowds as the embryonic American city dealt with its first of many booms, that one Gold Rush instigated.

My mom regaled me with stories about Market Street on VJ-Day, celebrating WW II’s ending and welcoming men, like my dad, who served in the 13th Jungle Air Force, back from the Pacific. Earlier in the 1960s, I vividly remember two huge gatherings, one which may have led to the other.

Father Patrick Peyton’s 1961 Rosary Rally, held in Golden Gate Park, drew an estimated 550,000 people. It remains the largest gathering in San Francisco history. No doubt, since my mom had to make me turn off my transistor radio Giants/Reds broadcast, I prayed that day that the Giants would win a pennant. 

My prayers were answered the next year. The Giants’ pennant-winning ’62 team included the player I emulated as a hitter, Harvey Kueen, himself recently traded from Cleveland. Kuenn previously had been exchanged for Rocky Colavito after the 1959 season, a unique trade of a batting champ for a home run champ. 

That trade stood out even in an era when Kansas City operated like this year’s A’s, trading away their best players, then almost exclusively to the Yankees. One 1957 transaction included 17 players traded between New York and its “farm team.” It wasn’t until 1972, when Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson traded wives, that a trade could rival the Colavito/Kueen swap.

When the Giants did win that 1962 pennant, Pete and I were among 50,000 fans who greeted the Giants at the airport after their ninth-inning, third-playoff-game comeback against the Dodgers.

Although we could only spy our team on a distant bus, we did see Giant announcers Russ Hodges and Lon Simmons in the terminal. Pete asked Simmons if we’d beat the Yankees in the World Series matchup. Lon replied, his wonderful baritone slurred a bit, “Hands down.” 

Course, the ultimate hand that mattered in game seven of that Fall Classic was Bobby Richardson’s, the hand that held the glove which speared Willie McCovey’s potential series-winning liner. 

Besides public gatherings, San Francisco has always loved parades, though there was no 1962 victory parade.

S.F. parades today honor Martin Luther King, Jr., Chinese New Year’s, St. Patrick, the Union Street Spring Event, the Cherry Blossom Festival, Cesar Chavez, Carnaval, Memorial Day, Gay Pride, Juneteenth, Italian Heritage, Chinatown’s Moon Festival. Two parades on the Bay – Fleet Week’s Parade of Ships and a Lighted Boat Parade – add to festivities. Additionally, numerous July 4th parades get staged in near suburbs.

1967 famously saw a parade of youth drawn to San Francisco’s summer of love in the Haight. Public marches protesting the war and championing civil rights during the decade also played out as parades of sorts during the decade. 

It was two other memorable parades at the time though which affected me most personally. 

I grew up a block off Castro Street, then called the Eureka Valley. For months before Halloween, I would watch across the street as a huge paper mâché dinosaur took shape in the garage of my neighbor, who owned Cliff’s Variety Store on Castro Street. The dinosaur would lead costumed kids trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. That parade morphed into the Halloween celebration that solidified the Castro’s reputation as a gay Mecca.

An early summer Shriner’s Parade was an annual highlight for big crowds. Larry, Gil, Pete, and I loved the exotic hats and outfits, not realizing costumes and parade participants misappropriated a culture. 

Not knowing anything about freemasonry or the Shriner’s 1870’s birth as a fraternal organization, we knew about the group solely through the Shriner’s yearly East-West classic at Kezar Stadium, a short bus ride from my house and the home of the 49ers and my high school football team. With few significant bowl games during the early ‘60s, the best graduating collegiate stars played in S.F.’s all-star game, with funds raised from the game and parade earmarked for hospitals. 

In the summer of ’66, just graduated from high school, the four of us postured as an unofficial, decidedly tongue-in-cheek, Shriner’s Parade entrant. 

We dressed to fit in, if colorful mismatched clothing served the part. We bought cheap cloth fezzes from a salesman’s cart on Market Street near the Ferry Building

Our sign was our most meticulously crafted prop. We took turns holding it in front of us as we found a spot right after roller skating clowns, a gorilla in a cage (a human in a costume) wearing his own fez, and a legitimate band and right before old-fashioned uniform-wearing gendarmes, riding in circles on what looked like motorized child tricycles. A snippet of that year’s parade on YouTube verifies crowds ten deep on Market Street watched participants.

Our sign drew much applause. It read, “Ray Sadecki for Imperial Potentate.” We marched for miles before peeling off, with huge smiles on our faces and cheers echoing behind us.

We chortled over our performance the next day. Larry shared the news that our stunt had been applauded in the most San Francisco-of-all chronicles, Herb Caen’s daily newspaper column, called “a continuous love letter to the city of San Francisco.” Caen’s Chronicle column ran for nearly sixty years, San Francisco’s Bible. Caen, who won a special Pulitzer Prize calling him the "voice and conscience" of San Francisco, was, in the context of the Shriners, S.F.’s Scheherazade. Fittingly, he published a collection of essays about the city titled Baghdad by the Bay.

“We made it,” Gil proclaimed, hearing about the doffing of Caen’s proverbial hat to us as we fingered our fezzes, destined to get pushed into drawers as we readied ourselves for college or, in Pete’s case, M.P. school before his two-year stint umpiring in the California League after his discharge.

Ironically, in 1969 Orlando Cepeda got traded from the Cards to the Braves for Joe Torre, who would win an MVP award in 1971. And to complete the trifecta, Joe Torre got traded to the Mets in 1974 for RAY SADECKI, himself traded three more times in 1975.

The Giants did orchestrate positive trades during their 2010-14 World Series run besides adding Pat Burrell and Cody Ross, named 2010’s N.L. Championship Series MVP, off waivers during the first ever S.F. Series winning season. Key trade additions during the five-year run included Javier Lopez, Marco Scutaro, and Hunter Pence.

Especially after personally attending home World Series games in 1962 (game six), 1989 (game four after the earthquake), and 2002 (two home games, and the seventh game in Anaheim after an overnight drive), series which all ended in defeat, 2010 was bucket-list special. 

And, what better than the quintessential San Francisco parade to celebrate? Pete, Larry, Gil, and I enjoyed another fulfilling parade experience. 

The principal of the high school I attended in 1962 when my father wrote three straight days of excuse-notes, necessitated by a rain delay before game six, to get me dismissed in time to bus to Candlestick, I made an announcement to my 1300 students that almost evoked tears: “Students, today’s early dismissal is to enable those who choose to attend the parade finishing near campus the opportunity. Enjoy yourselves, mind the crowd, cherish the memory, and go, Giants!”

I didn’t carry a “Ray Sadecki for Imperial Potentate” sign when I blended into 2010’s parade assemblage with students and teachers on McCallister Street, but I felt as if I had been named Imperial Potentate.

DR. Ken Hogarty, who lives in SF’s East Bay with his wife Sally, retired after a 46-year career as a high school teacher and principal. Since, he has had stories, essays, memoirs, and comedy pieces published in Underwood, Sport Literate, Sequoia Speaks, Hobart's, Woman’s Way, Purpled Nails, the S.F. Chronicle, McQueen’s, Bridge Eight, Points in Case, Robot Butt, Glossy News, The Satirist, and Good Old Days. He was a semi-finalist in 2021's Earl Weaver baseball writing contest for Cobalt. His novel, ‘Recruiting Blue Chip Prospects’, will launch Nov. 7th from Atmosphere Press.