Before the era of free agency, general managers had to evaluate their team, their opponents teams, and individual players. They didn't get orders from the owner to sign a super star free agent that any seven-year-old in the stands could evaluate. Few were better at making trades than George Weiss.
Thirty one year old Aaron Robinson had an excellent season with the Yankees in 1946, batting .297 with 16 home runs and 64 RBIs in 100 games. He was a fine defensive catcher but he tailed off in 1947, batting .270 with only 5 home runs and 36 RBIs in 82 games. Weiss knew that he had a young player named Yogi Berra who played the outfield and was being groomed as the next Yankees' catcher, so Robinson was expendable. Weiss and the Yankees' scouts felt that Wight and Bradley were borderline major leaguers at best and they wanted Lopat, who had done well with the White Sox.
From 1948 to 1955 Lopat won 113 games for the Yankees while losing 59 for a winning percentage of .657. He started 202 games and completed 91 of them, which was good in the late 1940s and early 1950s but which would be amazing today. Robinson did poorly for the White Sox but he was part of another of the great one sided trades in baseball history when the White Sox traded him to the Tigers for young left hander Billy Pierce, who became one of the finest pitchers in White Sox history. Wight drifted from team to team, never reaching his potential while Bradley appeared in only 9 games in his major league career.
It is fascinating how important complete games used to be. When Lopat was traded, sportswriter Roscoe McGowan wrote that in 1947, when he still with the White Sox, "Lopat needed relief only nine times...in 31 starts, thus gaining a second place tie with Early Wynn of Washington. Hal Newhouser, Detroit southpaw, was tops with 24 but was driven to cover a dozen times."
Completing games was a vital part of evaluating pitchers because pitchers were taken out of games only when they lost their effectiveness. The fact that Hal Newhouser didn't complete twelve of his starts was a huge negative. Lopat was not a big, strong man but he had the stamina to complete what he started. He was nicknamed "The Junkman" because he changed speeds off his fast ball, which was not especially fast. He rarely gave the batter a good pitch to hit and Yankees manager Casey Stengel called Lopat "The Swindler" because of the different ways he fooled the hitters.
