Neyer: Bo Porter is latest manager to pull the ‘Waxahachie Swap’

From SABR member Rob Neyer at FoxSports.com on June 11, 2014:

Monday night, basically my favorite thing happened. My favorite thing in baseball, anyway. …

[It’s] called the Waxahachie Swap, and it happened Monday night in Phoenix when Astros manager Bo Porter sent left-handed relief pitcher Tony Sipp from the mound to right field, then brought him back to the mound after one batter.

I first became interested in this movie about five years ago, when Lou Piniella, then managing the Cubs, pulled the Swap in a game against the Cardinals. That led me to a fair amount of research, at the end of which I determined that a) while the Swap had been done back in the 19th century, there weren’t any extant examples between 1909 and 1950. In 1951, though, rookie White Sox manager Paul Richards did it. And Richards would do it three more times; it was one of the things that made Richards famous.

Alvin Dark, who managed in the 1960s, mostly, also did it four times.  Whitey Herzog, who managed in 1980s, mostly, did it four times. In 2009, I found only 21 Waxahachie Swaps, and these three managers accounted for a dozen of them.

Read the full article here: http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/bo-porter-managers-astros-tony-sipp-waxahachie-swap-paul-richards-061114



Originally published: June 11, 2014. Last Updated: June 11, 2014.