NY Mets trade retrospective: How Pat Zachry to the LA Dodgers became something else

On December 28, 1982, the New York Mets traded Pat Zachry to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The 1976 NL Rookie of the Year’s biggest claim to fame was being one of the pieces acquired by the Mets in the far more infamous deal with the Cincinnati Reds that sent Tom Seaver to Ohio.

Zachry pitched well at times for the Mets, never reaching anything near Seaver status. The decision to move on wasn’t the greatest considering he would have two pretty good years as a reliever for the Dodgers. It looks especially worse when we follow his trade train which involved more moving parts than an actual locomotive.

Although traded for Jorge Orta, a veteran outfielder, the Zachry deal ended up becoming something entirely different as we look back at the different bodies moved around.

Following the Mets trade of Pat Zachry and what it eventually became

Orta never played a single game for the Mets, dealt in February to the Toronto Blue Jays for Steve Senteney. If the names doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because Senteney played only 11 major league games. All of them came with the Blue Jays in 1982.

The Mets weren’t done building train cars for the Seaver trade. Senteney was dealt mid-1983 to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Arthur Ray (a lifetime minor leaguer) and Junior Ortiz.

Ortiz was a young catcher for the Pirates who’d played 108 games for the Mets in 1983 and 1984. He didn’t hit a single home run in any of his 288 plate appearances. A negative WAR player, the Zachry trade train ends with him. That’s because after the 1984 season, the Pirates reclaimed him from the Mets in the Rule 5 Draft. The rules were different back then, embarassingly so to help explain how the Mets traded away Zachry for what essentially came to be a backup catcher for just over 100 games. With that transaction, the Zachry trade results become further null.

Zachry’s career didn’t revitalize in Los Angeles or with the Philadelphia Phillies in his final season in 1985. However, for them to turn him into a light-hitting backup catcher who was gone before he did anything noteworthy seems like an error in judgment. Ortiz turned out to be a stereotypical journeyman catcher who’d hit well over .300 in some seasons and barely over .200 in others. He would have been nice to have behind Gary Carter in the latter part of the 1980s. There are no tears to shed about how the trade resulted, but it is curious how in such a short span it became something completely different.