Bill Conlin: Gotcha! moments at baseball's winter meetings

THE PHONE RANG around 3 a.m. Groggy and ill with flu, I rolled over and rasped, "Yeah?"

"Bill, the Baron here," Phillies media relations director Larry Shenk said. "Come to the Pope's suite as soon as you can. We've got a trade to announce."

A trade? If it couldn't wait until daylight, it had to be a big one.

"What kind of trade?"

"A big one," Shenk said. "We got Sutter . . . That's all I can say. The Pope will fill you in."

This was 1979 and baseball's winter meetings were in Toronto. I hadn't been out of the hotel since checking in Saturday with some kind of bug. Now, I was weak and feverish and would have to tackle a blockbuster trade story at 3 a.m. The Daily News was still an afternoon newspaper in '79, so it would have to be pounded out on deadline.

Owens was in his suite with minister of trade Hugh Alexander, manager Dallas Green, several scouts. They obviously had been celebrating the acquisition of baseball's premier reliever, Bruce Sutter, for some time. But what stars or future stars did it take to pry the 26-year-old master of the splitter away from the Cubs? Maybe Greg Luzinski, Ron Reed and Keith Moreland and a minor league throw-in or two?

"I called you guys up here because we have traded for Sutter," the GM began, then paused for effect. "Burke Suter. That's spelled S-u-t-e-r. Same pronunciation as Bruce Sutter."

A half-dozen ballpoints froze in midstroke. It was a great "Gotcha" and we folded our notepads and joined in the laughter. William Burke Suter was a 26-year-old righthander obtained from the Red Sox in a very minor transaction. He never got past Triple A.

Stuff like that happens when the baseball meetings are held in a cold town in the grip of hockey season where the Blue Jays had not yet caught on.

I checked my Weatherbug program and at 3:30 p.m. yesterday, as the cocktail-hour lobby vigils were getting under way, it was 26 degrees in Indianapolis, snow was flurrying and there was a wind advisory for gusts up to 50 mph. The trade winds were blowing at a much lower velocity on the next-to-last day of what used to be a wonderful assembly of baseball men before free agency turned it into a convention for megastar agents and elderly ballplayers looking for one final payday.