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Bo Belinsky died a few months ago.

The Templeton trade was more a deal to get rid of a troublemaking player than one to get a better player.

Templeton was a 21 year old great fielding shortstop, switch hitter, who hit .320 or so in 1977 or 78 (I don't remember which was his rookie year). That was when .320 meant something. That'd be at least .350 today.

But he became a head case and one day flipped off the crowd who booed him.

Whitey Herzog wasn't about to keep him after that. It was like the Keith Hernandez for Neil Allen trade. Allen had a few good games for St Louis, but Herzog wasn't going to keep a drug addict.

Ozzie turned out better than anyone ever could have guessed. But, then again, it was Herzog and if anyone knew, it would have been him.

The Templeton trade was more a deal to get rid of a troublemaking player than one to get a better player.

Half right. The White Rat assuredly did have his eye on the Wiz-to-be and, in fact, courted the living daylights out of Ozzie after the deal was made, hoping to get him signed long-term to the Redbirds.

Keith Hernandez wasn't the only drug user Herzog unloaded (though the real reason may also have been Hernandez, at the time, had a tendency to loaf a bit on the field if things weren't going well for him). More notoriously, when managing the Kansas City Royals, Herzog dumped John Mayberry, the popular slugger, after the White Rat caught Mayberry in no shape to play a World Series game - because Mayberry was nursing a nasty hangover from a previous night's libations of booze and coke. The trade shocked Royals fans and writers who covered the team, Herzog got roasted in the press, got fired not long afterward as the Royals' manager, then they brought in the "nicer" guy and the druggers had a field day in the Royals' clubhouse. Whatever you think of the War On Drugs, there's nothing at all wrong with Business X deciding its own drug policies. Whitey Herzog was actually as Christy Mathewson had been to the old gambling scandals: they were the only men in baseball willing to stand up to the problems before they got out of hand. (The flip side, of course, was that Herzog would go to bat for a drug-abusing or booze-abusing player if the player was determined enough to kick and leave it behind - which was one key reason Darrell Porter became a Cardinal in 1982.)