Larry Bowa says he engineered the trade that sent him from the Phillies to the Cubs and brought Ryne Sandberg along with him, a move that later turned into one of the defining transactions in Cubs history. Bowa was back in that same baseball orbit on July 12, 2026, managing the American League team at the 2026 MLB Futures Game at Citizens Bank Park.
The story has stayed alive because Sandberg was no afterthought once the deal was done. He was a little known second baseman when he arrived, but by 1984 he and Bowa were the keystone of a Cubs team that reached the playoffs for the first time since 1945. Sandberg won the NL MVP that season, and later was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005.
Bowa still tells the joke the same way. “I always said that joke. Every time I saw Ryno I told him, ‘Don’t forget, you were the throw-in in that trade,’” he said, adding that Sandberg “laughed all the time.” It is the kind of line that only works because the trade’s long view became impossible to ignore: Ivan DeJesus went to Philadelphia on Jan. 27, 1982, and the deal sent back a player who would become one of the faces of the Cubs.
That long view was sharper for Bowa after Sandberg died in 2025 after advanced prostate cancer. Bowa attended his funeral on Aug. 22, 2025, at Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Chicago, and said he had talked to Sandberg two weeks before his death, when Sandberg told him he had played nine holes of golf. “He never quit,” Bowa said. The line fits the way Bowa still talks about him: as a player who arrived with little notice and left behind a much larger legacy than the trade, or the joke, seemed to promise at the start.
For Bowa, the larger lesson is simple enough to fit in a sentence and hard enough to prove over time: when good players are in the deal, everybody remembers it. That is why the 1982 trade still matters now, and why Sandberg remains the name that finished the joke.
