What if the Phillies had been able to avoid the 1964 collapse by making a trade seven years earlier?

Editor’s note: We don’t know when baseball will begin in 2020 or if a season will even be played. The Phillies should have started the season on March 26. Instead, we’re left wondering how Joe Girardi would have impacted this team or how Zack Wheeler’s fastball would have looked or how many home runs Bryce Harper could have hit. All we have are what-ifs. So during the shutdown, we’ll take a look at some what-ifs that could have changed the course of Phillies history.

To trace the origin of the 1964 Phillies collapse, one often points to the sixth inning of the season’s 151st game. The Phillies led the National League by 6½ games with 12 to play when Cincinnati rookie Chico Ruiz stole home with two outs at Connie Mack Stadium, providing the only run in a 1-0 Phillies defeat and starting a two-week stretch that would forever scar a generation of Philadelphians.

Ruiz’s steal, which his own manager lambasted afterward because future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson was batting, propelled the Phillies into a 10-game losing streak and dropped them from first place to third. Their magical summer — Richie Allen’s rookie year, Jim Bunning’s perfect game on Father’s Day, Johnny Callison’s All-Star walk-off homer — became a painful memory.

But what if the Phillies had been able to avoid that epic collapse in 1964 by finalizing a trade in 1957 that was all but agreed upon? What if the player who powered the Cardinals past the Phillies had been playing in Philadelphia instead? It almost happened.

In 1957, Phillies general manager Roy Hamey thought he had a trade finished with the Cardinals and their wheeling-and-dealing GM, Frank “Trader” Lane. The Phillies would send center fielder Richie Ashburn and left-hander Harvey Haddix to St. Louis in exchange for third baseman Ken Boyer, who had been an All-Star in 1956 at the age of 25 but whose stats had declined in ’57.

A year earlier, Hamey and Lane had agreed to a superstar swap of Robin Roberts for Stan Musial that was halted at the final moment by Cardinals owner Gussie Busch, who told Lane that Musial was too popular to be moved.

The trade of Ashburn and Haddix for Boyer would not get the attention of Busch. But first, Lane tried to negotiate a contract extension that offseason with Busch, and the beer magnate replied with a telegram telling Lane to kiss his rear end.

Aware of where he stood in the organization, Lane left for Cleveland and left his deal with the Phillies to be approved by incoming general manager Bing Devine, who had been Lane’s assistant. The nearly completed deal was dead.

“When I spoke to [Hamey], I told him I was not interested in making that deal,” Devine told the Daily News’ Bernard Fernandez in 1995. “I thought Boyer was developing, that he’d be a key man in our organizational growth for years to come. That was the end of it.”

After yet another trade fell through with St. Louis, the Phillies traded Haddix to Cincinnati, and Ashburn played two more seasons with the Phillies before finishing his career with the Cubs and Mets. Hamey tried again in 1958 to land Boyer, but he never came as close as he did with “Trader" Lane.

“I told my wife that if I’d been the Cardinals, I’d have made the deal, the one with Philadelphia for Richie Ashburn and Harvey Haddix,” Boyer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in December 1957, aware of how close that deal came to happening.

Hamey’s disappointment in the winter of 1957 was no match for the pain Philadelphia felt seven years later when Boyer led the Cardinals to the pennant. The Cardinals erased a 6½-game deficit, broke the Phillies’ spirits by handing them the final three losses of that 10-game losing streak, and Boyer was named the National League MVP.

The Phillies ended the season with two wins in Cincinnati to finish tied for second place. Ashburn, who played two more seasons for the Phillies after nearly being traded, was a team broadcaster in 1964, and Haddix spent the season in Baltimore’s bullpen before retiring a year later.

Boyer posted a .903 OPS in September of ’64 and the Cardinals went 21-8 while the Phillies finished 12-19. All summer, the pennant seemed destined for Philadelphia. But the Cardinals clinched it behind the player they nearly traded away.

Remove Boyer from the Cardinals lineup and the one-game difference in the standings could have been negated. He led the team that season in Wins Above Replacement (6.1) and led the majors in RBIs (119) while hitting .295 with an .854 OPS. He had five hits for the Cardinals in their late September sweep of the Phillies, the one that sealed the collapse. The Cardinals won 93 games that season, which would have been difficult to do without Boyer.

“The fact that I didn’t want to make the deal wasn’t because I didn’t want Richie Ashburn,” Devine said in 1995. “I loved Richie Ashburn as a ballplayer. I wish there was some way I could have both Boyer and Ashburn. But in a sense, I had grown up with Boyer. ... I just had a feeling about Kenny. I didn’t want to lose him.”

With Boyer, the Phillies could have aligned their infield in 1964 to have Boyer at third and Allen at first. They would have had a lineup with three of the National League’s top 10 batters in WAR that season — Boyer, Allen, and Callison. Perhaps that would have been enough to reach the World Series, which the Cardinals won in seven games over the Yankees thanks in part to Boyer’s seventh-inning home run in the clincher.

What if Boyer had been on the Phillies that September instead of the Cardinals? Maybe Ruiz still steals home and the Phillies still lose 10 straight games with Boyer in their lineup. Still, there’s a chance that the Cardinals might not have sped past the Phillies without Boyer — their most valuable player — batting cleanup.

The collapse of 1964 lingered long among Phillies fans, many of whom had purchased World Series tickets before believing they had been cursed by a 25-year-old infielder named Chico Ruiz.

Callison, who died in 2006, said: “When I think back to that season, the first thing I think of is the pain.” He finished second that season for the MVP award that Boyer won. And maybe his pain would have been relieved had the Phillies and Cardinals struck a deal seven years earlier.