It happens to every team. Some boneheaded general
manager engineers a trade
that makes no sense, and soon one team is reeling from disaster, and the
other team reaps the rewards.
June 18 marks Lou Brock's
birthday, and we immediately remembered his involvement in one of the most
one-sided transactions in baseball history. In 1964, the Chicago Cubs traded Brock
to the St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Ernie Broglio.
Brock went on to the Hall of Fame
after gathering more than 3,000 hits and 900 stolen bases for the Cards (winning
two World Series), while Broglio won just seven games for the Cubbies before
retiring.
But that trade was hardly the worst. There was the deal that sent Pedro Martinez (who has more than 200 wins and 3,000 strikeouts) from
the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Montreal Expos for Delino DeShields (who hit .241 before moving on).
All-time strikeout king Nolan Ryan
(5,714 Ks
and 324 wins) went from the New York Mets (with three
other players!) to the California Angels for shortstop Jim Fregosi
(who hit all of .233 before being sold to the Texas Rangers).
But the worst deal of all has to be Harry Frazee's 1920
sale of Babe Ruth
to the New York Yankees. While Ruth, who was already one of the game’s top
left-handed pitchers,
went on to blast more than 650 homers for the Yanks, the Sox began
almost a century of futility (the so-called "Curse
of the Bambino") until they finally
exorcised that curse in 2004.
Had Ruth never left Beantown,
baseball fans would have been spared two blights: one was the domination
the Yankees had over baseball during the 20th century. The other was the whining Red Sox fans exhibited over their
hard luck. That alone damns Frazee
to baseball ignominy.
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