That "No no Nanette" had some serious WAR working though, gotta admit !

Posted by zubinsum on 12/7/2015 10:18:00 PM (view original):
Worst trades by WAR

http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/worst-trades-ever-baseball/


Even at the time the Bagwell trade was a bit of a head scratcher. That one is probably the worst.

Dumb methodology, frankly.  You shouldn't be judging trades based on additional transactions.  Would the Bagwell trade REALLY have been less lopsided if he'd signed somewhere else when he reached free agency?  Was the Schilling et al for Glenn Davis trade really any less lopsided because Schilling was traded again?  And seriously, because it wasn't for a player, we ignore the 140+ WAR that Ruth compiled for New York for $100,000?

Hence my "No no Nanette" reference dahsdebater - that was the Broadway play the Red Sox owner wanted to produce and for which he sold Ruth to get the money. Not so much WAR in a Broadway play. Not even Les Miserables !

But as someone who prefers Bill James' Win Shares system for all sorts of methodological reasons - not so many Win Shares for Nanette either ! - let's all remember this: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZI2aLQ9Sw&list=RDztZI2aLQ9Sw

Posted by dahsdebater on 12/8/2015 5:37:00 PM (view original):

Posted by zubinsum on 12/7/2015 10:18:00 PM (view original):
Worst trades by WAR

http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/worst-trades-ever-baseball/


Even at the time the Bagwell trade was a bit of a head scratcher. That one is probably the worst.

Dumb methodology, frankly.  You shouldn't be judging trades based on additional transactions.  Would the Bagwell trade REALLY have been less lopsided if he'd signed somewhere else when he reached free agency?  Was the Schilling et al for Glenn Davis trade really any less lopsided because Schilling was traded again?  And seriously, because it wasn't for a player, we ignore the 140+ WAR that Ruth compiled for New York for $100,000?

Evaluating trades by WAR in hindsight isn't the end-all of analysis, nor did the author claim it to be so. It does provide a quantitative data point that is interesting if not useful.

The No No Nanette thing has been pretty thoroughly debunked over time...Wikipedia sets some of the record straight, but there are other sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Frazee

It's particulary interesting to read about Ban Johnson's dealings with Yankee ownership...he basically promised to create a dynasty in New York and set about political machinations behind the scenes to make it happen. Frazee was given essentially no options for trading other than NY and Chicago...and Chicago wasn't willing to spend (see also Comiskey, Charles and the 1919 World Series)... There's a reason that basically every trade the Red Sox made across a 5 year period was with NY. It was Boston - not Babe Ruth - who created the Yankee dynasty. The Yankee dynasty of the early-mid 1920s was essentially a continuation of the Red Sox dynasty of the teens.

What Frazee did was far from unprecedented. Connie Mack had done much the same thing - trade away all his good players - a few years earlier, and would repeat that in the 1930s.

I'm also curious, and have never seen good sources for this...what was the contemporary reaction to the Ruth sale? What did the Boston and New York papers say? What did the Sporting News say? What did the annual baseball guides say? I have a sneaking suspicion that the deal, in its own time, was not seen as one-sided as it now obviously appears to be.

For my mind, the worst trade in baseball history, and it's not really close, is the one referenced in the very first post. Rusie for Mathewson. Rusie was 100% done. He had not pitched a major league in TWO YEARS at the time of the trade, and subsequently threw a grand total of 22 innings for Cincinnati, going 0-1 with a 8.59 ERA. That's worth far far less than the value of what Frazee received from the Yankees. Mathewson went on to win 373 games for the Giants, and become one of the 5-10 greatest pitchers in baseball history.

Rusie for Mathewson probably beats Fregosi for Nolan Ryan, but the same basic dynamic is at work in both those trades.

good point

Curt Blefary for Mike Cuellar (what were the Astros thinking in that era? They traded away Morgan, Mayberry, Staub, Cuellar...) was a bad trade for Houston.

The subsequent Blefary for Pepitone trade hardly is in the category of Mathewson - Rusie, but as a 9-year old Yankees fan whose favorite player was briefly Pepitone (um, it is 1969 and you are 9. What are your options for favorite player?), Blefary never hitting above .218 again - for the Yankees or the Athletics - did not make that trade any easier to accept.

The Astros had Pepi for half a season, he hit .250 with 14 homers - not easy playing half your games in the Astrodome, and then they traded HIM too, to Chicago (Wrigley is a nicer place for HRs) and he followed that pace for the rest of the season in 1970 and then hit .300 in 1971. After that he was done. But since the Yankees searched for 1B until they got Chris Chambliss 5 years later, and since they had very good pitching and even came in 2nd in 1970 with no offense whatsoever, having avoided that trade might have helped (having Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Harmon Killebrew would have helped them catch the Orioles in 1970 as well !!).

Here is who played at 1B for the NY Yankees, a spot once held for 2,130 games by Lou Gehrig, between 1970 and 1973:

an aging Felipe Alou
an aging Matty Alou
Ron Blomberg, who twice dropped the ball to ruin triple plays
John Ellis
Mike Hegan
Bill Sudakis
Pete Ward
Otto Velez
Frank Trepidino
Jerry Kenney (!!)
...
oh and Curt Blefary, the guy they traded their leading HR hitter in 1969 for to get.

wait..one more name - Danny Cater too.

And here the story takes a turn. Had the Yankees not traded Pepitone, and had Blefary not collapsed completely from drinking and just being crazy and hostile, they may never have realized that Cater could have been useful to play 1B. Had Cater not hit .301 in 1970 and a decent .276 in 1971, the Red Sox press might never have decided they needed to convince the team to trade for him by sending Sparky Lyle to NY (this is Bill Lee's account of what happened anyway), the trade that finally turned the storied franchise's fortune's back around (before Steinbrenner bought the team) almost getting them a division title in 1972.