With the Winter Meetings upon us, and with the ever-present possibility that your favorite team may make a steal of a deal and acquire a star for, figuratively, a Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-like cow with little worth; or, conversely, execute a terrible trade, it’s time to look back at just a few, hand-picked (almost randomly so, and not meant to be the ultimate) lopsided trades of the previous century. Today’s story focuses on just one of those moves with more to come later this week.
Maybe general managers who now execute deals regress to their childhood at times, returning to the days when swapping baseball cards was fun, but making a major league trade has many risks. When the Cincinnati Reds made the December 15, 1900 exchange which send Christy Mathewson to the New York Giants for Amos Rusie, it was a disaster. It was a steal ranking along the proportions of the sale of Manhattan Island for virtually nothing.
Mathewson went on to win 30+ games four times with a high of 37 in 1908, one of the four times he led his league in wins. He also posted invisible ERAs such as his 1.14 in 1909, one of five seasons in which he led the NL in that department. He topped the league in strikeouts five times and in shutouts on four occasions. In 1909 his record of 25-6 translated to a league-leading WL% of a staggering .806.
In all, Matty would win an astronomical 373 games, post a career ERA of 2.13, and stun the baseball world in the 1905 World Series when he won three games, all on shutouts. He gave up 13 hits over those 27 innings, fewer than one hit per two IP, and he fanned 18 while giving up just one walk thanks to his uncanny control.
His 373 wins still stand third all-time, his ERA is ninth best ever, and his 2,507 strikeouts is the 30th loftiest total ever. He’s #6 based on his ratio of 1.058 walks plus hits per IP, he has the fifth best stat ever (2.26) for lifetime fielding independent pitching, and he ranks third best ever for shutouts thrown (79).
He received 90.7% of the votes cast in 1936 to become a charter member of the Hall of Fame along with fellow legends Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and Walter Johnson.
More from MLB History
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 5 MLB players who are human cheat codes for Immaculate Grid
- Good MLB players in different uniforms: A look at a random year and two random teams
- Sticky fingers: The pine tar incident, New York Yankees, Kansas City Royals and Gaylord Perry
- Chicago Cubs scoring 36 runs in two games? That’s nothing compared to this historic mark
Make no mistake, though, Rusie, “The Hossier Thunderbolt,” was a huge star as well, one who owned 246 big league wins prior to the trade. The problem is that after the trade he won exactly zero more contests. He went 0-1 in three games in 1901 before his career was over. Rusie was 30-years-old that season and he had, from 1889, in just his second pro season, through 1898, the last season he pitched before joining the Reds (he didn’t pitch in the majors in 1899 or 1900), won these totals: 29, 33, 32, 33, a league-leading 36, 23, 28, and 20. Yes, it was a much different era than the modern days (for example, Rusie averaged more than 500 innings per season from 1890-1894), but, again, he was a star— a Hall of Famer, in fact.
So Rusie, at the end of his career, is traded for a 20-year-old Mathewson who had just one year in the majors under his belt. In an odd coincidence, Rusie, as mentioned, went 0-3 after the deal was consummated, while Mathewson had gone 0-3 before the trade. Yet the unproven Matty achieved so much, and Rusie so little after the swap, the trade ranks among the worst ever in baseball to this day.
In my next article, we examine the other one-sided, terrible trades which made my list.