Every Team Has Its Babe Ruth. The Mets Have Two.
In 1971 the Mets traded a 24-year-old fireballer named Nolan Ryan for a third baseman they needed. In 2021 they traded a 19-year-old named Pete Crow-Armstrong for a shortstop they needed for two months. Ryan made the Hall of Fame. Crow-Armstrong is already a 30-30 All-Star. This is how a baseball team breaks its own heart, and it is always the same trade.
The question: why does every baseball team have exactly one trade it cannot talk about?
The answer. Because they are all the same trade. A team with a hole to fill now gives up an uncertain future for a certain present. The Mets did it twice — Nolan Ryan in 1971, Pete Crow-Armstrong in 2021 — fifty years apart, for the same reason.
Why that is surprising. These look like blunders. Mostly they are the sane move: almost every unknown 19-year-old stays unknown. The error is not stupidity. It is a bias so ordinary that it has a name in finance too.
What you get from it: a way to spot the same mistake when it is not about baseball.
The trade that made the phrase famous is the oldest one. In January 1920 the Boston Red Sox needed cash, so they sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 and a loan against Fenway Park.
Boston would not win another World Series for 86 years; the Yankees would win 27. You already know which of those two facts gets repeated.
Every team since has filed its own version of that receipt somewhere. Notice how nearly all of them are the same trade, made for the same reason.
The shape of the mistake
Watch what the Mets did, twice, half a century apart.
In 1971 they had a hole at third base and a 24-year-old pitcher who walked too many hitters. So they shipped the pitcher — Nolan Ryan — to California for a proven veteran, Jim Fregosi, who could plug the hole now. Fregosi gave them a season and a half of nothing. Ryan struck out more men than anyone who has ever lived.
In 2021 they had a hole at shortstop and a 19-year-old outfielder nobody had heard of. So they shipped the outfielder — Pete Crow-Armstrong — to Chicago for a proven veteran, Javier Báez, who could plug the hole now. Báez played 50 games and left. Crow-Armstrong became one of the best young players in the sport.
That is the shape, and it almost never varies; a team with an urgent need now trades an uncertain future for a certain present.
The kid might be great or might be nothing; the veteran is a known quantity who helps this week. Next to a pennant race, the sure thing wins every argument in the room, and we would have voted with them.
Only years later, when the kid turns into Cooperstown and the veteran turns into a line in an old box score, do you see the trade for what it always was.
Every team’s receipt
Pull the drawer open and the same slip is in every one of them — a future Hall of Famer, handed over for a stopgap or a rental or a sack of cash.
| The one that got away | Traded by → to | Year | For… |
|---|---|---|---|
| Babe Ruth | Red Sox → Yankees | 1920 | $100,000 and a loan. Eighty-six years of winter. |
| Lou Brock | Cubs → Cardinals | 1964 | Ernie Broglio, whose arm was already going. |
| Nolan Ryan | Mets → Angels | 1971 | Jim Fregosi, to play third base. He didn’t. |
| John Smoltz | Tigers → Braves | 1987 | Doyle Alexander — who, to be fair, won them a division. |
| Jeff Bagwell | Red Sox → Astros | 1990 | Larry Andersen, for the season’s final month. |
| Pete Crow-Armstrong | Mets → Cubs | 2021 | Javier Báez, for fifty games. |
The Smoltz line is the honest one to sit with, because Detroit’s rental actually worked. Doyle Alexander went 9-0 and pitched the Tigers to a division title. They got exactly what they traded for.
It just cost them twenty years of a Hall of Fame arm.
That is the trap at its purest. The deal can succeed on its own terms and still be a disaster, because the thing you gave away kept growing long after the thing you got was gone.
A team with a hole to fill is offered a sure thing for a maybe. The sure thing wins the argument every time — and every so often the maybe was Babe Ruth.
The ColumnistWhat to take home: in fairness to the general managers
It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a parade of idiots. I have made the same call in my head watching these deals, and so have you.
Teams make thousands of these trades, and the vast majority of 19-year-olds nobody has heard of remain, forever, 19-year-olds nobody has heard of. We remember Ryan and Bagwell and Crow-Armstrong because they are the rare ones who hit — the survivors of an enormous graveyard of prospectsi we never think to count.
Trading an unproven kid for a proven veteran is usually the sane move; it usually works out fine.
But that is why the pattern is worth naming, because the error it hides is real and it is not only baseball’s.
We almost always overvalue the certain, present, visible thing against the uncertain, distant, invisible one. A veteran over a prospect. A bird in the hand over two in the bush. This quarter’s earnings over next decade’s.
So the young player is worth more than he looks, not less; what you are trading is the whole fan of things he might become, and a few of those end at Cooperstown.
Baseball feels this harder than football or basketball. Its players are controlled for years and take years to ripen, so the gap between your trade and your regret is long enough to become a legend.
The Red Sox needed 86 years to stop paying for one afternoon’s cash problem. Somewhere in every team’s drawer is the receipt. The Mets, bless them, kept two.
Notes & sources
Trades and outcomes are on the record. The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in a deal agreed in late December 1919 and announced January 5, 1920, for $100,000 in installments plus a $300,000 loan secured by Fenway Park. The Mets traded Nolan Ryan (with three others) to the California Angels for Jim Fregosi on December 10, 1971; Fregosi lasted a season and a half in New York. The Cubs traded Lou Brock to the Cardinals for Ernie Broglio on June 15, 1964. The Tigers acquired Doyle Alexander from the Braves for John Smoltz on August 12, 1987; Alexander went 9–0 and helped Detroit win the AL East. The Red Sox sent Jeff Bagwell to the Astros for Larry Andersen on August 30, 1990. The Cubs acquired Pete Crow-Armstrong from the Mets for Javier Báez and Trevor Williams on July 30, 2021; Crow-Armstrong became an All-Star with a 30-homer, 30-steal season.
Career value figures are Wins Above Replacement (Baseball-Reference), rounded to two significant figures: Ryan and Bagwell about 80 each, Smoltz about 66, Brock about 45. Crow-Armstrong, 24 years old, is in the single digits and rising. Ruth’s career WAR (well above 100, split between pitching and hitting) is off the scale of the chart and omitted from it. Ruth, Ryan, Brock, Smoltz and Bagwell are all in the Hall of Fame.
The reasoning caution — that we judge these deals only by the prospects who became stars, not the many who didn’t — is the primer on Survivorship Bias (Concept No. 4). The archive is at thesportspage.net.
Baseball is ranked by championship leverage: we simulate the rest of the season 60,000 times, then split those seasons by who won each of today's games. College football cannot be simulated that way, so it is ranked by how close to a coin flip the ratings make it — a lopsided game teaches you nothing. Tomorrow this block reports what happened to today's pick.
