Bagwell is the second-biggest steal in the history of major league trades.
To quell the age-old arguments of which were the most onesided, you have to go to WAR
Twenty-seven years ago, the Astros landed Red Sox farmhand Jeff Bagwell in a deadline deal that would go down as one of the great trades in baseball history (depending, at least, on which team you were). But how should the Astros’ acquistion of Bagwell, a 2017 Hall of Fame inductee, be gauged against other lopsided swaps?
Wins Above Replacement, pertinent to hitters and pitchers, offers an acceptable means of measurement. By comparing the WAR each team ultimately got out of the player(s) involved in a trade, it’s easy to assess and rank the all-time steals.
In the case of the Astros-Red Sox deal, for example, the Astros got out of Bagwell 79.6 wins above the average replacement player over the course of his 15-year career. Boston got 0.9 wins above replacement from Andersen over his two months as a rental. That makes for a WAR differential of 78.7, which cements the trade’s status among the game’s most larcenous exchanges.
The WAR figures of all players must be taken into account in multi-player deals. In the methodology used (see the Astros’ worst trade), the top player receives the maximum difference that can be attributed to him. If a team totaled a negative WAR return in a deal, the top player does not receive WAR credit above that which he earned.
Sales of players, such as Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees, were not considered. After all, $100,000 doesn’t lend itself to a WAR measurement. But in light of Ruth’s 142.7 WAR over his 15 years in New York, it’s easily the greatest theft among all player transactions in baseball history.
So was Bagwell-forAndersen the best (or worst, if you’re Boston) trade of all time? Well, there was one that topped it.