This is not a list of the worst trades in sports history: it's a list of bad trades made during the lifetime of the author or rather from when the author first discovered a sport. Technically, Babe Ruth shouldn't be on the list as his contract was _sold_ to the Yankees. He was not traded for another player. The same goes for Shoeless Joe Jackson as the White Sox bought his contract from Cleveland. And Wayne Gretzky to the LA Kings? His former team, the Edmonton Oilers, won the Stanley Cup without him (proving Mark Messier was the real glue that held the Oilers together) but Gretzky took the Kings to their first Stanley Cup final, This was sIgnificant as they were the _last_ of the 1967 expansions teams even to get to the final. There seems little doubt to me that without Gretzky the Kings franchise would have died or been moved to Saskatoon and there would be no NHL teams in southern California. And, yeah, the Kings would not have won the Cup in 2012 if Gretzky hadn't been there first.
So always ignore any headline that speak about the greatest or worst anything in sports history because the author usually has no idea what real sports history is.
