The Tragedy and Farce of Luka Dončić’s Trade.
The Dallas Mavericks handed their leading man to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now everyone is trying to make it make sense.
There have been worse trades than the one that sent Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis, along with Max Christie and a future first-round draft pick. Here’s one: in 1919, Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, for a hundred thousand dollars.
Frazee had his reasons. For starters, Ruth was a selfish bum. As Glenn Stout wrote in his book “The Selling of the Babe,” “Finding Ruth after a bender—usually sleeping it off somewhere, often in the back alley behind a brothel, his pockets turned inside out—became something of a pastime for his teammates.” Ruth skipped games when he felt like it, and had a habit of gambling away his paychecks.
The team tolerated his bad behavior for a while, and not only because he was charming. As a young pitcher, he won sixty-seven games in his first three seasons and set a scoreless-innings record during the 1918 World Series. Plus, he could hit. With his uppercut swing, a rarity at the time, he delighted fans by smashing home runs, though his teammates, who looked to slap the ball for singles instead of walloping it out of the park, thought his technique was suspect. But Ruth wanted to focus on hitting; the Red Sox wanted him to pitch.
Ruth knew how to torment the team to get what he wanted, and, anyway, Frazee, who was also a theatre producer, was broke. So he shipped Ruth to the Yankees, who’d never won a playoff series. Legend has it that Frazee used the money to put on the 1925 Broadway musical “No, No, Nanette.”
