Hot Stove Week

Today marks the beginning of what some call the most exciting season in baseball: Hot Stove Week. With Friday being the 31st of July - and, thus, the last day of the season that a trade can be made without having to deal with waivers - we can expect an inordinate amount of updates and speculation about who will be traded to whom and all of that fun stuff that makes MLB Trade Rumors go crazy.

As a tribute to the week - and in keeping with the tradition here at wezen-ball of looking at contemporary accounts whenever we can - I thought it might be fun to spend the next few days looking back at some of the most interesting and exciting trades of the past 20 years to see how well they worked out and how they were viewed at the time. Was the Harold Baines-for-Sammy Sosa-and-others trade really the terrible trade that President Bush made it out to be? Can we learn any lessons from the Randy Johnson-to-the-Astros trade of 1998? What about the Mark McGwire trade of 1997 or the Curt Schilling trade of 2000? With all the attention paid to the Roy Halladays of the world this year, or the Mark Teixeiras of the world from last year, the lookbacks should offer some helpful insight.

It should make for an interesting week. I'll be back later this morning with the first one.