Jaylen Brown trade far from alone in the annals of ‘obviously unpopular’ Boston deals, and other thoughts

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When he wasn’t delivering a Breslow-esque spin on “optionality,” Brad Stevens this week admitted dealing Jaylen Brown was “obviously unpopular.”

There’s a fun topic: unpopular trades in Boston sports history.

It’ll be years before we can fairly access the failure or success of sending Brown to the 76ers for Paul George and a bunch of picks. In the meantime let’s examine some Boston trades that were panned the minute they were announced.

This means we’re not talking about deals that barely moved the needle in the moment. This grouping would include Craig Breslow’s 2023-24 offseason trade of Chris Sale to the Braves for the immortal Vaughn Grissom. It turned out awful, but nobody carped about it when it went down. In December ’23, Sox fans were happy to say goodbye to Sale after many seasons lost to surgeries and broken bones.

It was the same when Sparky Lyle was traded to the Yankees for Danny Cater way back in 1972. Hub fans believed Cater would mash at Fenway Park (he didn’t). Almost 20 years later, when Lou Gorman sent Jeff Bagwell to the Astros for journeyman reliever Larry Andersen, Bagwell was a little-known minor league third baseman and the Sox were trying to make the playoffs. Only true seamheads objected when the deal went down. No one could have known Bagwell would wind up in Cooperstown.

So … those bad trades are not in our conversation today.

But here are some Boston trades that were “obviously unpopular” at the time they were announced.

Ever the clubhouse leaders in local sports controversies, the Sox pulled off the capo di tutti capi of provocative deals when carpetbagger owner Harry Frazee sent ace southpaw/home run king Babe Ruth to the Yankees for cash and a mortgage on Fenway Park in the dark baseball winter of 1919-20. Ruth-less Boston wept and the Yanks went on to scorch the baseball earth with the great Bambino.

“I was only 8 years old when we sold the Babe, but everybody had a broken heart,” Cambridge native and US House Speaker Tip O’Neill told me in 1989. ”Nobody ever in the history of this country was the idol that Babe Ruth was.”

One hundred years later, the Sox did it again with Mookie Betts.

There were plenty of other deals that pained fans like me in my baseball-loving, championship-starved, central Massachusetts childhood … batting champ Pete Runnels to Houston for Roman Mejias … Home run king Dick Stuart to the Phillies for Dennis Bennett … no-hit master and home-run-hitting-hurler Earl Wilson to the Tigers for Don Demeter … Nehru-jacket-wearing, sub-shop-owning, Ken “Hawk” Harrelson to the Indians for Sonny Siebert, Vicente Romo, and Joe Azcue … Tony Conigliaro to the Angels for Doug Griffin, Ken Tatum, and Jarvis Tatum … Bill Lee to the Expos for Stan Papi … Fred Lynn to the Angels …

And then there was Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs in 2004 when Theo Epstein boldly traded the the most-popular Red Sox player of the 21st century (at the time).

Two months after young Jeremy Jacobs purchased the Bruins in 1975, Harry Sinden traded the wildly popular Phil Esposito and Carol Vadnais to the Rangers for Jean Ratelle, Brad Park, and journeyman Joe Zanussi. It was a Black and Gold bombshell. Espo, the best pure scorer in franchise history, was a centerpiece of the Big Bad Bruins that won two Stanley Cups in the early 1970s. He’d just led the league in scoring for a sixth straight season when the deal was struck, and it took fans a long time to get over it.

Ultimately, Park and Ratelle delivered the goods, and it turned out to be a good deal for the Bruins.

“That trade saved us for about seven years,” Sinden said later.

Another one that shook B’s Nation was moving Jumbo Joe Thornton to the Sharks in 2005. Thornton promptly won the Hart and Art Ross trophies in the first of his 15 seasons with San Jose and skated all the way to the Hockey Hall of Fame. In return for Thornton, the Bruins got Wayne Primeau, Brad Stuart, and today’s head coach, Marco Sturm.

In 1969, while Clive Rush was coach, the Pats inexplicably traded fan-favorite Nick Buoniconti to the Dolphins for John Bramlett and Kim Hammond. Buoniconti went on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Ten years later, when All-Pro Leon Gray got into a contract dispute with the Sullivans and was traded to the Oilers, offensive linemate John Hannah said, “We just traded away our Super Bowl.”

Bill Belichick was master of the “spite trade” when he was winning Super Bowls: Richard Seymour to the Raiders; Logan Mankins to the Buccaneers; Jimmy Garoppolo to the 49ers. Sometimes Bill was mad at the player. Sometimes he was mad at the owner. In every case, fans sided with popular players and kept wearing jerseys of the departed to games at Gillette.

The Brown deal is extraordinary because the Celtics simply don’t trade stars in their primes. Red Auerbach did it with 28-year-old, six-time time All-Star center Ed Macauley in 1956, but that was to acquire the greatest winner in sports history: Bill Russell.

Red later traded a very popular Danny Ainge as the Larry Bird dynasty wound down in 1989. Ainge became Celtics general manager and in 2011 made a horrible midseason swap of Kendrick Perkins for passive-resistence-specialist Jeff Green and Nenad Krstic. The players hated the deal and it effectively blew Boston’s last chance at winning a second title with Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. Like the epic dumping of Brown, trading Perk was “obviously unpopular.”

Two final thoughts on the JB deal:

▪ Would this Celtic madness — ”We’ve become the Red Sox,” said one team official — be happening if the Grousbecks had found a way to sell the team to longtime loyal partner, Steve Pagliuca?

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▪ I don’t know about you, but I’ve had about enough of analytics geeks trying to convince us that Jaylen Brown is bad at basketball. Jeremias Engelmann must be a lot of fun at parties.

I’ll stick with the opinion of one Charles Barkley:

“The Sixers just got away with murder.”

▪ Quiz: 1. Name the last five players to win an American League batting title with an average of .370 or higher; 2: Name the four players to have 150 walks and 150 hits in the same season (answers below).

▪ Instant Karma’s Gonna Get You Dept.: The Globe’s estimable John Powers summed it up best after the USA’s 4-1 World Cup loss to Belgium on Monday night: “The Americans … weren’t good enough to go on. No presidential phone call ever was going to change that.”

True. And do you think anyone told the Commander in Chief that US player Folarin Balogun was born while his Nigerian parents were on a trip to New York? Balogun was raised in London. If Mr. Bigly had his way (birthright citizenship) a quarter century ago, Balogun would have been ineligible to play for the US national team.

Too bad the Prez couldn’t call Georgia’s secretary of state, looking to find a few more goals.

▪ So injured Roman Anthony has to go to Fort Myers because the Red Sox’ home clubhouse is overcrowded and interim manager Chad Tracy says the outfielder needs to get away from the “other stuff” that comes with recovering at Fenway Park? What “other stuff” is there?

▪ When do the Sox start asking themselves if all these finger/hand/wrist injuries suffered by their hitters are being caused or aggravated by a teaching method that’s all about bat speed and launch?

▪ Remember Dan Duquette talking about a Red Sox team that spent “more days in first place? That’s what I think of when I read the Sox think they are actually pretty good, and playoff worthy, because of their run differential and an “expected record” of over .500 when they entered the weekend five games under .500. Makes my skull implode.

▪ The still-reeling Yankees struck out 34 times (17 in each game) in back-to-back losses to the Rays during the week. Yogi Berra struck out 12 times in 656 plate appearances in 1950.

▪ Cohasset’s Dan Rice, a former pitcher at Brown and father of Yankees All Star Ben Rice, will pitch to his slugger son at Monday’s Home Run Derby in Philly.

▪ After the Lakers acquired center Walker Kessler from Utah, ESPN’s inimitable Stephen A. Smith said, “The Lakers think they going with a bunch of white dudes? Your three top players (Kessler, Luka Doncic, Austin Reaves) are white dudes? Really? This ain’t golf. This ain’t baseball. Hell, it ain’t even soccer. You ain’t going anywhere being led by three white dudes in today’s generation of basketball.”

The league today is over 70 percent Black, just as it was in 1985-86 when the Celtics won the championship and went 50-1 at home (including playoffs and Hartford) with a starting lineup that included Bird, Kevin McHale, and Ainge. The ’85-86 Celtics’ 12-man roster had eight white players and four Black players and was coached by K.C. Jones, who occasionally was asked to explain his team’s racial makeup and said, “The race issue was a non-issue. The only issue for me was winning … I thought it was strange that I was criticized or at least needled by Black people for keeping a white player in preference to one of their own.”

▪ Let the record show that AJ Dybansta is not the first St. Sebastian’s player to make it to the NBA. In 1969, Boston-born St. Seb’s grad Grady O’Malley, a star at Manhattan University‚ was the 19th-round pick of Atlanta. He played in 24 games for the Hawks in ’69-70, averaging 2.1 points.

▪ Nice of ESPN to give the late Eddie Andelman a shout-out during its coverage of Joey Chestnut’s latest competitive eating victory on July 4 at Coney Island. Andelman invented the “Hod Dog Safari,” which has raised millions in the battle against Cystic Fibrosis.

▪ Next Friday, Governor Maura Healy will officially rename the I-290 bridge in Worcester as “The Bob Cousy Pass” at a private dedication ceremony at Holy Cross. Cousy, who’ll turn 98 on Aug. 9, is expected to attend.

▪ RIP retired Herald high school sports reporter Danny Ventura, who died Tuesday at the age of 66. He was the best at what he did and loved by all. The MIAA should name a building after this man.

▪ Quiz answers: 1. Ichiro Suzuki (2004, .372), Garciaparra (2000, .372), George Brett (1980, .390), Rod Carew (1977, .388), Ted Williams (1957, .388); 2: Barry Bonds (1996, 2001), Mark McGwire (1998), Williams (1946, ’47, ’49), Ruth (1920, ’23).

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