While the hot stove is cooling off as we near the start of spring training, there’s still the occasional murmur of a trade here and there that might swap present, future and/or former stars for one another. The merits of trades are instantly put through the ringer by bloggers, pundits and the casual fan, and many times live on in infamy as steals or robbery – depending on which side of the trade your team was on.

In Traded, Doug Decatur takes a sample of trades throughout history – those he describes as the most lopsided in baseball history, and promises to take you ‘inside’ them – a term that unfortunately never quite gets explained.

Decatur starts by explaining a bit about trades and that they are just one of several options a general manager has at his disposal to improve his team. This, of course, should be no surprise to the reader, but it made me wonder if Decatur was somehow weakening the quality of his topic by diminishing a bit. Trades certainly do not make or break teams on their own – they can have profound impacts of course, or they can be fairly innocent, and even if you make a trade there are many more variables that go into weighing it’s eventual merit.

Decatur asks a critical question early on – do lopsided trades matter or not? – which he answered with the words that were swirling around in my head at the time: in some cases. That cast an unfavorable light on the rest of the book for me — if the author is stating that the main topic of his book doesn’t always matter, then what is the purpose, other than to compose more lists and put more words on paper? Between this admission and his readiness to admit that trades are just part of the big equation, I was beginning to doubt that I’d really enjoy the book.

Decatur uses Bill James’ Win Shares totals to assign value to trades – a methodology that he explains nicely in the early pages of the book. Win shares is not a perfect method of course, and many trades have to be looked at in larger contexts to fully appreciate their value to a team.

After his introductory chapters, Decatur moves quickly into the list of the 306 most lopsided trades of the 20th century. Note that I said 20th century, as opposed to baseball history as the subtitle would indicate. Decatur explains in his introductory chapters that the book will only cover 1900-1999. Which leads me to my first eyebrow-raiser from the list: if this is the case, then why are the Washington Nationals mentioned in the book? Shouldn’t the Montreal Expos be noted instead?

My guess is that Decatur had to make a decision somewhere along the way as to how to refer to teams, and elected to refer to them by their current names. But the Texas Rangers didn’t make all the trades they’re given credit or fault for — some were made when they were the Washington Senators, and the list goes on. It’s certainly convenient to group things by franchise and lump everything under one team logo, but the real juicy meat of trade discussions comes from going into the why of a trade – what did the team need, what did they have to offer, and who was calling the shots at a particular point. To really go inside a trade, Decatur needed to go back to newspaper clippings, interviews and team makeups and figure out why a trade happened and what made each GM pull the trigger on a particular deal. This is where the promise of being taken inside the most lopsided trades in baseball history began to fall apart, and where I would venture to say quantity outweighed quality.

Following the list – which is headlined by the 1991 trade that sent Steve Finley, Curt Schilling and Pete Harnisch from the Orioles to the Astros in exchange for Glenn Davis, a net win of 609 future win shares – Decatur ventures into a very brief team-by-team history that spotlights the positive lopsided trades a team has made, the players acquired via a lopsided trade who appeared in postseason play, as well as the best trades in franchise history, the negative lopsided trades, and a quick paragraph about the GM who made the best trade in franchise history.

The final chapters contain some of the true highlights of the book – in particular, a pair of chapters about the 13 red flags of lopsided trades and how to apply those red flags to midseason trading deadline deals. While there is no magical formula provided to figure out whether or not a trade is lopsided, there are at least some things to keep an eye out for.

A final chapter touches on lopsided trades of the 21st century, a nice touch even though it only checks in at a page and a half and features just four deals and a “hopeful” that Decatur thinks might turn out to be a lopsided trade that could be included in a future edition.

Unfortunately though, this brief section also contained a very noticeable error – the misspelling of Richie Sexson’s last name, which ended up as Sexton. Having spent time with the Mariners and failing to live up his free agent signing, “Big Richie” has a spot in my memory that is less than favorable. Seeing an error like this – the misspelling of a player’s last name – is simply unacceptable.

Likewise, I noticed an error in the chapter on the Arizona Diamondbacks – when Decatur is talking about Luis Gonzalez, and mentions that a piece of gum supposedly chewed by him sold at auction for $10,000 in 1982. While the auction part is true, the event happened in 2002 – some 20 years later. Unfortunately these two errors casts doubt on the rest of the book, especially some of the lesser-known bits of trivia and information. It’s unfortunate, because that became the final strike in this book’s at-bat.

The topic is certainly interesting and valid and one that will continue to generate lots of discussion among fans, but Decatur’s book leaves a bit lacking for my preference. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Rob Neyer to cover for one his “Big Book of Baseball (fill in the blank)” works, something Decatur might want to peak at should he attempt a rewrite or a future edition. Decatur’s treatment of the topic leaves quite a bit to be desired, from his own positioning of the validity of the topic, to his treatment of the team sections, to the spell and fact checking that was missing at several points in the book.

Traded simply isn’t worth trading your money for.