Definitely at his peak Mattingly was a better player than Mcgriff. Mcgriff really should have been a DH anyway because he was a pretty horrible defensive 1b. Mcgriff would have been a good Dh to go with MAttingly, Henderson and Winfield.

Phelps kind of gets knocked around like he was a bum, but he was actually a pretty good player. He has a career .374 on base percentage and a .480 career slugging percentage. The only problem was that the Yankees got him at the end of his career. He was traded to the A’s in ’89 and got a WS ring and then was out of baseball.

What’s often left out of the Mcgriff trade is that Mike Morgan and Dave Collins were traded along with Mcgriff. Mike Morgan was pretty decent in the early 90′s and pitched until 2002. Collins was decent and played until 1990.

Maybe “myth” wasn’t the best word to describe the Bhuner/Phelps trade and I wasn’t implying that you didn’t know what you were talking about.

I should have said “hype” instead of “myth” and a lot of that hype came from that Seinfeld episode. There is some myth in the way Phelps is portrayed and the way Buhner was portrayed.

The trade was a dumb trade because the Yankees were probably the strongest A.L. team in ’88 as far as 1b/dh goes so why they traded for another one is besides me. Maybe they wanted to platoon Clark/Phelps, who knows. They should have traded for a starting pitcher.

The numbers I posted were from baseballreference.com. Phelps didn’t cost Clark a chance to hit 40hr, because like I said he only had 18 by the time of the trade on July 21. And Phelps like I said hit .551 slugging in 1988 so it wasn’t like he was the bum that he’s often portrayed as.

The Mcgriff trade is clearly the worst Yankee trade of the last 50 odd years. Mcgriff ended up with 493 hr, same as Lou Gehirig and he is a boderline HOF player.

Look the Bhuner trade was terrible. They got a 1b/dh in Phelps that was about 33 and essentially done for a young right fielder that would put up good numbers.

Truth be told Bhuner’s kind of an overrated player. How he ever won a gold glove is mind-boggling because he was a horrible right fielder. He was a good power hitter but didn’t hit for average and was so-so as far as on-base percentage goes. Also, he played in a great hitter’s park during a very good hitting era.

http://fenwayinthe90s.blogspot.com/2009/07/children-lose-their-innocence-jack.html

There’s so much myth surrounding the Phelps-Buhner trade that it’s hard to remember what actually happened.

Here’s a few points:

*The late 80′s early 90′s was a rare weak period for the American League East so a team with 88 wins could win the division.

*The Yankees won 85 games and bounced around from 1st-3rd for most of that year.

*The trade was odd in a sense that the Yankees already had a good DH in Clark and a very good offensive team with Henderson, Mattingly, Winfield so why they would trade for Phelps when they were already solid at 1b/Dh is a real head-scratcher.

*The weakness of the ’88 team was their starting pitching staff. It was a very old and broken-down starting staff of Tommy John-age-45, Ron Guidry-age37, Rick Rhoden-age35, John Candelaria-age34, and Richard Dotson-age29. Candeleria was the only productive pitcher on that team that year. What they really should have done was trade Buhner for a good starting pitcher.

*Phelps gets a lot of crap but he did what he was supposed to do. He hit 10HR in 107 plate appearances, had a slugging percentage of .551, and had an ops+ of 147.

*Clark had 18 home runs by July 4 but didn’t hit another HR until July 24. Phelps was traded on July 21, so Clark’s HR power started to diminish BEFORE Phelps arrived. That may have been part of the reason they traded for Phelps.

*Clark’s playing time really didn’t diminish that much because of Phelps. He had a few more off days in August of that year but he played almost all of September while Phelps missed almost 2 weeks.

*Clark ended up with 616 plate appearances in ’88 so again I don’t think it’s fair to say that Phelps cost him a lot of playing time. Clark still played at DH quite a bit that year.

*Clark was hitting .246/.396/.463 at the time of the trade. He finished with a .241/.381/.433, not a drastic drop. I attribute the drop in slugging to fatigue probably in part from playing the outfield which he hadn’t played in about 4 years. So I would say that Phelps coming in and playing Dh may have cost Clark 2-3 hr.

And to me the worst Yankee trade of the last 50 years was the Fred Mcgriff/Dave Collins trade for Dale Murray.