T10YL - The Trade Equinox
The only post of 2024 that features the NBA, NFL, and MLB all at once.
[These trades occurred on July 1, 2014.]
Perhaps you’re familiar with the “Sports Equinox.” On certain Sundays late in October, the NFL will play its slate of games while the MLB wraps up its postseason and the NBA and NHL get their seasons started. The seasonal schedules are designed to somewhat minimize cross-sport overlap (besides the NBA and NHL, who are engaged in perpetual battle), so the Sports Equinox is always a fun day when it pops up on the calendar.
July 1 is the Trade Equinox of 2024 — the only day on my calendar where an NBA, MLB, and NFL trade were all made ten years ago. Trade seasons for a sport are different from the scheduled regular seasons, but they do tend to follow similar rhythms year after year. The beginning of July is a turbulent time in the NBA transaction space and marks the early days of MLB’s trade deadline surge of activity. There was only one NFL trade in the month of July, but fortunately its timing provided us with an equinox opportunity.
Even more fortunately, all three of these trades are extremely bizarre:
MLB
The Names: Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim receive: Rich Hill. Boston Red Sox receive: cash.
The Team Context: As we discussed last week, the Angels were looking to improve their bullpen. The MLB roster of the Boston Red Sox was entirely unaffected by this trade.
The Player Context: Rich Hill debuted for the Cubs in 2005 and was an effective starter in 2006 and 2007. Control problems began to disrupt his performance in 2008, leading to modifications to his delivery and minor league demotions that attempted to address the issue. Hill also started to pick up a series of injuries, including a labrum tear that he pitched with until July 29 of the 2009 season.
After that, Hill was relegated to the bullpen, and often not even an MLB bullpen. He signed with the Red Sox in each of the 2010 and 2011 seasons on minor league contracts, eventually getting an MLB call up each year. But a few weeks after his May 2011 call up, he tore his UCL and required surgery. The next season brought another minor league contract from the Red Sox (third in a row) and another eventual promotion to the majors. Across 2010-2012, Hill allowed just four earned runs across 31.2 innings of work at the MLB level. The limited opportunities may have been a blessing; in 2013, Hill made the opening day roster for Cleveland (after first signing a minor league contract) and allowed 27 earned runs across 38.2 innings.
The 2014 season brought yet another minor league contract offer from the Red Sox (fourth in five years) for the now 34-year-old Rich Hill. Watching a washed-up pitcher try to squeeze more juice out of his husk of a career was starting to get sad. MLBTradeRumors noted that “If Hill can keep his command under control, he could carve out a niche as a solid lefty specialist,” while going on to add the relevant information that he had walked 14.5% of the left-handed hitters he faced in his MLB career. They also provided two opt-out dates (May 15 and June 30) by which Hill could become a free agent if not on the Red Sox roster.
May 15 came and went with Hill biding his time in Pawtucket. He got into a game that day, throwing 1.1 innings with a strikeout as he retired Blake Davis, Michael Martinez (the strikeout victim), Robert Andino, and Gregory Polanco. It seems that the June 30 (or was it July 1?) date may have been acted upon if not for this trade — Hill’s final 2014 appearance for Pawtucket was on June 28.
The Trade: Baseball Reference doesn’t even call this a trade; they have this classified as the Angels purchasing Rich Hill. Nobody even bothered to break the story. The Angels just announced it on their Twitter account. Ordinarily this would not be a significant enough transaction to write about, but it’s the Sports Equinox.
The announcement of Hill’s arrival got one comment on Reddit, which was “Aaaaaaand he’s awful” and got upvoted 19 times.
The Results: On July 1, Rich Hill made his debut for the Angels in game one of a doubleheader against the White Sox. Garrett Richards continued his breakout season with eight innings of work that spotted the Angels to an 8-3 lead. Hill came in for the ninth inning to face the heart of the White Sox lineup. He allowed a leadoff single to Paul Konerko, then walked Jose Abreu and Adam Dunn to load the bases. This was no longer a comfortable lead; Rich Hill was replaced by Joe Smith, who got three outs from two ground balls to end the game and pick up a save.
On July 1, Rich Hill made his final appearance for the Angels in game two of a doubleheader against the White Sox. Jered Weaver didn’t have his best stuff and allowed 5 runs in 5.2 innings of work, but this was enough to outduel Scott Carroll and the 7 runs he allowed. Once more, Rich Hill was the first man out of the Angels’ bullpen, brought in to face Adam Eaton with two outs and Alejandro De Aza standing on second base. Hill walked Eaton on five pitches, one of which was a wild pitch that sent De Aza to third. Hill was removed from the game and Mike Morin got a strikeout to end the inning.
On July 5, the Angels designated Rich Hill for assignment. The announcement of Hill’s departure got three comments on Reddit, with the top one declaring Rich Hill’s tenure to be a “contender for most pointless trade in the history of our franchise.”
The Aftermath: Rich Hill’s MLB career was quite obviously circling the drain, or maybe going back down the drain after being regurgitated as sewage a couple of times. But left-handed relievers always seem to get one more chance. Hill was released by the Angels and signed to another minor league contract with the Yankees, working his way back to the major leagues in short order. By this point, Hill was strictly limited to the LOOGY role (left-handed one out relief guy), with seven of his 14 Yankees appearances consisting of one batter faced and only three consisting of more than two batters faced.
Hill signed a minor league contract with Washington (his sixth straight season inking a minor league deal) and ended up opting out on June 24 when no promotion was forthcoming. Nobody from an affiliated baseball team called. On July 29, Hill signed a contract with the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League. With a little more negotiating leverage with the Ducks than he had experienced with MLB teams, Hill moved into the Ducks’ rotation after stretching himself out to work as a starting pitcher again.
Hill would make two starts as a Duck, totalling 11 innings but allowing just two hits and three walks. He struck out 21 batters. The Red Sox took notice and dusted off a minor league contract for Hill (their fifth time signing him in six years), who then joined the Pawtucket rotation. The ERA increased (from 0.00 in the Atlantic League to 2.78 in AAA), but this was still enough to get him called up to the majors for four starts with Boston. In the first, he struck out ten Tampa Bay Rays across seven shutout innings. In the second, he struck out ten Toronto Blue Jays across seven three-run innings. In the third, he struck out ten Baltimore Orioles while pitching a complete game shutout. He only struck out six New York Yankees in the fourth start, but the point had been made by then. Hill tallied 36 strikeouts against just five walks in the four starts he made for Boston that year and was suddenly an intriguing free agent for the first time in his career.
Hill signed a one-year deal with Oakland that guaranteed him $6 million for his age-36 season, increasing his career earnings by several multiples on the basis of four good MLB starts. Amazingly, the adjustments that Hill made with the Ducks seemed to have stuck as he continued to be one of the better pitchers in baseball that season. He was a featured name at the 2016 MLB trade deadline when he was sent to the Dodgers, the first of three times in his career that he would be traded for actual baseball players. He has made more than $75 million in his career, substantially all of which was earned after he turned 36.
Hill is now 44 years old and the only reason he isn’t pitching in MLB right now is because he preferred to coach his son’s little league team. He’s told the media that his plan is to sign with a team in mid-season, so we should hear more in the next couple of weeks.
NBA
The Names: Milwaukee Bucks receive: Jason Kidd. Brooklyn Nets receive: 2015 2nd-round pick (#41, Pat Connaughton selected) and 2019 2nd-round pick (#42, Admiral Schofield selected).
The Team Context: The Milwaukee Bucks were coming off their worst-ever season, but had reason for optimism. They had successfully landed Jabari Parker with the #2 pick of the NBA Draft and witnessed encouraging signs of improvement from young players Brandon Knight, Khris Middleton, and Giannis Antetokounmpo in 2013-14. At the very least, their record probably wasn’t going to get worse than last year’s 15-67.
The Nets named Jason Kidd as their new head coach on June 12, 2013. This was long enough ago that the person submitting this news to Reddit submitted a link to Stefan Bondy’s Twitter because they didn’t know how to share a specific tweet (and long enough ago that the linked Twitter profile of “NYDNInterNets” has been replaced by a Russian-language account with four followers and no tweets since March 2015). The hire was curious; Kidd had just played in the NBA the prior season and was perceived as out of his depth on a win-now roster that featured the most expensive collection of veterans ever assembled to that point. 17 games into the season and with the Nets sitting at 5-12, Kidd demoted Lawrence Frank (his only assistant with head coaching experience) after publicly campaigning to make Frank the highest-paid assistant in the NBA during the preseason. Frank retained legal counsel on his way to a buyout from the Nets, who lost that night’s game by 24 points and fell to 5-13.
Things started to turn around from this rocky beginning when the calendar flipped to 2014. Kidd won Eastern Conference Coach of the Month in January, much to the surprise of anybody who had seen his coaching in 2013, then won the award again for the month of March. The Nets made it to the playoffs, where they beat the Raptors in a seven-game series and then lost to the Heat in the second round. But as new head coaches Derek Fisher and Steve Kerr received contracts that dramatically outpaced Kidd’s, he became frustrated with the situation in Brooklyn and attempted what was described by Adrian Wojnarowski as “a [spectacularly] failed coup to Brooklyn’s Russian ownership to usurp the power of Nets general manager Billy King.” After just one season of coaching in any capacity, Kidd seemed to want more control over basketball operations. According to Zach Lowe, the “reaction pouring in from other 29 teams is a mix of eye-rolling at Kidd, out-and-out laughter, shock even among cynics that he’d pull this.” Kidd would eventually deny reports that he pushed for control over player personnel, saying that “I didn’t promote myself to do anything but to learn how to be a coach” and blaming his exit on reports from December that his job was in jeopardy that “helped me to see what type of people I was dealing with.”
The Player Context: Oh, maybe I should’ve written about Jason Kidd in this section if he’s the guy getting traded? Sorry, usually at least one player gets traded.
The Trade: A key factor in Kidd’s decision to make a coup attempt was his knowledge that he had a supporter in new Bucks’ co-owner Marc Lasry, a former co-owner of the Nets who served as Kidd’s financial advisor in his day job. Kidd was granted permission to interview for the Bucks’ head coaching role and seemed to have the position locked up if trade compensation could be worked out. This was all news to current Bucks coach Larry Drew and GM Jon Hammond, neither of whom received word from ownership that they were interviewing a potential replacement.
On June 29, it was clarified that Kidd had only interviewed for head coach rather than any front office role. Wojnarowski implied this was a smokescreen, saying on June 30 that “belief is that it’s just a matter of time until Kidd has full control in Milwaukee.” The teams negotiated back and forth, with Brooklyn demanding a first-round pick in exchange for Kidd and Milwaukee insisting they wouldn’t give up more than a second. The compromise ended up being two seconds, one near-term and one long-term.
The reaction to this trade was fairly ludicrous, with fans unable to understand this outlay of resources on an inexperienced coach with a long history of interpersonal conflicts and a recent history of spectacularly failed coup attempts. The most charitable interpretation was that the Bucks had just hired “an above-average coach, and a below-average human being.” In the introductory press conference, Marc Lasry and fellow co-owner Wes Edens apologized for their role in any communication breakdown. “We were naive about how this business is put out to the press. We are used to operating in businesses where discretion is necessary and part of the fabric of it,” said Edens. “The degree to which the media plays an integral role in basketball was a shock to me.”
The Results: The Nets were essentially torpedoed from this move; Paul Pierce left in free agency and Lionel Hollins got off to a 4-7 start as the franchise’s fourth head coach in three seasons. When Jason Kidd returned to Barclays Center, he was heartily booed by Brooklyn fans even as his retired number from his playing days hung above the court. The boos didn’t help the home team; the Bucks would win 122-118 in triple overtime to give the Nets their 5th straight loss. Brooklyn would make the playoffs as a 38-44 8th seed and would win fewer than 30 games in each of the following three seasons.
In his first season with Milwaukee, Jason Kidd improved the Bucks’ record from 15-67 to 41-41 and finished third in Coach of the Year voting. He became the first coach in NBA history to lead two different franchises to the playoffs in his first two years as head coach, presumably because most coaches who lead a team to the playoffs in their first year as head coach don’t immediately leave that team after an alleged power struggle. Kidd managed to pull off this success even with health-limited seasons from core players like Larry Sanders (though that would turn out to arguably be Kidd’s fault) and Jabari Parker.
The Bucks missed the playoffs in 2015-16 even as Giannis Antetokounmpo successfully played point guard for a season and began his ascendance to superstardom. They clawed back to a winning record in 2016-17 (42-40) before losing their first-round playoff series to Toronto. Midway through Kidd’s fourth year in Milwaukee, he was fired due to the team’s poor performance along with “frayed relationships in organization and general non-alignment.”
The 2015 pick was used to select Pat Connaughton, who debuted for Portland after a draft night trade. Connaughton spent three years successively increasing his role for the Trail Blazers to become an 82-game player before leaving in free agency to join the Bucks. Connaughton has averaged about 22 minutes per game during his six seasons (and counting) in Milwaukee. He’s under contract for next season and has a player option for 2025-26. He’s made the fifth-most three pointers in Bucks franchise history. I have no idea how to factor Pat Connaughton into calculations of whether the Bucks won this trade.
The 2019 pick was traded a couple more times and ultimately used to select Admiral Schofield. Schofield contributed in the NBA fairly immediately by the standards of a 2nd-round pick, playing 368 minutes as a rookie in Washington. He spent the 2020-21 season in the G-League and has been in Orlando on two-way contracts for the three seasons since then. Schofield only got 84 minutes in the NBA last season and might be running out of NBA runway. Schofield seems to agree, as he signed a contract to deploy with the French team LDLC ASVEL four days ago.
The Aftermath: After he was fired from Milwaukee, Jason Kidd joined Frank Vogel’s Los Angeles Lakers coaching staff and ultimately won a championship with the team in 2020. Now with actual substantive experience coaching in the NBA, he was hired by the Dallas Mavericks as head coach after the 2020-21 season amid substantial skepticism. Before he coached a game, Kidd came under fire when a biography of Giannis Antetokounmpo included descriptions of Kidd forcing the Bucks to practice on Christmas, where he berated Larry Sanders to such an extent that Sanders had full-body convulsions and left to take himself to the hospital. Sanders missed the next year and a half due to mental health issues and never played for the Bucks again.
Kidd quieted the discourse about his suitability for the role with a successful first season in Dallas, taking the 2021-22 Mavericks to the Western Conference Finals. He topped that this year when the team made a surprising run to the NBA Finals as a 6-seed. In May, Kidd signed a “multi-year contract extension” amid reports that he would be considered for the Lakers’ head coach position.
NFL
The Names: Dallas Cowboys receive: Rolando McClain, 2015 7th-round pick. Baltimore Ravens receive: 2015 6th-round pick
The Team Context: The Dallas Cowboys drafted Sean Lee in 2010 and watched him blossom to become a defensive leader at inside linebacker. Lee signed a six-year contract extension in 2013, but only made it through one season before he tore his ACL for a third time at a May practice that seemed to involve more contact than was permitted by league rules. The Cowboys were not projected to have a good defense even with Lee in the fold and needed to replace him.
The Player Context: Rolando McClain had already retired from the NFL, twice. Before that, McClain had started eight games as a true freshman for Nick Saban’s first University of Alabama team and was selected 8th overall by the Oakland Raiders after his junior year. For the first two seasons of his NFL career, McClain was a solid starter at middle linebacker who registered 85 and 99 tackles. But in 2012, he lost his starting position as discord grew between him and the team. In November, he posted on Facebook “Officially no longer an Oakland Raider!!” in a bout of wishful thinking, since he was definitely still under contract. McClain expressed his interest in being “anywhere besides here” after a heated exchange at a practice with coach Dennis Allen led to his ejection.
The Raiders released McClain after the season. His reputation had deteriorated as a result of his ending with the Raiders, the four misdemeanor convictions he had received in connection with a 2011 shooting in his hometown of Decatur, Alabama (which were ultimately vacated when the prosecuting witness dropped the charges amid rumors of a payoff from McClain), and subsequent minor offenses in Decatur that resulted in an infamous arrest photo. But his glory days at Alabama were recent enough that, when news broke that the Ravens planned to sign him less than a week later, the sentiment was that his talent would shine through in Baltimore’s more stable organization. Then, about one month later, the team announced that McClain had retired, an odd career move for the 23-year-old that was explained when he said “at this time it is in my best interest to focus on getting my personal life together.”
McClain spent his 2013 season as a civilian in Tuscaloosa, working on the final 16 credits of his family financial planning degree and processing the decision to walk away from the NFL as he dipped Wintergreen Grizzly on the dock of his lakefront property. “I don’t know if I’m ready to know what triggers my anger. I just feel like I figured out on my own how to stay calm, how to enjoy life, how to be happy. Eventually, I might find the source of the problem, get over it,” McClain said in Seth Wickersham’s October article. Wickersham continued to describe McClain driving recklessly on the freeway as he texted while speeding and without wearing a seatbelt.
McClain expressed that he’d probably return to the NFL next season and then began working on a comeback in March of 2014. The Ravens reinstated him from the reserve/retired list on April 17. In his return to Baltimore (is “return” the right word?), he failed to complete the team conditioning test, and on April 21, Seth Wickersham got a text from Rolando McClain that confirmed he was retiring from football again, “this time for good.”
The Trade: The trade was announced as a late-round pick swap where Baltimore would get a 6th-round pick in exchange for their 7th. Basically nothing, but even that would turn out to overstate the compensation, since the swap was conditional on McClain playing 50% or more of Dallas’s defensive snaps in 2014. He would need to spend 5 games on the active roster for Baltimore to receive any compensation at all. This was an extremely low-risk pickup for Dallas, but for Baltimore it was an opportunity to get a little bit of draft compensation for absolutely nothing. All McClain had done as a member of the Ravens was retire (twice).
McClain’s last contact with the media was when he told Seth Wickersham that “I gotta follow my heart. It ain’t football” after he started a comeback earlier that spring. Perhaps wisely, McClain’s agent handled the media communications this time around, saying that McClain “sounds as excited about football as I’ve ever heard him.” This is known as hearsay and it’s generally not admissible as evidence.
The Results: You might recall that McClain started games as a true freshman at Alabama, but only eight of them. The five games McClain spent on the bench arose from a legendary practice where he changed the defensive play call that Nick Saban had given. Saban yelled at McClain for the insubordination; McClain responded by yelling at Saban for the bad initial call and got benched for five games as a result. But the event proved to be a galvanizing force in the relationship between Saban and McClain, who grew to appreciate the other’s football perfectionism as they watched extra film together for hours.
This made McClain’s retirement from the Raiders so puzzling — by all accounts, McClain wasn’t putting in the effort at Oakland that he was willing to put in at Alabama. According to a childhood friend, “the losing [in Oakland] drove him crazy. It was the opposite of Alabama. Guys on the team didn’t care, and it just soured Rolando on football. It got to the point where he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
It seemed like the problem may have been team atmosphere all along. McClain was rejuvenated in Dallas and immediately slotted in as a starter for the Cowboys. After a Week 2 win where he played 98% of defensive snaps (registering 7 tackles, a sack, and an interception), McClain said that “there weren’t many teams that I would’ve left the couch for.” His teammates and coaches raved about his locker room leadership and devotion to film study, while fans eagerly exclaimed how excited they were for the team to re-sign him. The Cowboys made the playoffs and signed McClain to a $3 million contract for the 2015 season.
McClain’s success meant that Baltimore got to complete the pick swap that represented their maximum payout, swapping pick #243 for pick #204. The Ravens drafted a wide receiver out of Georgia Tech named Darren Waller, who was used as deep depth and only made two catches in his rookie season. The next year, the team converted him to tight end, but he missed four games in 2016 and the entirety of 2017 due to violations of the NFL’s substance abuse policy. The Ravens ultimately waived him to the practice squad for the 2018 season until he was signed to the active roster of the Oakland Raiders. As if some sort of redemption for their short end of the Rolando McClain stick, this time the Raiders got to reap the benefit of a talented football player sorting out his personal issues; Waller emerged as a Pro Bowl tight end in the team’s first season in Las Vegas.
With pick #243, the Cowboys drafted an offensive tackle named Laurence Gibson. Gibson was a heralded recruit who dominated the NFL combine, but never made an active roster after a broken finger derailed his rookie minicamp experience. With the very next pick, the San Francisco 49ers selected Trent Brown, who quickly became regarded as one of the better tackles in the NFL. Close one!
The Aftermath: The Raiders signed Darren Waller to a three-year, $51 million contract extension at the start of the 2022 season, then traded him to the New York Giants after one year for a 2023 3rd-round pick. Waller only played in 12 games for the Giants and was less effective when healthy. He had married WNBA star Kelsey Plum before the 2023 season, but they filed for divorce in April. Waller responded to this development by releasing a widely-panned music video, then announcing a fairly sudden retirement from the NFL in June.
Rolando McClain’s return to the Cowboys in 2015 was delayed by a four-game suspension he received for violating the league’s substance abuse policy. McClain returned to post another effective ¾ of a season in Dallas, but his leverage as a free agent was weakened by the suspension and by continued off-field concerns, most recently a suspicious house fire at his for-sale Tuscaloosa home that the fire marshal determined to be arson. He ended up returning to the Cowboys with a slight pay raise, this time receiving $5M for 2016.
It would prove to be a moot point. Another failed drug test meant that McClain was suspended for the first 10 games of the 2016 season. McClain was rumored to have gained 40 pounds while abusing codeine, then gave credence to these rumors when he missed the mandatory drug test at the end of his 10-game suspension. That meant a new full-year suspension that would keep him out until midway through 2017. During this second suspension, McClain was arrested in Alabama on a marijuana and weapons charge that seemed to spell the end of his NFL career.
Maybe not though. In 2019, McClain started the process of applying for reinstatement by the NFL. This reinstatement was granted, which resulted in the Cowboys promptly releasing McClain and nobody else stepping up to sign him. Then, in December of 2019 he was once again suspended indefinitely by the NFL. McClain was arrested for a new marijuana and weapons charge in 2022, but the NFL reinstated him again in December of 2023.
Rolando McClain is 34 years old and has retired twice, been arrested on marijuana and weapons charges twice, and has been indefinitely suspended from the NFL (and subsequently reinstated) twice. In a December interview, McClain said that he’s “ready for the NFL now” and “never planned not to return to football.” The schedule he outlined for a typical day during his suspension starts at 3:30 AM and includes working out three times per day to stay in shape. He balances the workouts while keeping his day job as a financial family planner (he got his degree from Alabama in 2017) and spending plenty of time with his three sons. McClain blames the substance issues in his past on a teammate that “secretly gave [him] synthetic marijuana,” causing him to “wig out” and need to “smoke real weed just to have somewhat of a normal brain.”
That explanation does not seem to have satisfied NFL teams; McClain is still a free agent for now.
July 5, 2024:
Oakland Athletics receive: Jeff Samardzija, Jason Hammel
Chicago Cubs receive: Addison Russell, Billy McKinney, Dan Straily, cash
July 6, 2024:
New York Yankees receive: Brandon McCarthy, cash
Arizona Diamondbacks receive: Vidal Nuno