Blue Jays: David Wells says trade to Toronto worst day of his career

When asked by a fan on Twitter on Friday night, David Wells said the day he was traded to the Blue Jays was the worst day of his career. Ouch.

A relationship between a team and a player is a two-way street, and unfortunately it’s often a complicated puzzle. It’s especially complicated when one party didn’t really want to be involved to begin with.

That’s more or less what happened to the Blue Jays after their 1998 season, and in a way, it kinda happened twice. First of all, Roger Clemens was coming off of his second straight Cy Young award win as a Blue Jay, and had requested to be traded that off-season. The Blue Jays found a deal that they believed would work, sending him to the Yankees for David Wells, Homer Bush, and Graeme Lloyd.

The problem didn’t really go away though, because Wells, who was replacing Clemens at the top of the Blue Jays’ rotation, didn’t want to be in Toronto either.

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To be fair, ther Yankees were coming off of World Series wins in 1996, and had just won is again in 1998 with Wells on the roster, so you can’t blame the big lefty for being sore about getting traded from that situation, even if it was to a familiar environment. The Blue Jays may have had a promising team during that era of franchise history, but they couldn’t compete with the Yankees of the late-90’s and Wells knew it.

In fact, he’s still talking about it today, at least when it’s brought to his attention. That happened on Friday night when Wells was asked, “what was the worst day of your baseball career?”, and his answer? “Getting traded to Toronto in 99”.

In his defence, Wells made it known that he was a lifelong Yankees fan, and especially adored the legend that is Babe Ruth. He even went as far as wearing an authentic Babe Ruth hat on the mound for a real MLB game, one that he’d paid $35,000 to acquire, so you know it meant something to him.

So should Blue Jays fans take offence to Wells saying being traded to Toronto was the worst day of his career? I can certainly understand where he’s coming from in this case, even if I would rather not have read that particular comment. Ah well.