Heck of a Birthday Team today. You know you have a good ballclub when Ichiro! is your third-best position player (by WAR).

C/Manager: Bill Carrigan (13.2 WAR)
1B: Jimmie Foxx (93.1 WAR)
2B: Robinson Cano (69.6 WAR)
3B: Sam Bohne (7.4 WAR)
SS: Al Myers (7.8 WAR)
LF: Lou Klein (8.1 WAR)
CF: Gerald Young (6.0 WAR)
RF: Ichiro Suzuki (60.0 WAR)

SP: Wilbur Wood (50.0 WAR)
SP: Johnny Morrison (18.8 WAR)
SP: Jumbo Elliott (8.4 WAR)
SP: Kid Carsey (7.2 WAR)
SP: Oscar Jones (5.6 WAR)
RP: Darren O'Day (17.4 WAR)
RP: Hector Carrasco (9.2 WAR)
RP: Cecil Upshaw (7.4 WAR)

Owner: Phil Ball
Fun name: Chick Lathers
Not the guy who played Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: Jeff Jones

Wilbur Wood for Juan Pizarro is often listed with the worst Pirate trades. It always looked weird to me, with the veteran pitcher Pizarro moved as a PTBNL six weeks after Wood was sent to Chicago.

The newspaper record is strange. On the Pittsburgh side, it was recorded as a sale, but that the teams were working out a deal where the Pirates would send a bat to Chicago for a pitcher. Over the next few weeks, every White Sox starter was the subject of rumors.* When Pizarro finally came over, Pirate GM Joe Brown was explicit that he didn't give up any talent for him. The Chicago papers tended toward a trade with Pizarro the PTBNL.

My question is actually about transaction data. I believe BB-Ref gets their transaction information from Retrosheet. Does Retrosheet have this from league files, or was it collected from the Sporting News or some such? And if the Sporting News, did they get an official list every week, or were they relying on beat writers to submit information? Obviously, I'm not expecting a clean answer to this, just an overview of what we end up relying on.

*My guess is the big deal fell through when Maury Wills got in trouble with the Dodgers management. The Pirates sent their spare bat, Bob Bailey, to the Dodgers for Wills a few days after acquiring Pizarro.

The collection of Sporting News player contract cards is not very conclusive here.

Wilbur Wood: Released to Chicago A.L., 10/12/66

Pizarro: Released to Pittsburgh (part of the deal in which Chicago AL acquired pitcher Wilbur Wood from Columbus, O.) 11/28/66

Wilbur Wood for Juan Pizarro is often listed with the worst Pirate trades. It always looked weird to me, with the veteran pitcher Pizarro moved as a PTBNL six weeks after Wood was sent to Chicago.

It didn't work out very well for the Pirates, but at the time, I'll bet most people thought the Pirates won the transactions. Pizarro had been an All-Star in 1963-64, and though he had a couple of disappointing seasons since then, he was still only 29. Wood, meanwhile, had spent all of 1966 back in the minors.

According to his SABR Bio, Wood took a big leap forward after working on his knuckleball with Hoyt Wilhelm, who was pitching for the Sox at the time. So that improvement probably doesn't happen if he stays in Pittsburgh.

It didn't work out very well for the Pirates, but at the time, I'll bet most people thought the Pirates won the transactions. Pizarro had been an All-Star in 1963-64, and though he had a couple of disappointing seasons since then, he was still only 29. Wood, meanwhile, had spent all of 1966 back in the minors.

I'm sure that they did. As you note, at that time Pizarro had been an All-Star in recent memory - Wood at the time had a career MLB record of 1-8, with a 4.17 ERA in 160 innings.

Ruth quit his tour at Scranton, Pa. (and) saw his error in openly defying the baseball rules and baseball’s high commissioner.

In one of my alternate OOTP universes, Ruth tells Landis to p!ss up a rope and starts his own league, the Continental. Eventually there are four major leagues, when the PCL "goes big" in the 1950s. It's a mess.