In addition to hosting this year’s All-Star Game, the Reds are also celebrating the anniversary of their last World Series championship. Members of that 1990 team will be honored in April, when they will certainly recall fond memories of their sweep against the highly favored bash brothers of the Oakland Athletics.

While Cincinnati residents revel in the joy their cable-to-cable equipment brought during that magical season, most of them will be ashamed to remember what happened 25 years earlier. It was in 1965 that Reds general manager Bill Dewitt traded Cincinnati’s best player and future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson to the Baltimore Orioles for pitcher Milt Pappas.

Of course, that trade remains one of the worst in franchise history, and it is arguably among the worst in all of baseball. However, it wasn’t the only bad transaction Dewitt made as general manager that year.

He fired manager Dick Sisler, despite the fact that Sisler had led the Reds to 89 wins that year. Last season, after replacing the beloved and legendary Fred “Hutch” Hutchinson due to terminal cancer, Sisler won 32 of 53 games for second place.

Unfortunately, he was abruptly fired at the end of the season and replaced by Don Hefner. Reds general manager Dewitt fired Hefner midway through the 1966 season with the Reds in eighth place, and Dave Bristol took over as manager. Bristol himself would last barely two more years before giving way to the man who would orchestrate the famous “Big Red Machine” of the seventies, a team that featured Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan.

As his former team slipped near the league basement, Sisler, who had been hired immediately as a bench coach for Red Schoendist and the Cardinals, won two pennants and a World Series in St. Louis over the next two years. It would take Cincinnati another ten years to win it all.

One has to wonder how soon the Reds could have reached the fall classic crown if GM Dewitt hadn’t made any of those regrettable moves fifty years ago. Robinson had already set many of the franchise’s hitting records before the trade, and Sisler had been a successful manager. In fact, although his term was short, Sisler has the highest winning percentage of any manager in Reds history, including Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson.