Breaking down famous MLB trade trees ahead of 2026 deadline - ESPN

What do baseball players Jerry Dybzinski and Delmon Young have in common? You could probably categorize most responses into the following umbrellas:

1. They both played in MLB, and I know this because I'm old enough to have Dybzinski's baseball card.

2. I remember Delmon Young, but who in the sam-heck is Jerry Dybzinski?

3. Trade trees!

For our purposes, the correct answer would be No. 3. Dybzinski, a journeyman infielder who compiled 2.0 bWAR between 1980 and 1985, and Young, the No. 1 pick of the 2003 amateur draft, are at the root of two of baseball's most famous trade trees.

The trade/transaction tree concept is a fascinating one. One trade is turned into another, bringing back multiple players, a couple of whom are flipped, and so on, as each subsequent move from that initial trade — the root — spawns a new branch and, presumably, yields additional fruit for the team that made the original move.

Exploring trade trees in the digital age, via the magical hyperlinks at Baseball Reference, is both a great way for a baseball fan to kill some time and a way to lose a massive chunk of your waking hours, and perhaps some hours in which you should not be awake.

There have been quite a few attempts to organize trade-tree-related data, such as MLB Trade Trees, which hasn't been updated for a few years, and the all-sports resource TradeChains. One person, «Wilytics,» claims to have uncovered all 2,487 trade trees in history, per his criteria as to what constitutes a trade tree, and is worth checking out.

However, instead of trying to be definitive about what is at heart just a fun way to look at trades and baseball history — and realizing that trying to sort through all the data myself was beyond my capability and way beyond my