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 no doubt have fond memories of their sweep of the heavily favored Oakland A’s bash brothers.

While Cincinnatians revel in the joy their team brought from start to finish during that magical season, most of them will cringe as they 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 arguably among the worst in all of baseball. However, it wasn’t the only bad deal Dewitt made as GM that year.

He fired manager Dick Sisler, even though Sisler had led the Reds to 89 wins that year. The previous season, after replacing the beloved and legendary Fred “Hutch” Hutchinson due to terminal cancer, Sisler won 32 of 53 games to finish second.

Unfortunately, he was abruptly fired at the end of the season and replaced by Don Hefner. Reds general manager Dewitt then fired Hefner midway through the 1966 season with the Reds in eighth place, and Dave Bristol took over as manager. Bristol itself would last just two more years before giving way to the man who would orchestrate the famous “Big Red Machine” of the 1970s, a team that featured Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez and Joe Morgan.

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

One has to wonder how sooner the Reds might have clinched the Fall Classic crown if GM Dewitt hadn’t made any of those sorry moves fifty years ago. Robinson had already set many of the franchise’s batting records prior to the trade, and Sisler had been a successful manager. In fact, while his tenure was brief, Sisler has the highest winning percentage of any coach in Reds history, including Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson.