Ken Griffey's trade to the White Sox is old news now, but I just wanted to weigh in. Griffey probably helped sell tickets for a bad team, and kept Cincinnati's faithful interested. But it is impossible to say that the deal to bring him to Cincy was a good deal for the Reds. It just wasn't. It's not that he didn't produce for the Reds when he wasn't injured, and it wasn't that the guys traded for him turned into superstars, although Mike Cameron has always been a pretty good player - and has received more MVP votes since the trade than Griffey has.
No, the problem has been the salary, and everyone has known it. Griffey had to be a monster for at least some of those years in order to justify it, and that never happened. Because it didn't happen, and because of the injuries, the Reds couldn't move him at a reasonable price, either, so he was there, eating salary the whole time. Now, I like Ken Griffey as a ballplayer, and as a person, and if there's going to be a player that the Reds do that for, Ken Griffey is a good choice. But... those decisions kill revenue franchises the size of Cincinnati's, and this one surely looks like it didn't help a team with a horrible record this century.
The main area it hurt, I think, was actually the pitching. The Reds have had one of the worst pitching staffs throughout the zeros. They keep trying to catch lightning in a bottle, bringing in some guy who had some good year or years in the past but most other teams thought was pretty much done, a guy they hoped would be a stud - on the cheap. It almost never worked out, it almost always was a horrible pitching experience:
Eric Milton
Paul Wilson
Cory Lidle
Todd Van Poppel
Joey Hamilton
Shawn Estes
Everyone takes flyers on these kinds of guys, because every once in a while it works out. But the Reds weren't in a position to take a flyer - it HAD to work out, there wasn't much of a backup plan, which you'll recognize if you look at their pitching rosters.
So, I look at the trade as a bittersweet end of a very bad Reds management decision, at least as far as baseball on the field was considered. The Reds got their new ballpark, and they got Griffey's 600th homer, which they didn't even give the Reds' fans the benefit of watching at home. Ken Griffey did what he could, but it was an impossible deal to succeed at, and the injuries took away a lot as well. Good luck Ken, and I hope you get to a World Series some day as a player.