Trade

Amazon.com Inc. is introducing a service that lets customers trade in old computer games and receive a gift card, an effort to compete with GameStop Corp., which gets about a quarter of its revenue from sales of used video games. The service is still in the testing phase, Amazon.com said. Gamers can submit their games free by printing a label from the Amazon site. But the online retailer won't take everything, only games in good condition that are included on a growing roster of acceptable titles.

Woodie Held, 77, who played 14 years in the major leagues and was traded for future home run king Roger Maris, died Thursday in Dubois, Wyo., after a long bout with cancer, the Cleveland Indians announced. Held played for seven American League teams, including the 1966 World Series champion Baltimore Orioles and the California Angels in 1967 and '68. But he spent most of his career with Cleveland after being acquired June 15, 1958, from the Kansas City Athletics in a multiplayer trade for Maris.

I knew it was coming. You knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming. I just saw Bill Dwyre's Aug. 4 column that said there would be a Freeway World Series. So now it's official: There definitely will not be a Freeway World Series. The only thing that is certain is that if the Dodgers and Angels happen to be in first place at the same time, someone at The Times will write these ridiculous articles. Drew Sackheim New York Are Angels fans surprised about the team standing pat again at the trading deadline?

Francisco Liriano is a key with Kevin Slowey sidelined but can't get himself turned around, going 0-3 with a 6.23 ERA in his last four starts. It will be a surprise if the Twins get much strong work out of Carl Pavano. . . . Only two second basemen have hit 20-plus home runs in each of their first four big league seasons: new Hall of Famer Joe Gordon and the Marlins' Dan Uggla. . . . Mets GM Omar Minaya could be a fall guy for an injury-plagued year, which just keeps getting worse. If anyone loses a job in Cleveland, it probably will be Manager Eric Wedge, not GM Mark Shapiro.

A pennant race, not a Holliday In the off-season, the Colorado Rockies traded their best player, outfielder Matt Holliday, for a closer who had lost his job last season and a young outfielder who did not make the team out of spring training this year. It might be the trade of the year now. As the Dodgers head to Coors Field this week, trying to hold off the surging Rockies in the National League West, Carlos Gonzalez and Huston Street are starring in Colorado. Gonzalez, 23, the outfield prospect acquired by Oakland in the Dan Haren trade and flipped to Colorado one year later in the Holliday trade, hit home runs in four consecutive games last week.

Jimmy Johnson has a challenge for anyone who believes the Herschel Walker trade single-handedly turned the Dallas Cowboys into the dominant team of the 1990s. "Trace it," the former Cowboys coach said. "You can't do it." Twenty years ago Monday, the Cowboys sent Walker to the Minnesota Vikings for a bundle of players and draft picks in what is widely considered one of the biggest steals in NFL history, if not all of pro sports. The legend has grown because Dallas went from 1-15 to three-time Super Bowl champions in just a few years.

On the eve of his first Pacific trip since entering the White House, President Obama signaled Thursday that he would press Asian leaders to open up their markets and boost purchases of U.S. goods instead of relentlessly focusing on exporting more and more to American consumers. In remarks made before leaving Washington on the seven-day, four-nation trip, the president suggested that Asia must do more to "rebalance" the global economy by accepting more U.S. imports, increasing its own domestic consumption and relying less on Americans as buyers of last resort.

As Derek Shearer tells it, the first thing that struck his family upon arriving in Finland--a Nordic country of which at least a third is within the Arctic Circle--is how much it's like Southern California. "We came in the summer when people were on roller-blades skating along the waterfront. They collect classic American cars here and we saw a lot of '50s Chevies," Shearer recalled recently.