Playing Catch Up
I'm sorry but this is about Mookie Betts
The events of yesterday at our Capital have left me shaken. It’s shameful, infuriating, and scary that this has happened, and writing about baseball at this particular moment in our history feels small and insignificant and misdirected. I feel all that viscerally. But I committed to this, and because of that and the fact that I’m sitting here in my living room at 11:30pm wishing I could think of anything but the events of today, I have written this piece and I humbly submit it to you now for your enjoyment and edification. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide what to do with it.
Like a lot of ideas, Sox Outsider was a glimmer in my head long before it came to exist. Between the time this site began in my brain and when it began in reality, the Red Sox made a number of moves that have altered the complexion of the team for the long term. Since I didn’t have time to comment on them at the time, consider this my attempt to set the record straight on some items that look old but are still very relevant to the current direction of the franchise.
For today, let’s grab this hot potato.
Mookie Betts
As much as 2013 was a beautiful thing, it’s clear in retrospect (if not at the time) that the way the season played out was a sort of 101st percentile outcome. By no means am I discounting that championship or passing it all off to luck, but if you look at the rest of the Ben Cherington regime, 2013 sure stands out like a 100 story tower in a small New England town. In retrospect there were simply too many mistakes to continue down that road. The owners solution was as blunt an instrument as can be hired for a front office in Dave Dombrowski. Dombrowski did the three things he was expected to do when he arrived: he destroyed a very good farm system, he saddled the team with expensive long-term contracts, and he won a World Series.
It’s the third thing people focus on, and not without good reason. 2018 was wonderful, but it’s my believe that Dombrowski’s actions meant that 2018 was the end of things, a one-off, rather than the beginning of something long term. I wrote about Dombrowski for Sox Outsider and you can read my thoughts on him right here. The reason I’m bringing that back up again is because it was those long term contracts that led to the end of Dombrowski’s time in Boston. Those contracts, particularly the Price, Sale, Bogaerts, and Eovaldi deals, put Boston close to a $250 million payroll, a place the owners had no intention of living.
Whether or not they should live there is another matter, but clearly they decided the territory was too rich for them. This led to the Red Sox looking to firing Dombrowski and looking to shed money under new hire Chaim Bloom. Sale got hurt and his trade value was non-existent. Eovaldi was virtually untradable the moment pen met paper on his contract. Price was purchased at the top of the free agent market and for a number of reasons beyond just his extensive salary was no longer worth his salary. This meant that to remove salary the team would have to deal other players, and since they weren’t able to come to a long term contract extension with Mookie Betts, and since he had one year remaining before he could leave as a free agent with the Red Sox getting nothing in return, they dealt him.
I get all that. It makes sense. The problem was that things should never have gotten to that point. You don’t sign Sale and Bogaerts and Eovaldi and Price and then look down at your balance sheet and exclaim, “Well my stars! I seem to have spent well beyond my means!” When you are gifted with a player like Mookie Betts, you lock him up first to ensure you have enough money to do so. Boston knew Mookie’s contract situation, they knew his contract demands, and they still went and spent elsewhere first. Then when they were up against the luxury tax ceiling (something else they had to have seen coming), Mookie was about to reach free agency, and the team had locked itself into seasons of less productive players at exorbitant prices, they had painted themselves into a corner.
Of course they traded Mookie when they did. Bloom did well to get Alex Verdugo and two well-regarded prospects for only one year all while getting the Dodgers to take most of David Price’s deal as well. But you know why the Dodgers did that? Because Mookie Betts is one of the top two or three position players in baseball!
If the Angels called the Red Sox and said, “Will you give us two decent prospects for Mike Trout and the rest of Justin Upton’s contract?”, Boston’s reaction should be YEEEES and have the paperwork drawn up before the call ends. There are but a few truly magical players in baseball and Boston lucked into one in the fifth round (come on, if they knew he was that good, they’d have picked him four rounds earlier). They had a shot to keep him not just for the cheap years of his career, but for his entire Hall of Fame career!
This isn’t about money, exactly. The above is a justification for how the Red Sox could have kept Betts on their terms. You don’t want to spend over $245 million or whatever the figure is? Fine, then make sure you have enough to sign one of the great generational players who needs a contract before you give $68 million to Nate Eovaldi okay? But the truth is, I don’t really care about the money. The Boston Red Sox can afford both Nate Eovaldi and Mookie Betts and not have a problem. They could have kept Betts, signed him to a market rate contract extension, and been fine. They wouldn’t have been as profitable on paper but what is the value of a player like Betts playing his whole career in Boston? What is the value of making your team better not just now, but next year, the year after that, and five years, ten years, into the future? What is the value of kids everywhere seeing Betts and associating him with the Boston Red Sox?
There’s probably more but it’s late and the Capital is on fire. The point of all this is the prospects, the luxury tax, the contracts, the money, and everything else is just misdirection. The Red Sox had Mookie Betts, and they let him go. Not just let him go, but they sent him away. They had Mookie Betts and they sent him away. There’s no way to spin that as good. You can say it isn’t quite as bad as it could be. You could say they could win a lot of baseball games anyway. You could say they’ll be more profitable and their farm system is better. And you might be right about all of those. But it doesn’t matter.
They had Mookie Betts and they sent him away.
That’s a hard thing to come back from.
I will never get over the short-sighted thinking behind this move. Just a complete lack of understanding about why people care about baseball teams. What’s the long-term value lost when you trade away the biggest reason for young people to care about the team? How many hundred-thousand young fans will never care the same about the team? What will the consequences be when they grow up? Henry owed it to Sox fans AND his investors to take Mookie to free agency and to make the highest offer. That action would have been worth considerably more to the value of the franchise than Verdugo and prospects ever could, no matter how well they turn out. Having one of the coolest, most likable, most exciting, and best players on Earth on your team builds a long-term connection with your fans that even multiple moneyball titles over the next five years could never come close to touching. What an embarrassment.
😥