What The Blake Snell Trade Says

Last night's blockbuster has a few Red Sox connections

Last night at an obscenely late hour because teams think it is fun to ruin sports writers evenings, the Rays finalized a trade sending ace starting pitcher Blake Snell to San Diego for four prospects. This isn’t a Rays newsletter, but the Rays are direct competitors with the Red Sox and the most recent AL representative in the World Series. That makes it relevant to our interests. Also, the deal says interesting things about the Rays, about the nature of being a fan, about the Red Sox, and about baseball in 2021. Taking those in order…

What the Blake Snell trade says about the Rays

The Rays are heartless bastards. If you are a fan of the Rays, not a member of Rays Twitter or the Rays front office, but just a gal or guy who loves the team, this has to sting like heck. Snell was a home-grown star, and the ace on a World Series team, like, a second ago. God help me, I’m sorry, but I keep coming back to the Mookie Betts trade. There sure as heck are differences between the Snell deal and the Red Sox trading Mookie to the Dodgers, but there are also some similarities that you don’t have to squint too hard to see. And almost a year afterwards, I’m still gutted by the Betts trade. You could say that Rays fans are used to this, and maybe they are slightly more thick-skinned about these things than fans of other teams, or me, but this has to sting.

Beyond the pain inflicted on their fans, this is the kind of trade you make in a video game. Sign the ace pitcher to a five year contract that buys out a free agent season, then trade him a couple years later at the height of his value for a bunch of top prospects. Rinse, repeat. The farm system stays strong, and as long as you don’t miss on the prospects you get in return, there is a river of cheap talent that goes on basically forever. The only downsides are what you’re doing to your fans, and the risk of missing on the return. In this case, if the prospect gurus are correct, the Rays haven’t missed. Which brings us to…

What the Blake Snell trade says about fandom

I mean… ouch. Fandom can be brutal. Right? Winning is fun. Losing sucks, really really sucks, and most years there is only one winner. I say most times because there are times when a team takes a step forward in an unexpected way and that can be looked at as a success, even if the team didn’t hoist the final trophy. But for the Red Sox, with all the success they’ve had over the past two decades, there aren’t a lot of consolation prizes available. So it’s kinda winning or bust.

Or is it? The thing about fandom is that we grow to love certain players, and that love can last through losing seasons, through losing decades, through a lot. It can even continue after their careers end. You think about franchise-defining players, like Derek Jeter. Jeter is interesting because he came up, won Rookie of the Year, and the Yankees won the World Series. Two years later they won again, then again the next year, and then again the year after that. That was in 2000. Jeter played 14 more seasons and the Yankees won one more World Series during that time, but the die had already been cast. Yankees fans loved Jeter (with good reason, don’t get me wrong, he was a great player) and that wasn’t going to change. And not only did the Yankees fans get to watch the Yankees chase (and mostly fail to achieve) further World Series championships, they got to see a team with a player they loved on their roster. That familiarity has to have some value. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not nothing.

So back to Snell. The Rays may get to the World Series next season, may even win it. They’ll be good, even without Snell. But Rays fans won’t have Snell anymore, and that’s a shame. It is said that winning cures all, and that’s clearly what the Rays believe. It’s their guiding principle. But there is something other than winning, and that’s the familiarity and attachment fans form that comes from knowing the team, from following the players year after year after year.

Jeter made $265 million over his career, all of it from the Yankees, so maybe familiarity is a luxury the Rays can’t afford. That can be debated (Snell was under contract for three more seasons at a reasonable price so they didn’t exactly *have* to deal him now), but what can’t be debated is whether or not the Red Sox can afford it. They can. We are lucky in that way. It’s something we got with David Ortiz and Dustin Pedroia, and should have got with Jon Lester and Mookie. The ones that got away, or more accurately, the ones Boston shoved out the door, those whose careers we fans were robbed of watching in full, those are the ones that hurt. Not because it cost the Red Sox on the field, though it probably did, but because they were ours, ours in a good way. Then they weren’t.

So to answer the question directly, being a fan hurts. There are fun aspects to it, of course, or we wouldn’t do it (…right?) but watching your favorite guy in another team’s jersey sure as hell isn’t one of them. It’s like the rest of life in that way. People say we watch baseball and follow our favorite teams because it allows us to escape from the world. I’ve never really bought that line though. Baseball is intractably attached to the rest of the world, politically, socially, economically, racially, and on and on. The things we see in life, we see reflected in baseball, maybe not as brightly or in the way we want, but they are there. Baseball is a part of life, and not removed from it. That’s not to say watching a game can’t help you forget how much your job sucks, or that your back hurts, or that personal hardship you’re experiencing. It can, but that’s momentary. I don’t mean to say I’m not here for that, because I am. But at the end of the day baseball isn’t a fantasy world. It’s connected to our lives and our lives are connected to it. For better and worse.

What the Blake Snell trade says about the 2021 Red Sox

One of Boston’s prime competitors just traded away their best starting pitcher. That’s good! The Rays got four highly rated prospects back. That’s bad! Of the four it appears only one of them is major league ready though, so that means the Rays probably can’t field as good a team today as they could yesterday. Hooray for short categories.

What the Blake Snell trade says about baseball in 2021

A quick perusal of baseball twitter at this late hour shows many baseball fans and writers, regardless of who they feel won or lost the deal, hate this trade on principle. As a fan of neither team involved in the trade, I love it. Trading an ace pitcher for prospects is fascinating! This is objectively a fascinating trade. You don’t have to want to be a future GM to think so. The prospects are good, the big name is a Big Name, both teams are looking to contend next season… Wow!

Baseball isn’t perfect now, and I imagine we’ll cover that here at some point as well. But this is a fun trade. It’s big and impactful and fascinating! This is what passes for fun in baseball. Enjoy it, read about it, analyze it from every angle (or don’t!). Trades like this make me look forward to hearing what smart people are going to say about it, and that’s worthwhile right there.

Thanks for reading!