Revisiting the Mookie Betts Trade

That Harbinger of Doom

The Francisco Lindor trade seems like a good opportunity to revisit its spiritual predecessor: last year’s Mookie Betts trade. This trade was the biggest non-pandemic story of the last baseball season: one of the best two players in baseball changing teams, leagues, and coasts, and finally leading the Dodgers to the World Series.

But I still don’t think it’s been fully appreciated what a pivotal moment it was for the league. If anything, the trade now looks slightly better for Boston than it did at the time, since Alex Verdugo had such a good season for the Red Sox. And even though Betts decided not to test free agency after all, that decision was likely influenced by the pandemic, and his extension with Los Angeles was exactly the kind of megadeal Boston was worried about having to match to sign him.

So the Betts trade sort of looks like the kind of trade you see all the time in sports: faced with losing a superstar in free agency, a stagnant or struggling franchise trade him for a bunch of assets that may or may not pay off down the line. It is always a little disappointing to have to trade a star player in a deal like this, but it’s part of the sport—as the resignation from many Cleveland fans to the Lindor deals shows.

Except that’s not quite what the Betts deal was, for a number of reasons:

1) Boston was GOOD. – It’s easy to forget this, now that the Red Sox finished 2020 in last place, and were 19 games back in the AL East in 2019. But it’s not like they were some moribund, noncompetitive team. They won the World Series in 2018. And it was not a fluke: They won 108 regular season games and had a dominant postseason run. They had the league’s MVP and, until Chris Sale got hurt in August, the frontrunner for Cy Young. And even though 2019 was a tough year for them, they still won 84 games.

That same roster was more or less intact before the Red Sox traded Betts. And it was set up to contend for the foreseeable future: Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers were young stars coming off the best seasons of their respective careers; JD Martinez and Andrew Benintendi were still fixtures of the lineup; David Price and Chris Sale had both had rough seasons, but were signed to long-term deals and looked positioned to bounce back from injuries.

It’s one thing to trade a star for prospects when you are a few years away from having a competitive team; the timeline of the prospects’ development might better match with your window of competition, even if they aren’t as good as the star you traded. But trading Betts (and Price, who also went to Los Angeles in the deal) is what removed Boston from competition.

2) Mookie Betts was also good for Boston. – There are times when a very good player gets traded because, even though they are very good, they are not the best fit for that team at that moment. Maybe it’s because the team has multiple stars, and won’t be able to commit long-term deals to all of them, like when the Athletics signed Eric Chavez over Miguel Tejada. Or maybe it’s because there’s a young star ready to take over the position, like when the Phillies traded Jim Thome to make room for Ryan Howard. Or maybe a player has just worn out his welcome with a franchise or a city and needs a change, like when the Dodgers traded Yasiel Puig.

But none of that applies to Betts. He had already been the best player on a World Series winning Boston team, and he was beloved by the city. He was still arguably the best player in all of baseball, and the Red Sox had no obvious internal replacement for him in the outfield. He also seemed to like playing in Boston. In short, there was simply no way that trading Betts improved Boston in the short term or the long term.  

3) Boston has money – Just two years before trading Betts, they signed JD Martinez for $110 million. A year later, they gave Bogaerts a $132 million extension. Then they signed Nathan Eovaldi for $68 million. The Red Sox, in other words, are not a small market team. They are, in fact, routinely among the highest payrolls in baseball. In 2018 and 2019, they were #1.

It’s true that their money is not infinite, but the point is that this is not a team that has to worry about being outbid in free agency. If they want to sign someone, they have the resources to do so. Perhaps they were hemmed in by the big spending in the 2018 and 2019 seasons, but Betts’ free agency was foreseeable. While he wanted to test free agency, the fact that he ultimately did sign an extension shows he was open to one for the right price.

And this is really what makes the Betts trade such a scary harbinger. It’s not that the Red Sox couldn’t afford to sign Betts, but that they just chose not to. They decided that keeping their star player and contending didn’t make as much financial sense as trading him and being bad. The message seems to be that if teams cannot dictate terms to players, they would rather trade even a star like Betts than pay him fairly. Betts ultimately got his money, but the new Lindor trade shows it was not an anomalous trade.

At first glance, Lindor’s deal seems closer to the traditional model: Cleveland has never been a big-spending team, and has traded a bunch of stars in recent years: Corey Kluber, Trevor Bauer, and Mike Clevinger. But this one feels different. Trading Lindor and Carlos Carrasco cuts their team payroll nearly in half. It’s $100 million lower than it was three years ago. And while Cleveland has managed to stay competitive through other star-dumping trades, making the playoffs in four of the last five seasons, they now seem firmly outside of the playoff hunt: There are only five players on their roster making more than the league minimum.

This is different. Teams used to avoid big contracts because being so committed to one player could keep small market teams out of contention, like when the Texas Rangers signed Alex Rodriguez or when the Orioles have to trot out Chris Davis. But these are teams that are choosing not to contend because they’d rather be frugal and lose than pay fairly and win. It’s a weird kind of wage theft, and it will doom baseball if it’s not addressed.