The failures in this past offseason did not end with the Houston Astros or Rob Manfred, and I propose that the Boston Red Sox in fact managed the extremely difficult task of putting together a worse offseason performance than either of those epic failures. Where to even begin? Since the first two parts of this series discuss use of video in violation of MLB’s rules, let’s start there. In Part 2 of this series I discussed how the investigation into the Red Sox for improper use of the video replay room is disconcerting to me. I do not like the way they are being singled out and used as a scapegoat in an attempt to clean up the game while saving face for the league and the 28 other teams who are essentially being declared pure and innocent in spite of credible public accusations and significant circumstantial evidence. With all that being said, what a bunch of morons! I want to give them a pass for their behavior. I want to say, “well, when Alex Cora came over in 2018, he brought with him irrefutable proof that the Astros cheated them out of a chance at the 2017 World Series. Why shouldn’t they have broken the rules to level the playing field in 2018?”. I just can’t get there. Some of the stuff I’ve been reading about how multiple teams complained to MLB about the Astros cheating long before the investigation took place makes it more tempting, but still, the bottom line is that players with integrity don’t break the rules.
I may be jumping the gun here as many Red Sox players have gone on record clearly and emphatically stating that they broke no rules. I’d like very much to believe them, but it’s tough. I could maybe believe that they didn’t know they were breaking the rules, after all, what even are the rules about what you’re allowed to watch in the replay room? I have never seen a clear description of what the players are supposed to not be doing, so it is plausible that they didn’t know either. It’s not like they were watching the signs on a real-time video feed and banging on a trash can to let the batter know what was coming or something. Regardless, it’s up to the team as a whole to play the game the right way, and I’m expecting Rob Manfred to tell us in the next few days that in Boston, that wasn’t happening.
It’s not like they were babes in the woods here. MLB had already admonished them for the Apple watch incident in 2017, and Mr. Cora was clearly a seasoned pro when it came to cheating by the time he arrived in Boston. I think that more than anything has caused Manfred to single out the Sox as his secondary scapegoat. If 15 other teams were breaking the video room rules and Manfred wanted to blame it all on one of them, who better than the team headed up by the guy he fingered as the ringleader of the 2017 Astros scheme?
Regardless of whatever infractions they may or may not have committed, I’ve been pretty appalled at the the way they have handled the scandal as a whole. Rolling out two franchise icons in David Ortiz and Pedro Martinez to say disparaging things about Mike Fiers is awful. I don’t know if those guys made those comments on their own, but especially in Ortiz’s case, it felt very much to me like he was acting as a puppet of the front office. He toed the party line on every other topic in that press conference, and that fact leads me to believe that the Sox front office wants everyone to think Mike Fiers is a horrible teammate and a snitching back-stabber who broke the sacred clubhouse code. Quite frankly I don’t care where the message came from, it is a terrible message. It is terrible to have it associated with the Red Sox – especially when they are currently under investigation themselves for a similar offense. Would it have been even more courageous of Fiers to call up Ken Rosenthal and dish him the dirt in August of 2017? Sure, I don’t think anyone would argue that, but calling the guy anything other than a hero who is sacrificing himself to better the game for everyone is something I will never condone. It takes an awful lot of courage to own up to a mistake like the one Fiers made, and I can’t find fault with it taking him a little bit of time to work up said courage. Apologizing is tough, and I’m sure he had a major fear of exactly the type of backlash dished out by Papi and Petey – being branded as a bad teammate and a snitch.
Enough about stealing signs, because to me, any cheating that may have occurred as well as the subsequent mishandling of the aftermath pales in comparison to the biggest failure the Red Sox had in this offseason, and maybe any offseason in their rich history. That failure is the failure to keep Mookie Betts in a Red Sox uniform for the duration of his career. It is simply baffling to me that any major league team would let a player like Betts leave under any circumstances. The fine folks over at The Ringer wrote some great content on this topic that will help me to keep my piece short(er). I’ll simply refer you to them so you can learn about how no player as good and young as Mookie has ever been traded before – and then I’ll let them show you how measly the luxury tax penalty savings are for the billionaire owners of the Sox. Spoiler alert, if you don’t feel like digging through the whole math breakdown, getting rid of Mookie allows nothing more than some extra cash into the pocket of John Henry, and said cash compared to his net worth is the equivalent of an average-income person like me pocketing an extra $360/year.
Teams simply don’t let players of Mookie’s caliber walk away. There is a big difference between handing out a massive contract to a 32-year-old Albert Pujols that will pay him into his mid-40s and locking up a guy like Trout, Scherzer, or Betts who is a super-star, HOF-trajectory player entering the prime of his career. The value to an organization of having a home-grown Hall of Famer is enormous, and developing such a talent internally is both extremely rare and extremely special. Given that the Red Sox organization basically spent an entire century apologizing to fans for the last time the owner sold an all-time great to line his pockets, you’d think the current “stewards” would be a little more sensitive to the issue. It is one thing for a team like the Indians who’s max payroll is around $100MM to balk at allocating over a third of that budget to a guy like Lindor, but it is another thing entirely for the Red Sox, one of MLB’s biggest spenders who hand out huge paychecks like candy to let Betts walk away over the luxury tax that the MLB owners collectively designed to not be especially harsh.
The Red Sox botched their extension negotiations as well as the subsequent free agency process with Jon Lester, and that mistake forced them into the situation that lead to the supposed financial constraints that caused Mookie’s departure. They are not going to right the ship and compete in the long term by letting one of the top 3 players in the sport go play somewhere else, especially given the fact that it is nearly inevitable that in the next two years the Sox will sign some other inferior player to a Mookie-sized contract. If $420MM/12 is too much for Betts, how am I supposed to be sold on $330/10 for George Springer being a good idea?
All those things are about the future of the franchise in 2021 and beyond. Looking at the immediate in 2020, things are even worse. Ever since the Mookie trade went through, I have heard nothing but how the Sox have a great offense and still have the ability to compete for a Wild Card spot. I couldn’t agree more about the current talent remaining on the Sox being pretty fantastic, but if everyone is so gung-ho about the current roster, why would we not want to have an MVP and a Cy Young award winner on the roster along with everyone else? Two players of that caliber can be the difference between drinking champagne and an October 1st tee time, and in this case that is exactly what I expect to happen. While I would disagree, I can certainly hear the argument that even with Mookie and Price in the fold that the team wasn’t a true World Series contender and so getting some prospects for Mookie instead of having him “walk for nothing”, but that is why you make him a market-value extension offer and avoid the issue entirely. A franchise worth $6.6 billion dollars should be able to pay Mookie however much he’d like, and while players that command salaries like Mookie are not feasible for many teams that have limited revenue, the numbers show time and again that on a per-dollar basis, these deals are team-friendly bargains for those that can absorb the pure dollar volume. Mookie is projected to more than double the value of his contract for at least 4 or 5 seasons, which makes it a no-brainer to absorb any luxury tax penalties and to overpay a little bit on the back-end for the final seasons where his production will inevitably diminish.
The failure to ensure that Mookie’s HOF plaque has a Red Sox cap on it is atrocious, and the way they have handled each step of the process has been almost as bad. It started towards the very end of the 2019 season on NESN, when guest analysts from Herny’s own Boston Globe came into the booth to tell us how Mookie is a greedy scumbag and that it was in the best interest of the team to “get something back for him now before he walks for nothing”. That trend continued through the off-season, with the “leak” of the post-2018 contract negotiations attempting to paint Mookie as greedy once again, as well as a string of articles comparing a potential Mookie extension to Pujols’ bloated mega-deal and showing how because of his size that it is likely that he’s going to turn into a crippled singles hitter in a year or two. It saddens me that the Red Sox would do something like that, and saddens me more that some of the fans are buying into it.
It is obvious to me that the press spin is nothing but smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that John Herny would rather have a few extra millions than have the best homegrown Sox player since Yaztremski put number 50 up on the right field deck. We heard about how they weren’t shopping Mookie, but maybe they would consider it if an amazing offer of talent that would improve the team overall came along. The Sox lost any chance of selling me on that narrative when they made it 100% clear that they didn’t care in the least which prospects came back. If this deal was really about acquiring top talent, they would have either negotiated for Downs in the first place, or backed off the deal when Graterol’s medical reports didn’t live up to expectations. They can say whatever they want, but their actions make it completely transparent that the only thing they cared about acquiring in this trade was “financial flexibility”, and that the players coming back were of little consequence. They clearly are all of little consequence, as the only player with serious potential to make an above-replacement level impact on the field (Graterol) is now also on the Dodgers along with Price and Betts. I don’t know why they would have taken Verdugo, he is damaged goods both on and off the field that wouldn’t even be all that good even if they weren’t damaged. I have followed him very closely for the last couple seasons, and my suspicion is that the Dodgers were nearly as anxious to rid themselves of Verdugo as they were to acquire Price, Betts, and enough cash to fund Chaim Bloom’s entire 2019 Rays payroll. I know significantly less about Downs, but his name certainly isn’t going to do him any favors with the Boston crowd, and as a shortstop only a year or two away from the bigs, his path seems to be blocked by a certain player who we can only hope will be around for a while. I get that he can be moved to second base or the outfield, but the cynical part of me assumes he is just an insurance policy in case Xander decides that like Mookie he would like to earn somewhere in the vicinity of market value for his services and opts out of his outrageously team-friendly deal. If Mookie isn’t good enough to pay market value to, I can’t see any way they come up with it for Bogaerts.
The failures didn’t end with letting Mookie leave or the near-worthless return they got back. The aftermath of how they’ve handled the media has made the Astros look like PR whiz-kids. I’m not naive enough to think that they didn’t anticipate significant backlash, but I think it is possible that they slightly underestimated it. The statement to the fans came out, and then when that wasn’t good enough, the top brass held a press conference to attempt to quell the unhappiness from the fans. It couldn’t have gone any worse, somewhere between comparing Mookie to schlubs like Ellsbury and the hurt/aging version of Nomar and bemoaning the fact that players have gained the right to not work as indentured servants, he completely lost me – and I assume every other Red Sox fan with a pulse. Not to mention not even bothering to mention the Cy Young award winner (and should-be World Series MVP) who not only is also better than most of the players Henry said were tough to watch leave, but additionally will still take up a huge chunk of the team’s payroll while striking batters out in the NL West instead! I think John Henry needs to take a hint from the Yankees on these press conferences about letting HOF-trajectory superstars walk out the door over a few million dollars – they don’t have them.
If there were any lingering questions that Henry made the “tough” decision to deprive Red Sox fans of the caliber of player they wait decades to see developed in the system over a few bucks, the presser did at least serve to eliminate them. You’d think they couldn’t dig the hole any deeper, but they decided that if Henry couldn’t put any salve on the wound that they would bring out the big guns. David Ortiz magically popped up wanting to talk to the press about what a great trade it was! Big Papi has a lifetime pass from me for anything he does or might do in the future, but I was still appalled by his words. Starting with mouth-piecing for Henry on the Betts trade in what was to me another transparent effort to actually sell a few 2020 tickets and then heading right into calling Mike Fiers a snitch, much as I love the guy, I agree with his stances there about as much as I agree with Curt Schilling’s political views. Sorry to tell you Big Papi, but as good as you were, “we won without me” doesn’t cut it when Mookie is not only way better than you ever were, but is also the main reason that we managed to win without you. If John Henry had sold you off for a bag of balls after the 2006 season, I don’t think that we would have won without you in 2007 or 2013. It was probably a simple oversight on Henry’s part to not include him in the extensive list of departing players, but I do seem to vaguely remember another time we got rid of a superstar in his prime hot on the heels of the ’18 World Series win. While the first six years of Ruth’s career look like weak sauce compared to Mookie’s first six seasons, it’s the most equivalent situation I could find – and we didn’t win again for 86 years.
While it didn’t help with me, I do think that in terms of pacifying the fans, the Ortiz gambit has worked the best so far. The out-and-out revolt from the fans will not happen, people will be packing Fenway again in 2020, and soon enough Sox fans will get overexcited about George Springer or whoever the Red Sox deem worthy of a massive contract. Mookie will go into the Hall wearing the cap of whatever team gets the bargain of a lifetime by inking him to a deal this offseason, and I will never forget what a terrible failure for the entire Red Sox organization this mess has been. I will end this with a headline I spotted that sums up how I feel quite well – why even bother owning a baseball team in the first place if you’re not going to keep Mookie Betts? I’ll follow it up with a question I’ve been asking myself since the trade went through – why even bother following a baseball team that won’t keep a player like Mookie Betts?
