After 12 championship parades over the last two decades, Boston is suddenly reeling. Days after a Super Bowl was somehow staged without the New England Patriots playing in it, and with quarterback Tom Brady, the face of their franchise, in limbo, the city received news that was widely anticipated — yet still felt like a kick in the pants.
The Red Sox agreed to trade Mookie Betts, one of the best players in the team’s 120-year history, to the Los Angeles Dodgers late on Tuesday in a move that reeked of an old-fashioned, midmarket salary dump.
The move came amid a radical and rapid transition for the Red Sox, who enter 2020 in disarray despite being less than 16 months removed from a World Series title. Gone are Betts, their top position player, and David Price, arguably their best pitcher. They fired Dave Dombrowski, their general manager, in September, less than a year after he helped deliver a championship. Craziest and perhaps most concerning of all, the Red Sox still do not have a manager just days before the start of spring training, with Alex Cora having been let go over his role in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal.
By any measure, the proverbial white flag has been raised atop Fenway Park — at least for a year or so.
Now the Red Sox must convince disgruntled fans that their club will be back to prominence soon enough after engaging in the kind of creative destruction that other teams — including the Yankees in 2016 — have used to reconfigure their teams for years to come.
The deal, according to multiple reports, will send Betts and Price to the Dodgers in a three-team trade. Los Angeles will send outfielder Alex Verdugo, 23, to Boston and will also ship the veteran pitcher Kenta Maeda, 31, to the Minnesota Twins. Minnesota will give the hard-throwing, 21-year-old Venezuelan pitcher Brusdar Graterol to Boston. The Red Sox will also pay about half of the salary remaining on Price’s contract.
For those Bostonians old enough to remember, the trade evoked memories of letting Carlton Fisk walk away in free agency after the 1980 season; of refusing to pay Roger Clemens and Mo Vaughn in the 1990s; and of trading Nomar Garciaparra in 2004. Not re-signing Clemens proved to be a mistake. There was never any regret in letting Vaughn go, and a straight line can be drawn to Boston winning its first World Series in 86 years from the decision to trade Garciaparra three months earlier.
But all of those players were at least 30 when they departed. Betts will not turn 28 until October. At that point, he will presumably be competing in the playoffs for the Dodgers, who now have a fearsome lineup highlighted by Betts, the 2018 American League Most Valuable Player, and Cody Bellinger, the 2019 National League M.V.P.
Plus, the Dodgers will have Price, a good, veteran left-handed pitcher who helped lead the Sox to the 2018 World Series championship. But Price, 34, was never a good fit in Boston and is owed $96 million over the next three years.
For the Dodgers, whose recent postseason failures included losing in the World Series in 2017 (to the Houston Astros) and 2018 (to Boston) and in an N.L. division series in 2019, the moves reaffirmed their ambition to finally win their first title since 1988 — payroll tax be damned. They simply leveraged Boston’s desire to move the players before the season.
The preamble to the deal is that Boston had determined it would not sign Betts to an extension before he became eligible for free agency after this season. As one of the richest teams in baseball, the Red Sox certainly have the financial wherewithal to sign Betts. They just elected not to, instead striving to get under the $208 million payroll threshold for M.L.B.’s punitive luxury tax.
News media reports said the Red Sox offered Betts a 10-year deal worth close to $300 million, and Betts countered by asking for 12 years and $420 million. The gulf between those two figures, $120 million, is the same amount that the Red Sox are paying their superb shortstop, Xander Bogaerts, over the next six years.
Fans in Boston are mocking their team, calling it Tampa Bay North and the Boston Rays — references to the Tampa Bay Rays, a small-market team that has been making trades of this kind for years because it would be expensive to keep high-profile players.
The reason Bostonians picked that specific small-market team to inflame their sarcasm — and not the Pirates or Royals, for example — is Chaim Bloom, the Red Sox’s new general manager. The moment he was hired away from Tampa Bay last fall, it was a signal that the team wanted to do things more strategically than it had under Dombrowski, who powered the Red Sox to the 2018 title by depleting Boston’s farm system to acquire high-priced veteran talent.
Betts’ departure is the cost of those decisions, and Bloom must now navigate the fallout. In Tampa, Bloom was part of the front office that traded away stars like Evan Longoria, Chris Archer, Wil Myers and Price, all with mixed results. But he helped make the Rays into a surprising and pesky competitor the last few years, despite their meager payroll.
Still, many Boston fans do not want to hear about financial considerations, and they have already begun criticizing the ownership team of John Henry and Tom Werner for their pivot to penny-pinching. It is a drastic change in public perception, considering that the Henry-Werner tenure brought about the end of the Red Sox’s World Series title drought — the first of four Boston titles this century, more than any other team.
The third of those came in 2013, one year after Boston traded Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford — three grumbling, overpriced players — to the Dodgers.
Few in Boston were sorry to see that trio go. But fans adored Betts, a homegrown player on a Hall of Fame trajectory, who seemed to embrace playing and living in Boston.
Fans are angry about it. The prospect of waiting a whole year or two before the next parade is not sitting well in Boston.