I know Mookie wants to go to FA, but if he can secure the kind of deal he wants now, he might be smart to do so. A lot of players who switch teams don't always have the best transition; and it's not like he is going to a more hitter friendly park. It would be a shame for him if after all this, he went out there and hit like .276 with 20 HRs and 72 RBIs.
Like, of course he will still be good and will get a monstrous contract either way, but he got away from the team who didn't want to pay him the big bucks and is now on a team that most certainly will do everything they can to keep him.
This would be absolutely hilarious.
Man its really weird to have fans buy into the idea that the mega rich owners need to cut salary to avoid luxury tax payments rather than try to win. Even buying into the idea he was never coming back, then you keep him and contend this year and trade him at the deadline if you are out of it. Try to win!
Red Sox re-branding to the Pirates operational model, profits > winning.
What is the point of sports if your team doesn't even want the second best player in baseball on its team for fear of not raking in quite as much profit.
What good reason is there to believe they would realistically contend next year? Without getting into the 2018 allegations, almost the entire roster exceeded expectations (why there was severe regression is debatable, but let’s wait on the investigation for that).
Do you think, even with Mookie, that the 2020 team would play closer to the 2019 or 2018 teams? I vote the former.
So, if they have good intel (for whatever reason) that they can’t retain Betts after this upcoming season, you have to move him. You couldn’t move him after they fell out of contention last season, and waiting til the summer deadline is also too risky.
Now whether this was truly the best offer they could get, that’s the real question. It seems like an bad deal considering they are eating so much of Price’s contract. He wasn’t awful last season, so paying $16M per for 3 years (half his remaining contract) doesn’t seem quite the albatross it’s made out to be.
Plenty of teams trade away their superstars more in fear of losing them for nothing. I know they cited the luxury tax many times, but I also think they believe he would’ve left regardless.
They could have easily waited till the trade deadline to move him and tried to win. The fact that they didn't' showed that the priority wasn't prospects, but how much money could they squeeze out with him.
You build around 27 year old MVP players who are on HoF trajectories, you don't use them to dump contracts. The Red Sox weren't a hopelessly bad team that needed to move on! They were an above .500 squad with a solid run differential.
Its amazing to me that so many here are resigned to some sort of rebuild instead of contending for the playoffs this upcoming season. Owners being cheap is not okay, the Red Sox aren't the freakin Pittsburgh Pirates.
Rotation: Even with a healthy Sale and Eovaldi, the rotation is nothing great, and I'm confident that Sale and Eovaldi
will not stay healthy this season.
Bullpen: Was mostly a mess last season, and as of now, at least, the Sox haven't done anything to address that.
Lineup: They really have only 3 consistently good, dangerous hitters: Bogaerts, Devers, and Martinez. Benny isn't panning out at the plate (a measly 13 homers during last year's historic "season of the home run"), Jackie mostly stinks as a hitter, Verdugo is likely a huge downgrade from Mookie, and Moreland and Chavis are average.
Plus, at this late stage of the offseason, it's going to be pretty tough to significantly upgrade anything.
Conclusion: I think it's much more likely that the Sox miss the playoffs than make them. Last year a lot of fans kept saying, "But this is nearly the same team that won the previous World Series!", but I really have to wonder whether 2018 was the anomaly and 2019 was a truer representation of this team's overall ability.