The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. 11, No. 149
February 5, 2020
The Mookie Betts trade was a baseball trade.
It wasn’t the first or best option. As I wrote three months ago, a primary goal of any baseball team is developing a player the caliber of Mookie Betts. Boston’s first choice should have been to sign Betts to a contract reflecting his performance, somewhere south of what Mike Trout is getting from the Angels. Since I wrote that, however, the gap between Betts and the Red Sox seems to have grown. Even granting little credence to public reports of what the Red Sox offered and what Betts wanted, this winter’s free-agent activity, in which two players signed for at least $35 million a year, changed the landscape of Betts’s impending free agency. Betts has always seemed to be leaning towards hitting the market, and this winter’s events made the market more attractive.
In addition, one of this winter's deals made Boston’s path to a division title in 2020 that much harder. The Red Sox finished last season 19 games behind the Yankees and 12 games out of a wild-card berth. Through their own inaction, driven by a market that didn’t quite fit their needs, a desire to stop paying penalties for investing in their product, and front-office changes, they hadn’t done anything to close those gaps on their own. Meanwhile, the Yankees signed Gerrit Cole. A realistic view of the 2020 Red Sox, even with Betts and the rest of a championship-caliber core, placed them as a good wild-card contender needing a lot of things to go right to come anywhere close to a division title.
To pursue the goal of the Coin Flip Game, the Red Sox would have to incur some of the harshest penalties in the CBA, a 50% base tax rate and, likely as not, the 12 percent surtax for being $20 million over the threshold. It’s not enough to say, “They’re rich, they can afford it.” This isn’t a morality play. That’s an additional $20 or so million on top of a $240 million payroll on top of $26 million paid in tax the last two years, all to chase a wild-card berth.
The Red Sox traded Mookie Betts and David Price rather than do that. Again, it’s not what I would have done, but it’s a reasonable choice given their circumstances. Actually, let me rephrase; the Red Sox traded one year of Mookie Betts and three years of David Price. They didn’t have the rights to employ Betts after that. Price is a complicating factor, but it seems reasonable to say that Price at 34, coming off his second partial season in three years, owed $96 million over the next three years, wasn’t the best investment for the Sox. Is paying $48 million to not have him pitch for you much better? That’s probably less defensible than trading Betts is, but once you’ve decided to trade Betts, then pushing to get well below the tax threshold comes into play.
Their return for Betts is being dismissed as inadequate. I happen to like the players they got back. Alex Verdugo today isn’t as good as Betts was at 23, and he’s also had a choppier path to playing time given the Dodgers’ depth. Verdugo was a top-50 prospect coming into 2018 and 2019. As a 21-year-old in Triple-A, he hit .314 with more walks than strikeouts. Last year he hit .294/.342/.475 with very good defensive numbers in right field. It was a three-win season in just 106 games, and while Verudgo isn’t likely to match Betts’s 2020 performance, the gap is likely to be more like two or three wins (say, seven versus four) than it is five or six. Verdugo is a hell of a player, capable of being a core contributor on a great team.
Similarly, Brusdar Graterol could step in and match Price’s value in the short term. A starting pitcher in name, Graterol, 21, may not be long for that role. He throws extremely hard and could step into the Boston bullpen and be the power arm they’ve been looking for. He’s not likely to provide 100 innings in 2020 in any role, but on a per-inning basis he could be a very strong contributor. He might, might, be more valuable than Price in 2020, closing the short-term hit of this trade.
Just for 2020, this trade doesn’t make the Red Sox a lot worse. It makes them a little worse, albeit in a range where the marginal wins they’re giving up affect their wild-card chances. It caps their ceiling while saving them perhaps $60 million in salary and tax payments, as well as resetting their penalty structure in future years. The Red Sox only traded 2020 Mookie Betts; they didn’t have the 2021-2028 version. Evaluating this trade as if they did, as if employing that version was simply a matter of choice, is an error.
The idea underlying the reaction to this trade, that the Red Sox are cheap, is a ludicrous position, contrary to every available fact. John Henry bought the Red Sox in 2002. In the 18 seasons he’s owned the team, the Red Sox have finished in the top five in payroll in all but one. (Their payroll was sixth in 2017.) Under Henry the Red Sox have won four World Series, which is four more than they’d won in the 85 years before he showed up. Only the Yankees and Dodgers have paid more in player tax than the Red Sox have. The Red Sox spent so much money on their championship team that they incurred the penalties against their draft that are buried deep in the CBA. Moreover, under each successive CBA, the Red Sox have been asked to hand over more of the money they generate to teams like the Pirates and Marlins, who pocket it, and teams like the Rays and Twins, who use it to beat them.
If anything, the Red Sox have been beaten up when they do spend money. You can still hear the echoes of the laughter over the Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez contracts. The David Price deal was largely considered an expensive mistake until Price turned into Whitey Ford in October 2018. The signing of Nathan Eovaldi looks like it could be dead money. The Chris Sale extension is already underwater and it hasn’t started yet. The Red Sox have spent more than a billion dollars on players in just the last five years.
I don’t think it’s unfair to say “enough.” John Henry has been one of the best owners in baseball for nearly 20 years, and while I disagree with the tack he and Chaim Bloom took here, it’s hardly enough to erase those years, those four titles, those billions.
Not everything is class warfare.
Bob Nutting is cheap. Larry Dolan is cheap. The late David Glass, for almost the entirety of his time in baseball, was cheap. John Henry? Come on.
-
For the Dodgers, this trade is an exercise in lily-gilding. In Betts, they get the second-best player in baseball for a year, widening the gap between L.A. and the rest of a division they’ve owned for seven years. As mentioned above, the sabermetric gain is less than it will appear in the headlines because Alex Verdugo is a very good player. Betts has a higher upside and floor, however. In trading Kenta Maeda for Price, essentially, the Dodgers may even take a small performance hit. The error bars around 2020 David Price are extremely wide, but his contract, moreso than his corpus or his work product, was what the Dodgers traded for to make this deal work.
The unfortunate part of this deal is that it will ratchet up expectations for the Dodgers in October. Even adding Betts and Price doesn’t much change their chances to win a best-of-five or best-of-seven against another good team in the playoffs. That’s simply not the way baseball works. I mean, two years ago, the Red Sox won the World Series thanks to Price, then among the more unpopular men in Boston, having a great month while AL MVP Betts hit .210. There’s no changing the math of baseball -- short series are coin flips -- but that won’t register with most fans or media eight months from now. The Dodgers are now expected to win the World Series, and no amount of regular-season dominance will make people care if they do not.
-
The Twins made an upside-for-floor move in trading Graterol for Maeda. Graterol has a huge arm and reached the majors late last season. He’s extremely high-risk, especially as a starting pitcher. As a reliever, he could step in this year and be effective, but the Twins need the volume of innings more than they need the leveraged ones, given the talent on hand. Maeda can step in behind Jose Berrios and Jake Odorizzi as an upgrade in the #3 slot over Homer Bailey, Jhoulys Chacin, and even the suspended Michael Pineda. There’s some chance they eventually miss Graterol, but they’re trying to win right now, in what may be the last season before the White Sox overtake them.
