Betts, Price reportedly heading to Dodgers
Wealthy Red Sox deal superstar to avoid luxury tax
Mookie Betts had 22 hits against the Toronto Blue Jays last season in 18 games, and scored 23 runs. The Red Sox outfielder had seven extra-base hits, including four homers, which is how you end up with a gaudy 1.031 OPS against the Jays. He beat them like a trash can in the Houston dugout.
But with his departure from the American League East now done according to late-night reports, Jays fans should be worried. As should those throughout baseball.
The Boston Red Sox have reportedly agreed to trade superstar right fielder Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers, ESPN’S Jeff Passan reported Tuesday night.
Reports said pitcher David Price is included in the megadeal, which is pending a review of medical information. And the Minnesota Twins are involved as a third team.
What does it say about your sport when a rich team doesn’t want to pay market value for a recent MVP and World Series champion in the prime of his career? It says your sport is broken.
There was a brief pause from baseball’s existential crisis earlier this off-season. Following two straight winters in which more teams were interested in shedding salary and losing games than spending money in the hopes of winning, there was an actual bidding war for the top free agents. Anthony Rendon, Gerrit Cole and Stephen Strasburg made more than Us$800-million combined, so for the first time in a while baseball looked like other pro leagues in that multiple teams thought it was a good idea to try to pay elite players a lot of money to join them. Even the Blue Jays splashed millions on pitcher Hyun-jin Ryu, once the front office realized that their competitors had decided to be not quite so miserly.
But now, this. Betts has been the subject of trade rumours for some time, as he will be a free agent after the 2020 season. Barring a disastrous season, he will get a monster contract, but the idea that the Red Sox would ship him away before that point always seemed a little ludicrous.
And yet, the Red Sox are apparently serious about this. The word from owner John Henry is that he does not want Boston to be a luxury-tax team this season, and with the Sox about Us$25-million over the threshold, even a sports columnist can do the math that says Betts’ Us$27-million salary would do the trick. Recent reports have said a trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers or San Diego Padres is most likely.
The idea of trading a player, even a star, to get under a salary cap or a luxury tax is common enough. But baseball’s grand trick has been to convince everyone that its luxury tax is an onerous measure that few teams can afford. The Sox were about Us$35-million above the threshold last season. Fines escalate above a series of such thresholds, but Boston’s total tax bill was about Us$12-million. That is Tanner Roark money.
The fines would be steeper in 2020 under repeat-offender provisions, but even still the Red Sox would be looking at a tax bill of about $11-million if they kept Betts. Considering that they will pay Pablo Sandoval, who hasn’t played for them since 2017, Us$5-million, that bill doesn’t seem terribly burdensome.
Baseball’s system makes it seem like a team like Boston is forced to shed salary to get under the tax and reset those repeat-offender tax escalations, when they could easily go on paying it year after year. Particularly galling is that the Sox would prioritize tax evasion over keeping a franchise cornerstone like Betts. Because he is that. The AL MVP in 2018, his production dipped a bit last year, but he still led the league in runs and was a top-five position player in Wins Above Replacement.
While it might be fun for Jays fans to watch as a rival casts aside an MVP candidate to save money that they don’t need to save, the normalization of that kind of move should have them worried. What happens when the good young players on your team finally start making big money? The best-case scenario for the Jays is that their infield evolves into a bunch of all-stars. Would they pay them all? Or would they note, with a rueful shake of the head, that sometimes you have to make tough decisions.
Look, the Red Sox once had to trade Mookie Betts.