In trade for Betts, another of Astros’ vanquished opponents bulks up
The results of each postseason series are engraved on the inside of the Houston Astros’ 2017 championship rings. Most champions design it that way, but the teams that Houston thwarted in 2017 were, perhaps, the most regal of all baseball brands: the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The familiar logos of the vanquished seemed to burnish the Astros’ achievement.
Now a sign-stealing scandal has turned the Astros into a laughingstock, their rings all but meaningless to the rest of the sport. The Red Sox — who got revenge in 2018 by bouncing the Astros on the way to a World Series title — have helped the Dodgers’ cause in exacting their own revenge by reworking their trade to send Mookie Betts and David Price to Los Angeles. And the Yankees will welcome a former Astros ace, Gerrit Cole, to spring training in Tampa, Fla., this week.
When the Astros gather in West Palm Beach, they will do it in a complex they share with the Washington Nationals, the very team that beat them in the last World Series. The Nationals won four road games to do it, a first in major league history.
The Yankees or the Dodgers will be strong favorites to claim the crown this time. Not only do the Yankees have Cole — perhaps the American League’s best pitcher — but they will no longer face Betts, who had been the AL East’s best player. To replace Betts, the Red Sox got right fielder Alex Verdugo, who is 23 and missed the final two months of last season with a back injury. They also got two prospects from the Dodgers: a catcher named Connor Wong and a shortstop and second baseman named Jeter Downs.
Downs was actually born on Alex Rodriguez’s birthday, in Colombia in 1998, but his parents named him for a different young shortstop of that era. Their older son was named Jerry Jr., after his father, and they wanted another J name.
“Back then I had started watching the Yankees, and I admired Derek Jeter, the young boy,” Downs’ mother, Lucila, told the Dayton Daily News in 2018, when Downs was a Cincinnati Reds prospect. “I liked how he played baseball with that love and how he pushed himself. I loved the name … and those pretty eyes.”
In time, Boston fans may learn to cheer for a guy named Jeter, just as they did for a guy named Mookie. (A different Mookie, last name Wilson, once took a memorable at-bat in New York against the Red Sox.) For now, though, those fans can only fume about losing Betts, 27, who might be the best all-around player in the majors besides Mike Trout. In Price, they also lose a pitcher who should have been the MVP of the 2018 World Series, when he beat the Dodgers twice, including in the Game 5 clincher on short rest.
The Red Sox will not get Brusdar Graterol, the hard-throwing reliever who was originally headed to Boston by way of the Minnesota Twins, who had agreed to send him to the Dodgers for starter Kenta Maeda. The Red Sox reportedly had concerns with Graterol’s durability after examining his medical records, so the Dodgers eventually agreed to send Downs and Wong instead. The Dodgers will keep Graterol for themselves now, with Maeda bolstering the Twins’ rotation, once that deal becomes official.
The Red Sox were afraid of losing Betts in free agency next winter, at a time when they are trying to cut payroll to reset their luxury tax rate. Their owner, John Henry, acknowledged this goal at the end of the season, then emailed the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy last month insisting that the focus on the tax “resides with the media far more than it does within the Sox.”
As it turned out, the Red Sox were indeed determined to slash payroll. They blew past the luxury-tax threshold to win the 2018 title, the fourth under Henry’s ownership. His new chief baseball officer, Chaim Bloom, will try to build another champion without Betts, but with — the Red Sox hope — the small-market ingenuity he used with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Bloom’s old boss with the Rays, Andrew Friedman, now runs the Dodgers’ baseball operations. Friedman has helped the Dodgers sustain a streak of National League West titles that should stretch to eight this year. The franchise has not won a World Series since 1988, but it does not want a flag for the near miss against Houston in 2017.
“We don’t want a fake banner hanging in our stadium,” Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner said at the team’s Fanfest last month. “We didn’t earn it.”
The Astros believe they did, at least when they included the slogan “Earned History” — which now reads like a punchline — on that tarnished World Series ring. They retain a strong roster under their new manager, Dusty Baker, and new general manager, James Click, and their players will be highly motivated.
But so will the Yankees and the Dodgers. The Astros’ victims are coming for payback, and they’re bringing new superstars with them.