Exit, Betts:
The superstar’s strange departure from Boston signifies what could have been for the city and Major League Baseball.
❚ Dodgers look like World Series favorites, Page 15
It will be a summer to savor for Dodgers fans, rich beyond their dreams with MVPs playing alongside each other in the Dodger Stadium outfield, Mookie Betts and Cody Bellinger putting on five-tool clinics every night in pursuit of an elusive championship.
Yet before we ponder the promise of Cody and Mookie and so much California love, it’s worthwhile to pause a moment and consider the Betts era in Boston – and why the threeteam trade completed this week symbolizes the best and worst of the game.
Boston cannot ask anything more of Betts: He became an American League MVP and World Series champion there, a player far more dynamic and electrifying than any doddering slugger who sparked the Red Sox’s first three championships this century.
It’s also instructive to ponder what Betts wasn’t – in Boston and beyond.
He was loved at Fenway Park, though perhaps not revered. Such is life for an athlete whose career blossomed as David Ortiz’s was ending – and Big Papi would remain an outsized presence even in retirement. In another era, Betts might have owned Boston; in this one, he was another great athlete showering an embarrassment of championship riches on New England – Brady and Gronk and Papi and Mookie and Bergeron seamlessly blending one season into the next in a haze of Duck Boat celebrations.
He was known to baseball fans – but not in a manner befitting his greatness.
For all of the hand-wringing over Mike Trout’s inability to connect with fans on a national level, it is Betts’ relative lack of fame that should horrify baseball executives wondering how their grip on American culture loosened.
Betts is not quite the player Trout is, but the difference between the two is a relative pittance to the casual fan. More significantly, Betts checks every box Trout does not.
He plays in a massive market for a storied franchise. He made the playoffs in three consecutive seasons and has a World Series ring to boot.
And while Trout warms many an old heart that savors his Mickey Mantle talent in an unassuming, aw-shucks package, it is Betts, an African American star on a huge stage, who represents the diversity of America today and the audience Major League Baseball so desperately wants to reach.
Yet Betts, perhaps more so than even Trout, could walk unbothered through the heart of almost any American city in a manner that, say, Patrick Mahomes never could.
Certainly, it is a function of their sports and their positions – Mahomes will never play a game in which he goes 0-for-1 with three walks and hardly touches the ball – that a quarterback for a team in a state the president cannot identify enjoys a higher level of fame than an outfielder in a huge market. But drop-in fans should know Betts. Playing in front of Mary Hart and Larry King every night in LA will only help so much.
Finally, it is more than a little embarrassing that a team such as the Red Sox saw fit to no longer employ Betts.
The best player on the best team in franchise history should not merely be considered an “asset” to be bought and sold.
The confetti had barely been swept up from Back Bay in 2018 when the hand-wringing began over how “unsustainable” the Red Sox’s success was, a pearlclutching that only intensified when baseball ops chief Dave Dombrowski re-signed and extended pitchers Nathan Eovaldi and Chris Sale.
Dombrowski was gone a year later, likely as much a result of internal conflict as his overly aggressive deal making. We might never know how earnestly Dombrowski and his replacement, Chaim Bloom, tried to extend Betts, who will make $27 million in his final year before free agency.
The Red Sox certainly got something for him. Alex Verdugo might win a batting title spraying the ball all over Fenway Park and might have in him a .330, 30-plus home run campaign that will look fairly Bettslike.
But again: These are the Boston Red Sox. That “getting something for Betts” and “bundling him with a toxic asset” like David Price – another 2018 hero-turned-fungible commodity – took on far more urgency than actually retaining the superstar is depressing. The franchise is more than capable of delivering what Betts will command – somewhere between Bryce Harper’s $330 million and Trout’s $426 million.
Instead, there’s barely any hesitation in uprooting an MVPcaliber player in his prime and “replacing him in the aggregate,” words better suited for places like Oakland or Tampa Bay.
Certainly, there’s a chance all parties are better off. The Red Sox could make good use of their “flexibility,” even if they’re doomed to third place for the foreseeable future. Betts could get another ring in LA, a town that should take to him warmly, and then he’ll be off to get paid very handsomely.
Perhaps the Dodgers will retain him beyond 2020. More likely, Betts will disappear to Arlington, Texas, or another outpost where he will be plenty rich, if not appropriately famous.
All we know is it’s over in Boston, where Betts and the Red Sox amplify the game’s significant beauty.
And in ushering him out of town, how unsatisfying it can be, too.