Trading Mookie
By 
As you have presumably heard if you’re interested in that kind of thing, in a literally unprecedented move the Red Sox have traded the best position player they’ve produced in at least a half-century, at age 27, one year removed from one of the greatest seasons a major league outfielder has ever had, throwing in a fine pitcher and cash, for an extremely underwhelming package of talent although they’re making money hand over fist and are owned by obscenely rich people. As Michael Baumann says, this is revolting stuff:
But while re-signing Betts would have done as much to advance Boston’s championship hopes as any transaction could (except signing Trout, who’s spoken for), it would not have gotten the Red Sox under the luxury tax threshold in 2020. There could be no clearer illustration of where Henry and his confreres’ priorities lie than this.
This is a salary dump, and not from some woebegone Midwestern also-ran, but from the Boston Goddamn Red Sox. The most successful franchise of the past 15 years—a business concern that appreciates in value year-by-year run at a grotesque profit by hideously wealthy men—has announced that it won’t make a credible effort to compete, in the hopes that a public blinded by regional partisanship and hatred of player wealth will believe that it is in fact too poor to compete.
The average ticket price at Fenway Park is going up next year, by the way.
[…]
This trade is a disgrace for the Red Sox and for the league. I don’t understand why the owner of such a prestigious ball club—a de facto public institution—would charge his baseball operations department with ridding the team of a once-in-a-generation player when he could keep that player and continue to rake in unspendable profits. It’s such a mind-bogglingly greedy and self-defeating move that I resent being made to try to understand it.
There will be apologists for the Boston end of this trade, of course, and they will all be people who confuse “would prefer not to pay because they want their great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren not to have to go without a fourth ivory backscratcher” with “can’t pay”:
So much of the defense of the Red Sox here, be it fans or media, is wrapped up in a conflation of “The Red Sox cannot retain Betts for what he’s worth” and “The Red Sox do not want to retain Betts for what he’s worth”— Marc Normandin (@Marc_Normandin) February 5, 2020
Red Sox had every opportunity to set the market by paying Betts what he’s actually worth https://t.co/9LiesLl80p— Michael Baumann (@MichaelBaumann) February 5, 2020
Meanwhile, Michael Schur has an amusing thread satirizing the kind of Red Sox fan who would actually defend this:
Is this really the MVP and future hall-of-famer you want in your franchise, if having him on the franchise *costs you several million dollars and all you have are billions of dollars?!* https://t.co/uuqDFs9Do1— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) February 5, 2020
I need to write a full post about the awful year X-Treem Silicon Valley Tanking Theory has had, but one of the reasons I hate it is that it reflects fans who seem to be trapped in some kind of neoliberal Stockholm Syndrome where they try to convince themselves that profit-taking by owners not trying to field competitive teams is actually in their interest. The same syndrome will cause fans to defend hard salary caps won through union-busting as being about competitive balance rather than protecting owner profits. But actually, the vast majority of championship teams are not constructed from the ashes of teams that have been made deliberately noncompetitive for years and years, salary caps are about making owners more money, and it’s bad when a well-capitalized team refuses to pay the market rate for a superstar in his prime and people try to make excuses for them. At least this will make me feel better if the Dodgers win this year!