This adds to the bitterness of the pill. I took my girlfriend to Fenway this summer, her first time there. She's not a Sox fan and not from the area, but she made a point of wanting to go during our trip. Afterwards, she said, "So Fenway is just Disney for New Englanders?" I think that's a fair, and not ungenerous, read of the current ballpark experience.
We've discussed the aspects of the Mooke situation ad nauseam--from the initial errors (Sale/Eovaldi) to the ways Bloom seems like he was forced to make some lemonade from a lemon situation to @Fishy1's nice explanation of how missing on Mookie might have a long tail in giving a suboptimal deal to a suboptimal player in Devers.
I think we also circle around a core disconnect in the two sides of the discussion. One side has the hard facts--the team's championship prospects at the time of the Mookie deal, the money situation, the state of the farm system post-Dombrowski--to argue that the decision was tough, maybe cold-blooded, but reasonable.
The other side argues more subjectively--you don't trade a guy like Mookie no matter what, it hurt my connection to the team as a fan, etc. The thing is, being a fan is subjective for the vast majority of people. Just because something is subjective, doesn't make it invalid. And we have heard from enough people over the years post-deal that the subjective element of losing Mookie tangibly damaged their relationship to the team. Like, on a Ringer movie podcast they were talking about a list of cool people under-35, actors or celebrities or politicians or whoever, and one of the hosts said, "What about Mookie?" These Los Angeles transplants all agreed he should be on the list and I got fucking sad all over again.
Just because it's difficult to quantify doesn't make it untrue. I can't measure how much more joy I'd feel about the Sox, or love I'd feel for the Sox, if they still had Mookie, but I have less of each now and I know it to be true for me and for many, many others. That objectively there's been additional objective evidence that it was a mistake--Mookie still producing at an MVP level, Devers getting potential Mookie money (Covid notwithstanding) for less-than-Mookie--makes the result even worse.
We gave good money to Pedroia and the end of the contract was a mess due to injury. If I could go back in time, I wouldn't change a thing about keeping Pedroia here for his whole career, regardless of how it ended. Pedroia being a lifelong Red Sox made me love the team more.
This is where I am. Better said than I could.