Everyone has to pass physicals - including Price. I'd assume the Red Sox are more comfortable rolling the dice on Verdugo's health over the next 3 years than Price's.
Verdugo will have other stuff to answer to besides his back. There's discussion of it in the Verdugo thread.
After reading through a lot of good posts, I want to second this one. There is no reason to disbelieve that Henry et al have the best interests of the club at heart. They have a long track record of success, and deserve our faith. He spends money, and likely would have given Mookie a large chunk of that money, had it not perpetuated a competitive disadvantage for the club as a whole.
It was only ever going to be one more year at the most. I don't understand why people can't understand that. Is there a chance he comes back? Sure, but don't bet on them being the high bidder.
Nice first post.
Finally caught up in the thread and it's been responded to already, but a question back is, what if the Red Sox are in contention?
That's the MO and nothing of value is added by his posts (assuming him, her, they?). Check out his posts in Kobe's death thread if you need some more to be disgusted about
Hey, this is a guy that is asking for a contract with $420 in it...are we sure we want him long term? jokes
It's a non-existent aspect barring a major injury to Judge or Stanton, come on. Not only does NY have those two guys, but they have Gardner/Tauchman who combined for 7.6 bWAR last year in 846 PAs and Hicks back mid-season.
Except Verdugo missed a big chunk of time with a back injury, and back injuries can kill a hitter's power (see Don Mattingly). And Graterol missed more than two months with a shoulder injury, and shoulder injuries can be devastating for pitchers.
Graterol came back after the injury and was fine. He made the postseason roster for the Twins.
It's still scary that Graterol (who already had Tommy John surgery) had a shoulder injury too. Hopefully it's not something that recurs. Him being 6-1 and 265 pounds at age 21 is a little scary too.
This is what I'd answer also. FWIW, Fangraphs (Eric Longenhagen) has already put Graterol 1st on BOS's prospect list, ahead of Casas, but in some order those are the top two now.
Awful. Should have been enough to reject him as part of the deal and ask for other players.
Not good. "His maturity and effort have long drawn scorn from coaches, scouts, and even his own teammates." This is like the last thing you want to read about the guy we traded Mookie for.
This is where I am. He missed the last couple months of last season and still hasn't swung a bat. On top of the other issues, he should have been a complete non-starter in this deal.
Do you know this for fact? For the first 15 years of his career free agency wasn't a thing. I'm all for touting 'back in the day', but this sounds like a fun happy way to write an unknown history.
Or LAD, when out of it in June, trade him to the MFY because of an injury to a MFY OF, and then he quickly signs an extension after hoisting a WS trophy.
Enough of this already. The Dodgers could sit Mookie until August and still win their division. This ridiculous paranoid scenario is not happening.
I'm not sure whether he put money above the team, because as evidenced here fans will carry John Henry's water no matter what he does, so we'll never know, and it doesn't really matter. I mean, shit, this isn't the NFL. It isn't the NBA, either, but a single amazing MLB position player is worth far more than a single NFL player outside of a quarterback. I'm all ears on how voluntarily surrendering 27-year-old Mookie Betts makes this team better. John Henry, benevolent billionaire, could have bet on his own championship-winning operation to keep the second-best player in baseball, but he chose to not even try. Are you saying that there is zero chance Betts would have accepted a competitive free agency offer from the only team he's ever played for?
When we stop winning rings on average about once every 4 years you can then be entitled to bitch.
This is his tax for making poor financial decisions before this one
I'm guessing this is where the disagreement lies. Don't really understand how trading team-controlled Mookie Betts (and Price, and for the return we got) makes the future less scary, or 2020 less mediocre. 2019 was basically the same roster as the amazing 2018. I would feel a lot more reassured if there was a hard cap forcing this move. There isn't.
But how else are they getting under the cap and not losing draft picks for being over?
We can be entitled to bitch today. Mookie is the best homegrown Sox player since Yaz, and they decided to move him for a sexual assault-adjacent guy with a bad back and a pitching prospect, rather than paying him.
It's not that simple. Mookie making the 12/420 suggestion (2 years prior to becoming a FA) is a bit like filling out the "Make me move" price on your house in Zillow when you are not planning to sell. When FA actually arrives at the end of the 2020, he could readily be looking for less than that 12/420.
What about the years of his career (post-1976) when free agency was a thing? Facts seem pretty self-evident based on what's been reported. Mookie would prefer to play closer to his hometown and/or play someplace with better weather than Boston and/or play for a team willing to offer a $400M type of long-term deal.
I don't necessarily disagree with your post, but I think about Mike Trout, still waiting to win his first playoff game
Honestly, I couldn't be further away from this viewpoint. If a team I rooted for lost a year of cost controlled production of a potential MVP caliber player because they called him up in April instead of June, I'd be apoplectic. The odds that two months of a rookie is worth that lost year, that those two months add more to their playoff chances than a full year of in their prime production, is an absurdity. Management that makes those kind of short sighted decisions is exactly the kind of management that leads to things like losing that franchise player, because you've been too busy talking yourselves into building the team of today to pay attention to your ability to field the team of tomorrow. I root for the team, I root for the laundry, and the players that wear it are just a bonus. It'd be nice to have had Mookie longer, but he showed no desire to stay with the Red Sox. Extensions were offered. There has been absolutely no pushback from Mookie's camp to indicate he gave a reasonable counter offer, and everything he has said indicates he has always planned to go to free agency and get the most money possible, whether that's because of what he sees as his role in the MLBPA or because he just wants to get paid. He wants free agency, he wants the money, and the team what was best for the team, and I root for the Red Sox, not Team Mookie.
Well but what is that but another kind of epic mismanagement? Nine years of Mike Trout and they couldn't field a team around him good enough to make it out of the AL West. But sure, it could end bad. Anything in life could. The clear signs to me are that this is a player you bend over backwards and keep. Everyone's got their line though, so fair enough.
In your first paragraph here you're approaching being a fan from the perspective of the front office. That's fine, I've done it, I'm saying I'm long since over it. I fully understand every permutation you've laid out here already, I'm just rejecting it. I am a fan of the game and want to watch the best players play on my team as soon as they're ready and for as long as is possible--if the response is "we can't, because later, and the money," my response is that I don't care and that's "your" job, to figure that out. Each situation is, of course, different--this one breaches my line. I'm saying using every second of your control of Mookie Betts is much more important than considering the downstream effect that will have on John Henry, and then in turn his passing that on to the team. I understand that this particular approach does not necessarily net the most possible World Series wins for me between now and my death but I've seen four and so I pick Mookie.
This is weird, I was going to make this exact point. Great minds, friendo.
over/under on the Countdown to Mookie’s Free Agency thread Starting?
Is this a good time to remind people that we live in the real world, and not in a video game? And that it's the game of baseball, and not basketball, and that even a guy who could end up being the greatest player in the history of the sport has never made the playoffs despite ownership spending huge amounts to "pay the fucking talent" time and again? That the Tigers' went most of a decade under an ownership mandate to win and "pay the fucking talent", and it landed them nothing but the most categorically fucked organization in the league? That George Steinbrenner demanded the Yankees "pay the fucking talent" again and again, and the team was largely worse off for it?
I know this is what he was asking for, but he'll be a year older when he hits the market, I would assume there is a count point which reduces the years/dollars overall for that
