I really liked the original trade from a baseball point of view. I understand wanting to watch Mookie play the remainder of his career in Boston, but it's precisely this sort of thinking which has led to the contracts which put us in this situation. The likelihood of Mookie significantly outproducing the contract he will get as a free agent is very, very low. The likelihood that he does so in the first few years is small but not quite zero; the last few years are likely to be crippling.
Moreover, paying fair value for free agents is actually a loss for a contending team. If one pays, say, $9M per WAR for every WAR on the roster, then even a $225M budget produces a sub-.500 team. The extra 15-20 wins to be a playoff team, or perhaps even 25 wins to win this division, need to come from players who are underpaid. And because of limited playing time, that really isn't spread over 26 players, but rather primarily over more like 15. After all, a reliever throwing 70 innings is very unlikely to produce 5 WAR, let alone 5 additional on top of their salary.
From that point of view, turning one additional year of Mookie into Verdugo and the prospect we expected Graterol to be would have been a massive win for us in terms of our ability to build a team going forward. In truth, turning one year of Mookie plus Price into Verdugo is probably a good team-building decision, so getting a high-end prospect in addition would have been excellent. And this is true independent of the luxury tax; the prospect of paying Mookie an extra 50% on top simply makes the numbers that much more difficult. I have absolutely no hesitation in believing that this ownership group will spend money to win in Boston; everything they have done in the past suggests that budget cuts are for the purpose of long-term team building, not to put extra cash in their pockets this year.
OK, so what next? Given that there was an agreement, I'd certainly want to push for value equivalent to a healthy Graterol. But IMO, the original deal was too good to be true, so if the end result is that LA gives up a prospect but of lesser value than Graterol, I think we will still have done quite well.