While accurate the Sox were given a choice pay whatever the number was that he asked for or let him test the FA waters and beat the highest bidder or lose him in a trade for a very small return. I had hoped the "financial flexibility" the trade gave the Sox would lead to signing players that would make the Sox win again, however Sox ownership did not use the extra money for that, and the results speak for themselves.
Hey, Let's Talk The Mookie Trade!
- Thread starter FisksFinger
- Start date
This debate is never going to end. Hell, how about Haywood Sullivan mailing contracts so late that Carlton Fisk became a free agent and they had to trade Fred Lynn on the cheap? Sullivan did not want to pay these guys what they wanted and guess what happened? The great late 70's Sox teams sucked in the early 80's before Clemen came on the scene. I believe that Mookie was lukewarm about being here but would have stayed if offered the Godfather deal. No one wants to route for the cheap team that loses.
It’s the second part. Henry was candid in the Lester negotiations that he didn’t want to pay players in their 30’s for past performance. Fair. And I’m sure they look at their prior success stemming from being ahead of the curve in analytics. They developed a philosophy that the new competitive advantage is not signing Price type contracts, which most other big market teams are doing, and finding value in the middle tier. That dogma led to moving on from Mookie. They were spectacularly wrong.
Again, there’s a lot of parallels with the Patriots that is compounding the frustration of fans. Both organizations seem to be looking around saying, I can’t believe this is where the market is for elite talent.
100%! It was an expensive, soon to be crazy expensive team that faced draft penalties and no path but down in standings.
I admire the lack of self-awareness in gatekeeping someone else's gatekeeping. Mookie has taken over the entire domain. It's counterproductive. There are still people pissed about the man leaving, and that's of course 1000% valid. But we are also trying to find ways to shoehorn guys leaving into a problem with everything.
Romine did the work above in post 129. 2004->2007 had roster continuity of two position players and two starting pitchers. 2007->2013 two and one. 2013->2018 zero and zero. It's fair to say that roster continuity didn't hold those four world series winners together. It's a solution looking for a problem.
What are you talking about? Are you a bot or LLM model that has serious hallucination? Do you understand sports? I am really serious here, this may be the worst post in main board history.
The main issue with trading Mookie is you can look around an almost immediately realize what a shit deal it was. Mookie's contract became bargain within a year. Bloomers much like their cherish Dumpster Lord seem to be able to understand the free agent market. The cost per WAR ratio of free agents has sky rocketed over the last five years even with COVID. The main reason is the regional sports networks have blown up and major market teams have a ton to gain with getting eyes to screen. The only major market team that seems uninterested in this is the Red Sox. While every other team with their own network is buying, the Red Sox seem super content letting NESN collapse. Maybe they had already maximized the profits they could get from NESN (Basically NESN makes the neglible gains if the ratings go beyond X) and sitting firm on salary letting the team lose and playing Bloom ball (sign lotto tickets and trade all players popping out of cost control).
Man it would have sucked to if we had gone to being in last place three of the next four years with no prospect of getting out the basement in 2024. What a terrible spot. Glad we navigated out it....
Edit - The Great Delusion of the Bloomers is somehow we are in a better spot after five hopeless years because we have Mayer and Teel. This isn't the NBA and neither of those guys are Embiid. Mookie was Embiid.
I have no defense for how they’ve spent their money the last 5 years. To me that is Chaim’s greatest failure. And being $70 million behind 2nd tier payroll teams right now is inexcusable. But thanks for ignoring my entire post and pretending I said something I didn’t.
Edit: Bloom vs Dombrowski doesn’t have to be a binary choice. Dombrowski obviously did a much better job. He wasn’t perfect. Chaim made a lot of mistakes. But the farm system is in way better shape today than it was 4 years ago.
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At least I'm not the guy trying to convince people that the Red Sox would win if only they'd signed Andrew Benintendi for the next half decade.
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Little known fact lost to history... SoSH BROKE the Nomar trade. I wasn't on SoSH at the time either, but when a message board has a trade of this magnitude before the rest of the media... DAYUM!!! I think it may have been the first time I ever accessed the site.
As far as the Mookie trade, it was going to happen whether it was Bloom or someone else. JWH and Co. wanted to reset the cap penalty and Mookie was the casualty. There was a lot to blame on Bloom during his time here, but this wasn't on him. Perhaps that he didn't get the haul back from the Dodgers that he should have is a fair criticism, but I blame JWH and Co. more for that in that they put such a big task in front of a rookie GM, all the while absolutely telegraphing that Mookie needed to be traded (which brought down his value on the trade market).
I'm not sure it's (all) disingenuous, we've seen people (I believe) sincerely arguing this week that simply keeping the 2019 team together and extending Mookie would have led to a 90 win club this year. I don't think they're doing that in bad faith; I think they actually believe it.
I remember that. I was lurking at the time but I remember. And in return, the Mookie trade broke SOSH. Oh the irony.
Eh, I have not once claimed someone who I don't agree with on the Mookie situation doesn't watch enough baseball or doesn't understand how FO work or is being too emotional/nostalgic, etc. I'd argue that simply insinuating people need to better understand the state of team-building is borderline ad hominem (whether intended or not).
Counter the substance but don't prop up that defense with "everyone who keeps saying they aren't as passionate about the Sox because of Mookie don't understand the game or don't watch enough to fall in love with the current Sox players." If you're posting on this board, you probably have more engagement than 95% of MLB fans.
I appreciate RR's response, but to me it's defending something I personally am not arguing. I'm not arguing "there aren't enough players overlapping championship teams" -- to me, the central question that underlies a lot of this is whether or not the Red Sox are "behind" in terms of retaining core talent and/or building a central group of players that can be broadly marketed to a variety of different flavors of fans, even in seasons where the team isn't an obvious WS contender. While not directly related, I think this parallels the question of "what is the off-field benefit from developing marketable stars and how do you reconcile that with raw, cold, on-field optimization?"
Interestingly, a *lot* of the pieces (e.g., The Athletic, FG, etc.) about the $700M Ohtani signing have focused on the potential for "non-quantifiable" value he brings in terms of eyeballs, marketing, local fan goodwill, tourism, etc. as at least partial justification for the price tag. It's apparent that the teams in the SO sweepstakes essentially worked with two numbers in mind: the "on-field value" and the nebulous "superstar effect" for a big market team. I would be lying if I said I wasn't concerned that the Sox approach was behind the curve here.
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The Mookie Trade hasn't broken SoSH. It might be this generation's Original Sin in that the Sox FO basically gave away a future HOF'er and the only player left from that is Wong (which is only somewhat horrible, but obviously not a trade that both teams won). If the Sox can manage to win another World Series in the next five years, this MIGHT wash away. What we're all reacting to is how far away that goal seems to be.
Sox extended Sale and Boegarts in 2019, then traded Mookie (and Price) after the 2019 season. Began at $236M (#1) and finished $228M per cots: https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/compensation/cots/al-east/boston-red-sox/
Then 2020 - Covid. Which messed everything up.
Then 2021 - $180M (8th) opening day payroll but $205M (5th) in tax commitments.
Then 2022 - 6/140 to Trevor Story (who then is injured). $206M (6th) opening day payroll but $241M (5th) in tax commitments.
Then 2023 - 10/313 to Devers and 5/90 to Yoshida (as everyone was apparently losing their minds). $181 (12th) opening day payroll but $216M (12th) in tax commitments.
Given the team operated at or above the CBT threshold until 2023, the Mookie trade seems more like a bad (er, horrible) baseball decision than the ownership deciding to focus solely on profitability. And the team did pay Devers (unanimously applauded here when it happened), Yoshida (we'll see) and Story (2 injury-filled seasons so far). If that makes some here (incorrectly) perceive me a Bloomer or a water carrier for FSG, so be it.
If you were questioning the talent retaining issue, you could look up the various control years left on players approaching FA, and whether or not they had already been extended. And under what terms.
Hint: that's been done, and it shows nothing nefarious. The Sox signed and extended quite normally, but had an internal talent gap in their system resulting in FAs being clustered. GFIN has consequences, which nobody was complaining about in 2018, and very few were complaining about in 2019 when they sleep-walked out of the gate.
Frankly, the phantom-value angle sounds like wish-casting poppycock to me. The Sox, despite plastering their name on everything and shilling to corporate advertising, were somehow too dumb to realize Mookie et al, are popular. . .and thusly screwed the pooch? I'm afraid you must show your work on that one.
As a PS - "ad hominem" means "against the man." It's when a debator irrelevantly attacks the person, instead of engaging with the person's argument.
What you're talking about might be bad-faith arguing under some circumstances, but to my ear it sounds like you think people ought not to be told they better need to understand team building under any circumstances. But if they're making fact-free posts about their feelings about the Sox spending, instead of engaging with the facts of what the Sox actually spent (pro or con), then yes, it's totally fair game to suggest they don't understand team-building. Fair because they're posting as if they don't.
Not going to pollute the thread on this further because we're clearly talking past each other but at some point you literally said:
"But I am going to gently suggest that if you're not sure if there's someone on the team you'd be excited to watch. . .because you don't actually watch the team"
Given that I never said "I don't watch this team but..." I am not sure what other way I am supposed to interpret that other than someone literally being like "sure, but you don't watch the games, that's why you are wrong." I guess we can get into a semantics argument as to whether that it truly ad hominem, but on a baseball message board being like "brah, you must not be watching the games" seems pretty close. But *shrugs.*
This article from Passan today kind of gets into this. It talks about how all the big money FA spending teams have not done well the last 2 decades.
Not to defend Bloom or the Mookie trade (for fear of SoSH), but this paragraph kind of nails it for me — and was where Bloom, imo, was heading but failed to get to:
“The Dodgers, by comparison, have just one title in the past 35 years. But they have become a new kind of superteam, the best-run organization in baseball by a wide margin. They draft exceptionally well. They thrive signing international amateurs. Their player-development system is second to none. They crush analytics. They live on the cutting edge of performance science. And because they're so good in all of those areas, it affords them the ability to take more chances in free agency than their moneyed contemporaries who aren't as good.”
The Red Sox have not drafted well (until very recently). The Red Sox have not thrived signing int’l amateurs (consistently). The Red Sox player-development system has been lousy (until now!). The Red Sox have done some good things with analytics, maybe? The Red Sox have not been on the cutting edge of much.
Once they invest in and they do these things, they’ll be in position to regularly be able to get after top free agents because they’ll be consistently good and competing for championships and they’ll have the money to do it. Right now, they just have money, so caveat emptor.
I wrote that in response to your writing (literally) that you watched 30% or less of the Red Sox games and were "not sure" there's someone on the team you would be excited to watch. (Apart from Devers who you don't like.)
Perhaps I should have said:
"Gosh, you sound like a well-informed fan who closely follows the team and it must just be dumb fucking luck you saw all the games where Casas wasn't playing (and so forgot he existed), or Yoshida or Duvall weren't on a tear, or when Nick Pivetta didn't transform into an ace, or Sale and Paxton didn't look like their old selves."
Re-signing Mookie shouldn't have been based on the 2019 or 2020 team, but rather the next 5-10 years. All the Red Sox got was a mediocre prospect package and some Price salary relief. It's not like trading Mookie somehow jump started the rebuilding process with anything particularly significant.
Put another way, they could have tried to rebuild the team WITH Mookie (a much easier task) instead of trying to do it without Mookie. I do genuinely believe the front office undervalued Mookie and didn't want to go the extra mile to keep him, for fears he would McCutchen himself into yet another negative long term contract.
There is an alternate reality in which Mookie totaled 3 WAR per year rather than 7 WAR per year from 2020-2023 and we are all sitting here glad the FO dodged that bullet. But with the benefit of hindsight and 4 more years of elite data points, we now know the FO simply blew it.
The Dodgers are the Rays with money. There were years of foundation building before they opened the spigot on the big free agent contracts. They had the luxury of playing in the NL West while they were building the foundation and being ahead of the curve on undertaking this transformation. Seems pretty clear following the Dodgers model was what the Sox had in mind when they hired Bloom, who was positioned just like Friedman in having the Rays pedigree — just add money and voila! But they play in a meat grinder division and the foundation gets harder to build when so many other teams are now following the same playbook.
Also, if you’re going to copy the Corleone model, better to hire away Michael than Fredo.
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That was your takeaway from the post? I am sorry but like I can't help be impressed at how utterly focused your devotion to your narrative is. It is like a super power.
I don't get you Bloomers. Do you like losing? Do you think the last four, soon to be five years are fun? I keep seeing "but you don't understand the state of the team in 2019" but I do. You keep talking about if something wasn't done the team would have gone into some undetermined apocalyptic state. I fail to see how it could be worse than the last five years; Contiuously signing suboptimal talent and reclamation projects on short term contracts and getting your shit kicked in. At least if you were flipping the successful reclamation projects for prospects it would make some sense but no we stubbornly stood the line.
Now that seeds of Dombrowski's signings and drafts are coming to roost with Rafeala, Casas, Duran, and Bello, the Bloomers are praising Bloom for not touching them. Ok? I mean good on him for trading him but to be honest Bloom didn't make many great trades for MLB players. He did a good job in getting Pivetta and Abreu but his trades with major league talent weren't great. I suppose you can take some solace for Winckowski who is a fringe major league reliever. Honestly though Bloom's fire sales were pretty bad.
Losing helped Bloom beat out Cherington's draft record with Mayer and Teel but outside Roman Anthony and Yorke, his draft record is almost as bad. It is still an incomplete so if they don't trade those guys for talent or if they never become every day players that is another four bleak years of finding talent.
"Bloomers" Bwahahaha. Thats so funny. The loss of Tommy Smothers stings less now.
2020 was not fun for
reasons that had nothing to do with baseball. A baseball fan who enjoyed 2020 was a sociopath.
2021 was pretty fun.
Agree 100%. Literally nobody cares about the results of the 2020 season. It is completely irrelevant, and should not be brought up by posters trying to make an argument about Chaim Bloom.
2021 is actually the best argument they should’ve paid Mookie. Renfroe was awful in the post season and they could have another ring if Mookie was out there.
Does the Nomar thread exist still? I’d love that walk down memory lane. I was in LA at the time when I saw it at a sports store at Universal City Walk. when I got to my hotel jumped onto SOSH to read. Didn’t know SOSH broke it.
Renfroe in the 2021 postseason:
11 games, .576 OPS
Mookie in the 2022-23 postseasons combined:
7 games, .320 OPS
And down in the standings they went without Mookie, anyways. If they were gonna go down no matter what, I guess we still would have gotten the choice picks we got in Teel and Mayer, AND we'd have several more years of prime Mookie, the franchise superstar. Then maybe they don't extend Devers if the finances are so dire to have extended Mookie. Who would you rather have held on to long term - Devers or Betts?
Well, in addition to what Jon pointed out upthread, the Sox may well have decided to sign Renfroe and move Betts back to CF. That would have displaced signing utility man Enrique Hernandez. Hernandez in the 2021 post-season: 11 games, OPS 1.260. It also would have meant no Verdugo - a 2021 post-season OPS of .835 with 5 R and 6 RBI.
But on a more fundamental level than that, it would have been another $16M for Price and $30m for Mookie. Putting the Sox at $226M or so for 2021 if they also signed everyone they did. (Which they couldn't have from a roster perspective - they'd have an extra OF and SP.) It would also have put them #1 in baseball, far above the Yankees $197M. (Assuming the Dodgers weren't absolutely committed to spend that $46M somewhere else in 2021.)
So collectively what that means is in 2021, there's probably no Richards or Perez - either of whom gave you more innings and starts than Price was able to. (Or no Boegarts extension.)
And considering the Sox tied for the WC on the last day, that probably means relying on Price as a 2021 starter means they miss the post-season entirely.
Which suggests the opposite of your hypothesis; with Mookie and Price they become a hyper-expensive non-contending team.
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So 2021 makes up for the last two years of dogshit awfulness as well as the ass kicking this team currently constructed without realistic FA out is going to take. I am sure people in Detroit longingly look at 2008 Pistons season still as well.
Of course the guys who gave you that wonderful 2021 were unceremoniously cast off the team. Cast off is actually the wrong term, that means the Sox did something. Instead they let two best starters and 3 of the four best hitters walk for nothing. Of the ten most valuable players from that season in terms of WAR, only three are left on the team (Devers, Whitlock, and Pivetta); 4 guys walked in free agency; and three players were traded away for the amazing haul of JBJ's second coming, David Hamilton, Alex Binelas, Richard Fitts, Nicholas Judice, Gregg Weissart, Justin Hagerman, and Nick Robertson one of whose name I misspelled purposely to show the fun bag of minor leagues we got.
Of the three guys left, none of the three matched or exceeded their performance in 2021 last year. Chris Martin was the only FA who has been brought in that would have been a top ten player in 2021 and they only graduated one player who would got in Brayan Bello.
It is pretty easy to see why 2021 isn't going to be repeated. Even if Casas steps again (which I fully believe in), you are going to need eight or nine players to step up and improve next year in a significant way to match that team which was in a much weaker division.
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I would rather have Betts on a team positioned to win. What makes anyone think Mookie sticks around on a crap Sox team?
Betts wanted free agency —>> Betts wanted Trout money $425m+ —>>> Sox were heading south in the standing. What are the odds Mookie stays in Boston? 10%?
I may be wrong about this but I thought Henry said something to the effect that they decided they had to trade MB because they didn't want to lose him and get nothing in return.
I'm new here, I gather that there's not much enthusiasm for the 'rehash MB' thing, but I thought when MB visited town last season and spoke to the media he said a couple of pretty interesting things. One was to deny that an offer of $300 mill was ever actually extended (in spite of him apparently saying he had turned down such an offer in a report several years earlier). The second was when he invited the media to talk to Chaim Bloom if they wanted further details of the negotiations. Which seemed to imply that after Bloom took over there were further negotiations that failed. I was surprised that none of this was really followed up on by media at all.