Not so bad: Betts trade hasn’t been disaster fans first thought

Feb. 6—Two years ago this week, the Boston Red Sox made one of the most consequential trades in franchise history.

This Friday marks the anniversary of the blockbuster trade that sent perennial MVP candidate Mookie Betts and starting pitcher David Price to the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for Alex Verdugo and prospects Jeter Downs and Connor Wong.

The deal was widely panned at the time and was made in large part because the Red Sox weren’t willing to make the extraordinary investment it would have taken to retain Betts, nor were they willing to risk losing him in free agency for nothing.

As a result, Red Sox fans had to watch as Betts, a potential Hall of Famer and the team’s best homegrown player in a generation, moved on to continue his career elsewhere.

The question now is, was it worth it?

Any deal involving a superstar like Betts is inherently risky, but at the time the move was positioned as necessary for the long-term success and sustainability of the franchise. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that losing Betts was costly, but a case could be made that the deal was still worth making.

A win for both sides?

When the Red Sox traded Betts to the Dodgers, they were shipping out a player who by age 26 was a four-time All-Star, a four-time Gold Glove winner, an AL MVP winner and a World Series champion. He had 139 career home runs, 126 stolen bases, a .301 batting average, .893 OPS, and over his last three years with the Red Sox nearly as many walks as strikeouts. His 42.2 wins above replacement in just six seasons was already good for 13th in franchise history, and at that pace he would have eclipsed the Red Sox totals of Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz within two more years.

That’s the kind of impact Los Angeles was hoping for when it made the deal, and that’s exactly what Betts has delivered.

During his first year with the Dodgers, Betts finished as runner-up for National League MVP after hitting 16 home runs with a .927 OPS during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. He also won a Gold Glove and helped lead Los Angeles to its first World Series title since 1988 after years of falling just short.

Last year Betts was an all-star again, though he didn’t quite play to his usual MVP standards. He missed about a quarter of the season with various injuries and finished with a .264 average and .854 OPS, both his lowest totals since 2017.

The Dodgers have not gotten anywhere near that impact from Price, who opted out of the 2020 season due to COVID-19 concerns and spent most of 2021 pitching out of the bullpen. The Red Sox were able to dump some of his substantial salary but still owed him $16 million per year through the remainder of his contract, which expires at the end of this coming season.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox endured a calamitous 2020 season, but Verdugo was arguably the biggest bright spot of the year. The primary return for Betts finished 12th in the AL MVP voting after batting .308 with an .844 OPS. Then last year he batted .289 and emerged as a fan favorite on a team that vastly exceeded expectations, making it all the way to the American League Championship Series.

Betts has obviously been the more productive player, but the gap between him and Verdugo hasn’t been huge. At the very least, the case could be made that the Red Sox have gotten more bang from their buck from Verdugo, who earned roughly $650,000 in 2021, compared to Betts, who will earn an average of $30 million per year over the life of the 12-year, $365 million contract he signed after arriving in Los Angeles.

Verdugo has also proven that, at minimum, he’s a quality big league starter, and at only 25 he could still blossom into an all-star himself. That puts the Red Sox ahead of other teams who’ve made blockbuster deals for prospects that failed to pan out, and the deal could also look better if the injuries Betts dealt with wind up becoming long-term issues.

But for the deal to truly be worth it, the club will have to hope that Downs or Wong eventually develop into impactful big leaguers too. So far things aren’t looking as rosy on that front, as Downs endured a brutal 2021 season in which he batted just .191 over a full season at Triple-A. Downs also missed the entire 2020 season due to the pandemic and had only ever played 12 games above Single-A prior to his arrival with the Red Sox, so those struggles are explainable, but the Red Sox also have to be hoping for significant improvement in 2022.

Has money been well spent?

Besides the actual return Boston received for Betts, the other less discussed element of the trade is the opportunity cost the team incurred. In other words, how has the club used the $30 million per year it would have taken to sign Betts long-term?

In the short run, the Red Sox felt they needed to trade Betts in the first place because they had already invested a significant amount of money in other players. Specifically, former club president Dave Dombrowski signed Chris Sale to a five-year, $145 million extension, Nathan Eovaldi to a four-year, $68 million deal and Xander Bogaerts to a six-year, $120 million contract in 2019, soaking up close to $60 million annually that might have otherwise been put towards Betts.

Bogaerts’ deal was and remains widely seen as a steal, so we won’t focus on that, and despite initial criticism Eovaldi has proven to be worth all his money and more. While his 2019 season was plagued by injury, Eovaldi has been one of the best starters in the AL since 2020 and finished fourth in Cy Young voting this past season.

Sale’s case is more complicated, as he’s missed most of the past two years due to Tommy John surgery and wasn’t really himself upon his return last August. If Sale returns to form and re-emerges as an ace the last three years of his deal, it would be hard to argue against making the big investment, but if not that would be a tough pill to swallow.

In terms of on-field results, the Dodgers are the obvious winners, but even with Betts the 2020 Red Sox likely wouldn’t have sniffed the playoffs, and in 2021 the Red Sox reached the ALCS without him. You could also argue the Red Sox were better off bottoming out, as the last-place finish helped net No. 4 overall draft pick and top prospect Marcelo Mayer.

It’s impossible to know exactly how things might have played out if Betts had remained with the Red Sox, so the question going forward is how the Red Sox will use their money over the remaining years of Betts’ deal.

Will the Red Sox use that money to sign Rafael Devers to a big extension? Could they go out and make a big splash in free agency? Perhaps both? The Red Sox have no shortage of resources, so the idea that they can’t afford to pay top dollar for top talent shouldn’t fly.

The one thing we know for sure is that even after two years, the legacy of the Betts trade is still being written, and it’s still within the Red Sox power to make it worthwhile.

Email: mcerullo@northofboston.com. Twitter: @MacCerullo.

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