John Henry Said What?
The Red Sox have received a fair amount of criticism for trading Mookie Betts. Owner John Henry tried to clear the air a bit, clarify some misconceptions that are out there, and justify trading Mookie Betts. If his explanation felt lacking, it’s probably because the real explanation isn’t pretty. The Red Sox traded Betts to save money at the expense of a potentially winning team in 2020. That they received some talent in return can’t obscure the primary goal of the trade. Financial flexibility might remain a popular catchphrase, but there’s little reason to think the Boston Red Sox couldn’t just keep payrolls at similar levels over the foreseeable future and continue to add talent considering nearly $100 million in salaries comes off the books over the next three offseasons.
A few specific passages in Henry’s statement stuck out to me:
“It is not the system’s fault that the Red Sox ended up in this position. We were faced with a difficult choice.”
Henry called this an “extraordinary challenge,” a “difficult choice,” and characterized “tough decisions” for the organization. To frame trading Betts as a difficult choice, one must first frame the options and the results. It’s not just get prospects versus a draft pick. It’s contending in 2020 versus not. It’s attaching a bad contract to the trade versus getting the best possible future value. It’s decreasing spending by $60 million versus maintaining an already profitable level.
Henry appears to be accepting responsibility for big contracts for David Price, Chris Sale, and J.D. Martinez that put the Red Sox in a bind where keeping Betts wouldn’t be possible, except it is Henry that decides what it is possible and what is not. It is Henry who has decided he wants to cash more checks and write fewer ones. We’ve heard about a rumored $300 million offer, but that was another offseason ago before Betts accumulated $47 million in arbitration awards. An offer of just $250 million in free agent money when Mike Trout was accepting $100 million more (on a bargain deal) with Betts a full year younger and coming off his 2018 MVP season isn’t exactly much of an effort at all.
The Red Sox are only in a bind to the extent that they want to decrease payroll this season and beyond. Their payroll was already slightly down even before dealing Betts and after considering the increased tax penalties. At the end of the year, Betts likely wouldn’t have cost more than his current salary plus Jackie Bradley Jr.‘s. Dustin Pedroia’s roughly $13 million salary comes off the books after 2021 with Martinez, Price, and Nathan Eovaldi leaving after 2022 and taking another $70 million off the books. Fitting in another $8-10 million a year above Betts’ current salary to keep him would hardly have been an issue if the Red Sox were willing to maintain prior levels of spending, which still resulted in huge profits.
“Before Tom, Sam or I ever dreamed of owning a major league baseball club, we were baseball fans, like you. I grew up a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. My favorite player was Stan Musial. My heart would have broken if Stan the Man had ever been traded – for any reason. Your parents or your grandparents surely felt the same way about Ted Williams and Yaz.”
Imagine realizing this concept as an adult, feeling kinship with young fans, and being the one person in position to make sure that thousands of similar kids get to experience their fandom in the same special way you did growing up. Now imagine you take it all away anyway. Not because the player was getting older and less productive. Not because the team received an offer of blue-chip prospects with a decent likelihood of becoming stars. Not because you offered the player market value for his services and he refused. Not even because the player reached free agency and some other team made an offer that could not be refused. Imagine putting yourself in the shoes of the kids who idolize Mookie Betts and then choosing to add millions to your billion-dollar company.
“In today’s game there is a cost to losing a great player to free agency – one that cannot nearly be made up by the draft pick given. We’ve seen examples of this recently.”
I think we can agree that a draft pick isn’t worth the production of Mookie Betts. The problem is that Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs, and Connor Wong don’t make up for Betts, either. One season of Mookie Betts is currently worth one good-but-not-great prospect in Downs, a formerly-good-but-not-great prospect currently injured with off-field issues in Verdugo, a lesser prospect in Wong, the $27 million salary owed to Betts and roughly $20 million to make up for the Price contract deficit. One free season of Betts was valued at close to $50 million and a trio of young players. That’s a lot. We can’t say that the Red Sox didn’t get good value out of trading Betts, but we can say that one season of Betts is worth a lot because he is essentially irreplaceable and losing him tanks Boston’s chances of making the playoffs this season.
Now, the Red Sox could do something with the money they are saving by not having Betts, but we already know the Red Sox don’t plan to use that money at all this season, and in next year’s free agent class, the only player likely worth Betts’ current salary is Betts. Team president Sam Kennedy said the trade wasn’t “exclusively” about getting under the competitive balance tax amount. Of course, it was mostly about getting under the tax amount. Even in clarifying his remarks from September about getting under the tax amount, Henry still called it a goal and fired the previous GM who likely had no interest in achieving that goal. Whether it was a mandate or a goal made no difference, and clarifying the language does little to dissuade when looking at the trade the Red Sox just made.
If the Red Sox had offered Betts up without attaching half of Price’s salary, the future return would have been larger. If the Red Sox had agreed to pay down half of Betts’ salary, it would have opened up the entire league as suitors and increased the future value Betts returned. The Betts trade wasn’t exclusively about the CBT since they did get some players in return. It was just mostly about the CBT and decreasing payroll.
As for Henry’s examples of seeing this recently, there aren’t any. If we go back four years, the top two free agents were Yoenis Céspedes and Justin Turner, who both went back to their old teams. In 2018, a weak free agent class was led by Yu Darvish and Martinez, who were both traded midseason ahead of free agency because they were on non-contending teams. In 2018, Manny Machado was dealt at midseason by a bad Orioles team. Bryce Harper, who the Nationals held on to in his walk season, left, though the club immediately used Harper’s money to sign Patrick Corbin. They held on to Anthony Rendon in the same situation and won the World Series. They also brought back Stephen Strasburg. The Yankees signed Gerrit Cole away from the Astros, but the Astros got within a few innings of winning a World Series. They also earmarked Cole’s money for Zack Greinke before Cole even left. There are literally no recent examples of contending teams losing a player in free agency without immediately replacing that player’s production, or in Washington’s example, winning a World Series because they held on to that pending free agent. The Red Sox are just decreasing spending by $60 million.
“I understand there is probably little I can say today that will change how you feel about this, but it is my responsibility to try. The baseball organizations we compete against have become much more strategic and thoughtful about how and where they spend their resources in their quest for titles. We cannot shy away from tough decisions required to aggressively compete for World Series. That is what led to this trade.”
The team the Red Sox are most known for competing against, the Yankees, will spend about $90 million more than the Red Sox this season in an attempt to win a World Series and just spent more than $300 million on Cole. It’s true that the Yankees went under the tax threshold in 2018, but they did so with a younger, cheaper team on the upswing that won 100 games much like the Red Sox did in 2017. Because the Red Sox got under the tax threshold in 2017, they saved approximately $20 million in penalties over the last two seasons. The Dodgers also reset when the Yankees did with a a younger, cheaper, very good team. The decisions made by the Dodgers and Yankees weren’t as tough because getting under the tax amount didn’t mean actively getting worse or significantly lowering the chances of making the playoffs.
In any event, the Yankees signing Cole and the Dodgers trading for Betts means those teams are apparently looking at Boston’s “tough” decisions and reaching a different conclusion. Certainly the Red Sox farm system could stand to be better, but nothing is preventing the team from growing a better farm in the future, whereas the farm previously produced three of the top 12 players in the game last season in Betts, Xander Bogaerts, and Rafael Devers (plus a trade for Sale). To claim that trading Betts was an “aggressive” move toward competing for a World Series is insulting.
John Henry talks about his words not changing the way people feel about this trade. The problem is not feelings, no matter how hurt many Boston fans might be about dealing away Betts. The problem is facts. It’s a fact that they traded away the franchise’s generational star because of money. John Henry’s words can only serve to rationalize that fact. He cannot change it.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
This interview pretty much confirms that John Henry personally felt the roster construction was normatively stupid (firing Dombrowski, now this), and that trading Betts was one of the penalties of being so stupid for so long. Like, it’s a philosophical aversion to being over the luxury tax because being over the tax is something stupid money does, not smart money.
I don’t think it’s about the money, it’s about the philosophy of what he wants a baseball team to be and how other people think of him and the team. Which probably has a lot to do with what the Red Sox would like to think of themselves as- not the George Steinbrenner Yankees. They’d rather run a loser they’re proud of than a winner they feel is unsustainable. Especially since their biggest rival is running a team that, on paper, people think is more intelligently built. I really think these guys can’t stand the thought of not being the smartest people in the room.
As a meta comment, it’s hard to be critical of the Red Sox. This move will very likely work out for them in the long run. Next year, well, probably not, but it has as much to do with the Yankees maxing out in an intelligent way and the Rays being very very well put together. It’s hard to be critical when these mega contracts almost never pay out.
I think you were correct until you started talking about them wanting to be proud of the team. Your statement that they don’t want to be the Steinbrenner Yankees is absolutely correct, but the conclusion is not.
They would rather lose and make money rather than win and lose it (or make just a little).
Almost every owner now sees the team as an investment vehicle, which is a big problem with the sport right now. Making money when they sell the team is no longer enough. They want 10-20% profits every year on top of that.
eh cashflow isn’t THAT good and never would be. He wanted to get that, he’d still be making currency bets.
You’re correct to a point, owners do see owning any pro sports franchise as an investment vehicle. The razor’s edge though is this: Does spending money add to the value of your investment or detract from it? I would propose, spending money wisely, as in any business, does add to the franchise value. Spending it poorly, or cutting costs unnecessarily or in the wrong places, detracts from franchise value. So where is the fine line?
The argument is moot though. No matter how badly or well you run a franchise, the real big money is made when you sell. The Red Sox, for example, were purchased for $700m in 2001. That’s $1.02 billion in today’s dollars. They are worth $6.6 billon today, a tidy profit of $5.58 billion over 19 years. So what were the 4 World Series titles worth that were won in the meantime? No clue… $250m each for a total of $1b? Still, that yields a profit of $4.58b over 19 years with zero World Series titles.
The old saying is true. You do have to be an honest to god buffoon to lose money on a pro sports franchise. And I can’t resist… Daniel Snyder may be the exception that proves the rule.
Is that the total valuation for Fenway Sports Group including Liverpool? I can’t imagine that’s the valuation for only the Red Sox.
That’s just the numbers for the Red Sox.
Umm no you are very confused and google will clear this up fast.
$6.6 billion
The top group with a baseball team is the Fenway Sports Group — owners of the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool FC, and other ventures — which is worth a total of $6.6 billion. That’s third behind the Kroenke Sports, worth $8.4 billion, and Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones’s empire, set at $6.9 billion
I don’t think FSG has ever wanted to spend like crazy. They’ve done a hard reset a couple of times now; first the Nick Punto trade, now the Connor Wong trade. They’ve always wanted to be a Moneyball team, but with more resources. If you remember the A-Rod saga, the Red Sox saw themselves as the plucky underdogs to the Yankees.
But they keep on doing this thing where they get impatient, start spending huge sums of money in free agency, and then starting over. And that’s on the ownership group…that’s a leadership problem. You can kind of understand the David Price deal, but if this was the team they wanted to be, they probably shouldn’t have given those deals to Sale and Eovaldi. You can talk all day about how you know what you’re getting into when you hire Dombrowski but that was also a leadership decision.
Tearing the band aid off is hard, and this feels like tearing the band aid off. Agreed that their leadership got them into this position, but this feels like a bit of self-flagellation in addition to getting out of the position.
Henry should fire the guy who hired Dombrowski. It wasn’t like he wasn’t a known quantity.
Dombrowski did what he was good at and what he was hired to do. Push in the chips to go get a ring, which the Red Sox now have 4 of over the last 16 seasons.
Here’s a question:
Let’s say the Sox win in 2004 & 2007 but don’t win in 2013 &/or 2018. Do they still make these moves?
That’s to say, is the Red Sox’ recent success leading to this change in direction? Because they were seemingly a do-whatever-it-takes-team until all of a sudden they weren’t.
What do the Eovaldi contract and the Sale extension have to do woth winning in 2018?
What Dombrowski did to win in 2018 isn’t what crippled the “dynasty”. It merely set the stage for the hard choices to come.
Well for one IDK if Eovaldi gets that contract (or that it looks like it does) if not for his WS performance, but that’s not really what I’m saying.
I’m saying that it seems like the aftermath of a successful decade or two either makes it easier for ownership to move away from increased spending or that it is simply easier to justify that decision.
In the old days the standard model was to assemble a winning team at all costs and then prop it up as long as possible, when age and injuries crashed the team. Think of the Phillies under Amaro or the Giants of recent vintage.
The new model that is taking over seeks to balance long term competitiveness over maximizing short-term wins regardless of cost. The idea is to avoid the boom-bust cycles of yore by cycling talent in and out regardless of popularity.
The Yankees and Dodgers are doing it with deep pockets, so they can stick with select good players after they become expensive. Cleveland and the Rays are doing it with smaller budgets, more out of necesity than choice. The Cardinals have been doing it with medium budgets (letting Pujols walk when he got too expensive, trading useful young major leaguers and high minors players for low minors high ceiling prospects).
The common result is the teams look on paper weaker than they might be under the old “damn tbe torpedoes model” but they remain competitive and profitable for extended periods. The team might rely on multiple mid-talent players on short-term contracts to supplement their superstars instead of bringing in established stars on long term deals. (The Dodgers passing on both Harper and Machado, for example.)
It is more business-like and less fan-pleasing but unless the next CBA changes the landscape it is likely to be here to stay.
I think what he’s saying is that the recent WS titles gives the Red Sox ownership the feeling they’ve built up enough goodwill to trade Betts. If they hadn’t won those 2 titles, they may still be “all in” on 2020 to try & win a title before the inevitable reckoning.
I don’t think he’s wrong.
Dombrowski’s moves won 3 consecutive AL East titles then a World Series, but as he had done previously, in both Miami and Detroit, put the future in jeopardy. John Henry saw it happening, as did every member of Red Sox Nation, and made a bold move to reset the direction the team was headed. As a fan the ideal situation is one in which the team I root for is a consistent contender, and maybe even wins a few WS championships, The 69-93 seasons, like 2012, are not acceptable and John Henry feared a repetition of that was about to occur. A 2021 team that was without Betts, Verdugo, and Downs looked like it was headed in that direction. i feel for the fans of teams that can’t run a franchise. Yes Meg Rowley, how depressing must it be to go 18 years and never see a playoff game. I will defend everything that John Henry has done for the Boston Red Sox franchise and that includes catching his mistake of hiring Dombrowski before the Red Sox turned into the Tigers.
Dombrowski’s moves? Epstein and Cherington built the teams that you’re giving Dombrowski credit for.
ANY general manager can overpay in trades and free agency with the owners’ approval. Why do you think Dombrowski deserves so much credit? What did he do that was so shrewd?
Umm I don’t agree they were headed for a losing season. Prior to the trade they had a 90 win projection and with a couple of moves would have been right in the playoff mix. They have 100m coming off the books in the next 3 years and a young core of talented hitters.
Also who did DD trade that you want back? You mention overpay, so what talent was given up that you want back? The best pieces were in the Sale trade and its going to be tough for those combined pieces to give you what Sale has. DD wasn’t the guy that gave Pedroia/Hanley/Panda/Castillo those contracts. You can complain about Price but he was piece that got you a WS title and been a 4-5 WAR pitcher at times when healthy.
Going forward you save 16m a year on Price but pay guys like Martin Perez 6-8m to give you the same innings at crappy production. Meanwhile you traded 50m in production 2020 with Betts for some prospects that aren’t like to make that up their entire career. The only direction that was changed was the screwjob fans in Boston are getting. The good news is I believe Henry is going use the money he saved trading Mookie to do a live action film based off the play No, No, Nanette.
There’s this assumption that with Betts and Price the Red Sox were surefire contenders.
Just curious: do we know that to a certainty?
Do we really know everything the Sox knew?
As an exercise in logic, do we know that last year was a just fluke?
And do we know Dombrowski was fired solely because they wanted to save money?
Might it not be because of the Eovaldi contract and the premature Sale extension?
Might it not be that internally they believe that what they really had an 84 win team? That 2020 was more likely to be like 2019 than 2018?
There are reasons to believe Benintendi is as good as he’s going to be, that Pedroia is not coming back, that JBJ is what he is, that Martinez is more likely to slip at least a bit and maybe a lot. That Sale is damaged goods and Price is as likely to spend half the season on IL as he is to be good?
That the number of downsides were more numerous than the upsides?
If any or all of those turn out to be true, the Sox wouldn’t be surefire contenders but rather long shots.
And at that point, delaying the inevitable rebuild a year, spending over $250M, and getting but a draft choice for Betts for a chance at a one-and-done play-in game would be but a big gamble.
Sometimes the inevitable is best faced the soonest instead of delaying the confrontation to come.
These are valid questions, but every team has similar questions. The correct way is to look at the projections, which use historical data to estimate the likelhood and impact of these factors.
Those projections indicate the Red Sox would have been playoff contenders in 2020.
The projections don’t incorporate all the data the Red Sox have
I also find myself wondering whether the Red Sox had internal projections that were less sanguine, because it would explain a lot (and isn’t something they would reveal). With that said, they were projected for the fourth most team WAR before the trade, so their numbers would have to differ dramatically to conclude anything other than “we’re a serious contender.”
That does seem possible. It also is possible their internal projections were rosy, and John Henry overrode them. That’s what makes guessing about internal stuff rather pointless.
Agreed, I don’t think the trade is easily defensible in any terms other than maximizing profits, and you’re right that we’ll never get answers to these types of questions. But I do wish we could know what odds the Sox gave themselves of winning a WS in 2020, and whether there was some threshold above which they would not have pulled the trigger.
Correct, but it’s questionable whether the extra information is all that valuable. There is a well understand bias that happens when groups of people make a decision with their internal perspective; our brains tend to discount the outside view, even though research shows we make better predictions when we understand that our situation is less unique than it appears.
Also, we have no idea what their internal analysis suggests. It could indicate that Sale’s arm is fine, everything is great, and the Sox project to 98 wins.
I’ll bet money they thought they had an edge in rehabbing arms, and part of this is them reassessing that belief.
fjtorres, that is the best synopsis of the situation that I have read or heard anywhere and I would like to give you 10 bonus thumbs up! I take a back seat to no one here as a Red Sox fan and did not see the 2020 Red Sox as a team capable of finishing ahead of the Yankees. I have beaten the same rented mule over and over and continue to be astonished that so many people, both bloggers and writers, at Fangraphs and elsewhere, cannot see that a potential for 30+ WAR in the near future from the players the team received is far more valuable to the continued success of the Red Sox than 7 WAR from Mookie in 2020 is.
30+ WAR is a pretty optimistic number, especially with Downs/Wong not having played above AA yet. And even if you assume that across the three of them they hit that number in their team-controlled seasons, you have to take into account that 1) the WAR is going to be more valuable concentrated in one player versus three 2) the WAR is going to be more valuable the closer the team is to contention.
I think what puzzles fans and analysts is that this feels like a half-measure. The Sox farm system is still mediocre, at best, so while you have two excellent controlled pieces (Devers, Bogaerts) and a solid plus controlled player (Benintendi), it seems like the team will be in a rough spot during the controlled years of Verdugo/Downs/Wong–there’s zero cost controlled pitching of any note.
If you’re going to rebuild, rebuild–make some more aggressive moves. If you’re going to hang in there and ride the window out, keep Betts.
Exactly – the really damning thing about the Betts trade is using it to salary-dump Price.
The assumption is the 2020 Red Sox can’t get the same thing we think the team could have with Mookie and Price. The reality is that they were playing for a wild card before, and they are playing for a wild card now. The Yankees are clearly better, and having Mookie and Price was not going to change that. I still think the Sox can realistically get to a play in game. But in the future, they can afford to get Mookie back because they have mucho contracts (Rusney Castillo anyone?) and are not going to stop being good pretty much every year. John Henry is not the Marlin’s Lorea. He wants to win. He saw what the Dodgers and Yankees did. The smart money here says after a reset they will be good to go.
It’ll take a while, though.
The farm is pretty lean.
It may take 3-4 years despite Devers and the new guys.
The difference is that now they’ll be competitive in 21-22 and contenders by 23+ instead of losing 21-22 and not contending until 24 or 25.
The team wasn’t built to last.
> The reality is that they were playing for a wild card before, and they are playing for a wild card now.
This needlessly looks at outcomes as binary. The reality is they were significantly more likely to make the playoffs (Division Series+) with Betts than without him. This is 100% a worse team without these two players — going from 80% wildcard/20% division (or whatever) to 50% wildcard/5% division matters.
It matters, but how much does it matter? It’s usually not good practice to go for broke for one Wild Card spot, particularly if it means lowering your future competitive odds.
And that’s the situation they faced: next year they would need to replace 2/3 of their OF; their pitching would still be bad, still be aging, and still be injury-prone (even moreso in fact); and the farm would still be poor.
Now, they will have one OF hole and a ton of money to fill it, leftover money for the pitching staff, and a 50-grade MIF prospect that will probably be close to MLB-ready.
If you’re looking to keep a competitive window open this is how you do it.
It matters by about half as much as a shift in division series odds matter. Naively assuming all playoff entrants have the same odds of winning the WS, we see that it matters 6.25% * amount_odds_shift * $_value_from_playoff_appearance.
We can note this is about as extreme an odds shift as a team can experience, because the Sox are so close to the bubble w/ Betts and Betts is such an exceptional player. Also, if one is willing to reduce odds so significantly because they’re all long shots, a consistent argument dictates that acquiring a player at a deadline is also going to almost always be unreasonable.
John Henry has no one to blame but himself for the position the Red Sox find themselves in. HE is the one who signs off on ALL contracts before they’re handed out. He signed off on Sale. He signed off on Eovaldi. He signed off on $25m for Porcello when the guy could have been had for half that. He signed off on paying David Price $10m more per year than anyone else in their right mind would have.
JOHN HENRY is the one who signs off on all trades. What was he thinking when he signed off on Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez? What was he thinking when he let John Lester walk with many good years left? And Lester was prepared to take a hometown discount.
I’ve had the pleasure(?) of watching John Henry operate for 17 years now with the Red Sox, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. 1) John Henry cares first about money and profit, second about money and profit, and third about money and profit. If his teams happen to win, he doesn’t really care other than the fact that he makes more money and profit. 2) John Henry knows absolutely nothing about baseball as it’s played on the field and-or in the baseball ops offices. Problem is, he thinks he does.
Finally, I can only conclude from what I see that the Red Sox front office and baseball ops are dysfunctional. Since Theo Epstein left, there is no one willing to stand up to Henry and explain to him why what he wants to do baseball-wise makes no sense. They all appear to cower whenever he’s around and are scared stiff to recommend taking any risks or say anything (OMG!) controversial or non-PC. They’re afraid of losing their jobs, and go to great lengths to make sure they don’t get noticed, for better or for worse. There is no over-riding team strategy or philosophy, it changes with the wind and the whims of John Henry. Who can work effectively like that, under those conditions?
Ideally, John Henry would shut his pie hole, announce he’s stepping back from interfering in day-to-day ops, and let his people sink or swim and yes, learn from their mistakes. But he’s incapable of that, so what’s a fan to do?
Maybe stop going to Fenway, stop paying $100 – $125 for (honestly) a crappy seat, and stop paying $6 for a Fenway Frank , $5 for a bottled water, and $11 for a Bud Light? Hit John Henry in the wallet. I guarantee you it’s all he understands. And hey, take that $750 it’ll cost you to bring your family of four to a game and buy yourself a nice, 52″ HDTV at Wal-Mart. Heck, buy two of them and it’ll still be less than $750. And with the money you save, you can drive to sales tax-free NH and not pay the $50 MA sales tax either.
The game is better on HD from your couch anyway. And since the Sox are going to be awful this year, you can even turn off the game at your leisure. It’s a win-win-win!
PS: Has anyone heard anything regarding this cost-cutting BS being a move to better position the team for sale? Henry can’t own it forever, and he has no one except his trophy wife to leave it to in his will. Asking for a friend…
Hey it could be worse, you could have a meddlesome immature owner with zero championships and an irrelevant team with the best player maybe to ever play the game. You could be an angels fan
It’s before my time, but the Red Sox did have Ted Williams and a young good ol’ boy Tom Yawkey. I’d say that’s pretty comparable. Does that count? And didn’t the Angels win it all in 2002?
Thank god you have something “baseball” related to write about, Craig.
Excellent analysis of what has quickly (and predictably) become a farce. As a (former?) Red Sox fan, it is just a huge bummer to see Betts go, moreso in a manner like this. And then to have Henry talk himself in circles about how they “had to” do this because of the finances as he sits on almost $4 billion of net worth and a soccer team that’s about to win the most prestigious domestic league in the world, as well as his extremely lucrative and profitable baseball team, just rubs salt in the wound. I realize I am biased because of my emotional investment in the Red Sox specifically, but behavior like this seems like a much bigger threat to the long term health of MLB and baseball in general than some guys banging on garbage receptacles as a means of communication.
Downvote me all you want, but honestly I feel bad for John Henry at this point.
This guy took a club without a title for 82 years
and invested in it so that they won four championships during the last 18 seasons
and now he is painted as some Scrooge figure who only cares about profit.
I mean the team is still the most recent ex-champion.
Doesn’t that buy some goodwill anymore?
It buys goodwill if your immediate public-facing reaction isn’t “Welp, we did it, you got what you wanted. Time to reap all the profit and stop investing in this public institution that everyone loves while I sit back and take solace in my giant pile of money.” Oh and also raising ticket prices while you’re at it.
The Astros deserve all the shit they’ve been taking and more, but at least they kept trying to win and had been showing a willingness to pay to keep their homegrown stars after winning their World Series.
He did it in 2004, he so abandoned the institution that they did it again in 2007, then he so refused to spend money to win that they did it again in 2013, then he sold all the stars so they did it again in 2018. This does look like a premature teardown to me, motivated solely by the desire for profit, but you can’t reasonably claim that Henry’s immediate reaction to winning the series was to say, “Welp, we did it, you got what you wanted. Time to reap all the profit and stop investing in this public institution that everyone loves while I sit back and take solace in my giant pile of money.”
If that was his reaction, it wasn’t immediate, it was 16 reasonably successful years later.
That’s fair, but if anything that makes it even more difficult to swallow. He is MORE wealthy now and the Red Sox are a MORE valuable franchise now (by significant margins on both fronts I’d guess). So to my eyes this is even more indefensible than a similar decision would have been after any of the preceding titles.
I am going to use you for my latest rant but there are many others here who cannot see the motivation for the moves that John Henry has made, beginning with his firing of Dombrowski. D-Wiz you are not alone in your mistaken belief that money was more than a minor part of the decision to make this trade. Even with cost saving the Red Sox are still going to run a payroll in excess of $200 million dollars. John Henry recognized that the team, after 2020, was in danger of becoming what the Marlins and Tigers became after Dombrowski used all the available resources to take a shot at the WS championship. He managed to get one in Florida and just missed in Detroit but look at those franchises now. John Henry was struck between a rock and a hard place and his motivation has always been to keep a competitive team on the field. He has spent huge amounts of money, most of it wisely, since purchasing the Red Sox and has never shown any inclination to not spend when it is prudent. Dombrowski’s moves had put the future in jeopardy and a reset was required. Painful, certainly, but definitely a move that gives the Red Sox a much better chance to remain competitive from 2021 into the future.
Don’t forget that Henry invested in this team when Fenway and its environs were shitholes. There was no way that part of town was going to stay that way, even without Fenway, but the investment was by no means the best one available. I’m no Sox fan, but I would gnaw my arm off for the Braves to have this kind of “neglect” (I’m actually pretty happy with liberty media)
Tired of people citing off season issues with Verdugo. You mean when his dad pushed a coach? Also depending on whose war you use, his full season WAR last year prorated to 3.5-5. He’s a good player, maybe a borderline star and he is young. Does it seem that the Red Sox probably lost, probably. Depends a lot on Verdugo. If Betts has a down year then the Red Sox come out ahead. Astros hitters are currently being massively devalued in fantasy, and there are tons and tons of people betting against them in win totals, props, etc. So much so that books are adjusting lines substantially. I have no clue if that’s right, and Betts was great prior as well, but let’s say Betts only puts up 4.5 WAR. To me that makes it seem like the Red Sox are likely to win the trade.
Thank you Craig, for articulating very well what I’ve been feeling about that barf-worthy John Henry press conference.
Its a real shame and an insult that they think the fans are so stupid to believe this is about simply getting some value from a departing free agent.
The fact is, short of trading for Mike Trout, no team that trades Mookie Betts away will be better afterward.
I understand that these owners are billionaires who can certainly afford millions of dollars here and there, especially in light of the fact that baseball teams (most professional sports teams, for that matter) are essentially public institutions. However, I do have to say that I find it more than a little grating when sportswriters to whom these sums of money are beyond unfathomable throw these costs out there as if it’s next to meaningless. Can owners afford to pay more? Certainly. But let’s not pretend as if tens of millions of dollars are simply negligible sums of money, even to them.
Honestly, I thought that this was a great trade for Boston (I’m a Yankee fan)
Boston trades:
Mookie Betts 6.6 WAR, 1 Year of team control
Boston gets:
Alex Verdugo (OF) 2.2 WAR in 377 plate appearances 4.0 normalized for a full season, 5 years of team control, Jeter Downs (21 years old at AA), potential superstar, and Connor Wong (23 year old catcher at AA) great power, strikes out a ton.
Mookie Betts is worth about $63 million (based on $9.5 million per WAR). So his rights are worth $36 million (his salary is $27 million).
Verdugo should be worth around $190 million over the next 5 years and let’s say he’ll get paid half of that. So he has $95 million in excess value.
Downs will be worth $228 million if everything pans out. He’ll get paid around 45% of that. So let’s say $125 million in excess value. Let’s peg that at $62 million to account for the risk that he doesn’t pan out.
Wong is worth maybe $5 million plus or minus.
The Red Sox are paying half of David Price’s salary so the Dodgers get him at roughly what he’s worth, so that’s a wash.
So the Red Sox gave up $36 million in value and got back $162 million in value. That’s quite a trade. The dropoff from Betts to a full season of Verdugo is not that steep. And Verdugo could improve over his 2019 results because he’s only 23.
Fangraphs: we want everyone to do more math, except when it comes to whether or not players are worth the money in terms of on field performance.
Where are these values coming from?
Projecting Verdugo for 4 WAR per annum is extremely optimistic (extrapolating his 2019 is also just bad process).
Downs at $288M? Eric has him as a FV 50 right now, thats 12 war over 6 years.
No one views Downs as a “potential superstar,” though…and that’s not how value really works, considering that there are only 9 players on the field at a time, and the Sox have a ton of money.
Also – the Red Sox finished 9 games out of the wild card last year. Were they really going to close that gap even with Betts?
They got 2 very nice pieces in return and dumped half of Price’s bad and about to get worse contract. This frees them up to rebuild over the next couple of years as more contracts come off of the books.
Generally speaking an owner should always be considered an unreliable source. Team ownership is an exclusive club and one where actual profit is assured. Beyond the income generated from year to year owners stand to profit (by billions in some cases) just from holding the for a few years.
With this level of financial privilege should come some assurance of quality, responsible ownership. But, capitalism is specifically amoral so we should be surprised when we end up one or two immoral ones. After all, the profit margins are immense.
I think the percentage is much higher than just one or two.
Yankees fan here, so unquestionably not unbiased. Four World Series wins in 18 years after a nearly century drought…I think I’d be pretty happy about that. Parlaying a concern about an injury to the first guy they traded for into more value….I think I’d be pretty happy about that as well. John Henry is a smart guy and a good owner. These moves were purely about money (take money out of the equation and you know they would never have been made) but, from a performance perspective, aren’t likely to be decisive in 2020–and that’s the only year that counts. Hard for the fans to see a super-talented player go for what they think is below value. But given the Red Sox desire to cut costs, they did well for themselves. The problem isn’t Henry–it’s the CBT thresholds, that give owners the cover to maximize profits.
Mike, I’m pretty sure the owners introduced the CBT to give themselves an excuse to cut costs and maximize profit.
Really? While the CBT surely allows owners to throttle what profits come down to the players, it also serves to do what it is named to do, ie make things more evenly competitive between big and small markets.
It’s a little frustrating to read all the Boston fans, and Craig tbh, say, “no team should ever purposely get worse to cut payroll.” I’ve been a Twins fan for my whole life and THIS YEAR is the first time I can recall the team actually paying to get better. We traded our Mookie Betts, Johan Santana, for peanuts. We couldn’t get a sniff from Zack Wheeler. We won’t sign Byron Buxton unless he proves even more mediocre than he has already been.
Yes, it’s reasonable to bitch about rich people getting richer, but what the Red Sox did is not new. At least from a competitive standpoint, it evens the playing field toward the Twins, Royals, Indians… the majority of teams in baseball, who are consistently budget constrained and use their own in house strategies to mitigate that. Why should the Red Sox have an inherently better chance at the World Series than the Rays. I know that they do, but I sure don’t mind a mechanism that lessens the disparity.
The MLBPA wanted the CBT to improve competition. They thought by limiting (or at least taxing) what big market teams could spend smaller market teams would spend more.
Everyone talks about it like some nefarious owner collusion but the union was fully on-board at the time.
this take is the “Bush did 9/11” of baseball takes. Well, not THAT bad. But it’s quite a conspiracy if so if they got the players union in on it.
It’s not conspiracy. It’s just a poorly run union. The MLBPA felt that teams like the Pirates weren’t spending because they had no chance at competing financially with the big boys. So they jumped at the luxury tax thinking it would encourage spending in smaller market teams and that would boost their salaries. Boy were they wrong.
And considering the union signed off on this in the CBA of ’97 you most definitely can say they got the union in on it because otherwise the luxury tax wouldn’t exist.
On the other hand Henry and company may believe the 86 win team is the real Sox team and keeping Mookie was only delaying the pain, if at all. They need at least two quality starters and quite possibly more. Who would that be? Chasing pennants is a fools dream at this point. Straighten your organization out before plunging for the team.
They didn’t do either. They took a watered down prospect package to save 16m a year on Price. Half of which they will use to sign crappy replacements to cover his innings. Their biggest weakness “starting pitching” was not addressed and got worse without Price.
John Henry got rich rich exploiting inefficiencies in pricing he found in the derivatives market that no one else could find. Clearly, that’s not happening in baseball.
the edges were not such that they could build an insurmountable lead nor such that other teams couldn’t figure it out (pretty quickly). I mean, I think they did spot some inefficiencies early on and those added up. It’s interesting because Henry really spotted one big inefficiency in the derivatives market, and that provided most of the value. With baseball, the Sox knew of or spotted a bunch (and chose to throw money at them in a way other teams who may have known about them couldn’t), and they just sort of added up (even the Sox themselves were an inefficiency- the team was basically broke, and way undervalued).
I don’t want to give Dombrowski too much credit, but I think they (as an organization) made some bets on other unexploited inefficiencies that just didn’t work out long term. Sometimes you “zig” when you should “zag.”
The thing about everyone whining about how Henry is just being a greedy billionaire is that it just does not mesh with anything else he has done – he has never been unwilling to spend a lot of money to put a competitive team on the field, and a single move does not make reconsider that fact. So with that context in mind, whenever I see all of these writers barfing out several thousand words that can be condensed down to “John Henry is just being a miser”, it comes off to me as the absolute laziest possible take on the Mookie trade. I would expect it from the Globe or the Ringer or ESPN, where the modus operandi for the majority of those writers is to ride the backlash wave to views and clicks. But at Fangraphs? And Baseball Prospectus? Come on man.
I have watched the Red Sox, and mlb in general, pretty closely for nearly 20 years now, and the thing that has become very apparent to me is that John Henry has to run the Red Sox in a fairly unconventional way, considering he has historically gotten skewered in the media for a variety of moves while simultaneously winning 4 WS titles. On top of that, it’s been written about pretty extensively in recent years that the Red Sox are a notoriously boom and bust team. This article that was written on FiveThiryEight 5 years ago still applies: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-red-sox-are-on-the-wildest-roller-coaster-ride-in-modern-mlb-history/. Maybe, just maybe, the owner that has won 4 WS titles and has a history of weird moves, that go against conventional wisdom and provoke backlash, might be doing something behind the scenes that isn’t fully understood?
Well I wouldn’t expect it from the Globe, the Sox kind of own the Globe
Within the parameters big clubs have set for themselves, Boston is model both for money spent and ROI on that money. Over the last ~20 years, here is their spending (and their rank in spending against the league)
2002 – 108M (2nd)
2003 – 100M (6th)
2004 – 125M (2nd)*
2005 – 121M (2nd)
2006 – 120M (2nd)
2007 – 143M (2nd)*
2008 – 133M (4th)
2009 – 122M (4th)
2010 – 163M (2nd)
2011 – 161M (3rd)
2012 – 173M (3rd)
2013 – 150M (4th)*
2014 – 163M (4th)
2015 – 187M (3rd)
2016 – 182M (3rd)
2017 – 199M (3rd)*
2018 – 235M (1st)
2019 – 240M (1st)
They won the WS four times in that span. There is no question they have spent money as aggressively as anyone in the league and no question they have been effective in allocating resources to put winning teams on the field. Allocation includes cutting expenses in some situations and/or declining to pay premium dollars in every situation where doing so would make the talent better.
The only question is ideological: the author dislikes that big markets don’t just spend blindly into the tax. Analysis is rarely supplied in support of this ideology. It’s mostly pithy comments about rich people. They’re rich, aren’t they?! So they have money, don’t they?! So why shouldn’t they spend it to make the team better?
That’s facile. There may be good arguments for all of the biggest-market teams to spend more deeply into the tax, but those arguments have not been presented here – and none of the biggest-market teams do it.
Exactly how deeply into the tax should Boston spend? Should they have signed Cole this offseason? Maybe Rendon, too. It would be really weird if you answered “no”, wouldn’t it? Those players would absolutely improve the team in a very competitive division. And the only cost is money and John Henry has lots of money. Are there any other factors to consider?
Exactly this. I have never seen so many talented writers decide to write the absolute laziest take on a move before in my life. Their arguments are empty, filled with poor assumptions and holes in their logic.
I assume some people here have worked in financial services? You only come out ahead on the quant side if you are truly anal retentive about every part of the process. Your model has a life span, and you have to continuously innovate to maintain an edge. Sometimes you have to cut your losses, and judging the right time to cut a bad bet/figure out that someone is squeezing you is as important to your profit margin as having an effective, winning strategy.
This is just a club acting like a financial firm and perhaps authors showing their naivete about throwing good money after bad.
“This is just a club acting like a financial firm” That is the essence of the writers point. Instead of behaving like a baseball team with the main goal of putting the absolutely best product on the field, they are more concerned with profit margin.
The reason you don’t sign Rendon and Cole and every other guy who improves your WAR, even if you’re willing to ignore the tax ramifications, is that every additional projected win has diminishing returns above a certain point. Once your division odds start to level out, meaningfully improving your World Series odds becomes exponentially more expensive.
The reason you don’t trade Mookie Betts if you’re the Red Sox is that they were pretty much exactly on the point in the curve where trading dollars for WAR has the highest ROI in WS odds. But that’s only for 2020. This move was obviously made with a longer term view.
Yet in that same span they spent a whopping 25m in luxury tax compared to 300m + for the Yankees. This isn’t an isolated incident with Henry and the Sox. While revenues have climbed, the percentage that the Sox have paid on players had declined. Also spending money on resigning your young, very talented, homegrown player is not spending blindly into the tax. They have had years to make this work and plan ahead. Same thing happened with Lester. You site the 4 titles they have won but how many were left on the table?
Well written, Craig!
“You have to trade Betts or you end up with just a draft pick” begs the question. No team needed Betts *more* in 2020 than the Red Sox. If the Red Sox had to trade Betts or end up with just a draft pick, then I assume the Dodgers will now be looking to trade Betts, too?
The trade is fine if you are not going to sign Betts long term, probably even in balance a good move. But the part that hasn’t been explained is why they didn’t make locking Betts up long term a key part of their strategy. Betts is in the rare class of players at the top of the win curve who have the potential to produce surplus value on long term contracts because of the combined cultural/risk aversion factors that impose artificial limits on what teams are willing to pay. Even if he wasn’t and was paid fair value per WAR, you would think that one of the advantages of being a big money team is the ability to lock in a core of fairly compensated superstars. Where do they think they are going to get the core of talent that puts you on the level where a few shrewd value plays and intelligent mid level signings can put you over the top? Why not pay to lock up Betts, Boagerts, and Devers long term and go from there?
Betts has been adamant for a couple years now that he has no interest in signing an extension and that he wants to see how much he can get in free agency. Any extension offer would have to be a significant overpay and Boston rightly moved on.
…but then they used him as a chance to salary-dump Price, because they care more about that than winning.
There are very few Red Sox fans that are not very happy to see Price pitching, occasionally, any where as long as it isn’t in Boston. No David Price at a cost of $16M/year is better than having him around for twice that amount. The cost savings will take the chains off of Bloom and he will able to use the money in a better way. Never once has John Henry failed to spend when it was appropriate to do so. This is not that time and to suggest that John Henry would put money ahead of consistently fielding a competitive team is such an ignorant statement that it does merit any more comment.