What Do the Red Sox Actually Save by Trading Betts, Price?
Now that the Red Sox have actually traded Mookie Betts (and his salary) and David Price (and half of his salary), Boston has followed through on its intentions to significantly reduce payroll. Much has been made of the Red Sox’s desire to stay under the competitive balance tax threshold. In September, team owner John Henry said this:
“This year we need to be under the CBT [competitive balance tax] and that was something we’ve known for more than a year now,” he said. “If you don’t reset, there are penalties, so we’ve known for some time now we needed to reset as other clubs have done.”
Then, in January, Henry said this:
I think every team probably wants to reset at least once every three years.
Henry’s full remarks from January also include an assertion that competitiveness is more important than getting under the tax threshold, although the team’s eventual trade of Mookie Betts strongly undercuts that argument. According to our calculations on the RosterResource Red Sox payroll page, Boston’s payroll for the competitive balance tax is roughly $199 million, nearly $10 million under the first $208 million competitive balance tax threshold. If the Red Sox stay at that level this season, they will spend $56 million less on payroll and competitive balance taxes in 2020 compared to their 2019 outlay.
It’s worth exploring how much the Red Sox are set to save if they get under the tax threshold this season and the form those savings would actually take. At the Boston Globe, Alex Speier outlined a scenario whereby the Red Sox could get under the tax amount this year, and determined the team’s potential savings through 2022. The piece did a good job of delineating the different types of savings the Red Sox could expect to enjoy, as I expect there are some misconceptions about what the penalties actually amount to. While Speier looked through 2022, that year will be the first year of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement so it is difficult to know what, if any, savings will be present then. Let’s examine each of those penalties (and their effect on the team) in turn.
The Competitive Balance Tax
This is where I suspect most people assume the biggest savings are. Teams can reset the tax amount to lower levels, then go over the tax amount and reap the savings. In Speier’s example, the Red Sox go back up to a $243.5 million payroll in 2021. The taxes saved are right around $10 million next year. If you want to include the tax savings for 2020 compared to a $243.5 million payroll, we can add another $20 million in savings, though that’s generous given that the Sox could have non-tendered Jackie Bradley Jr., kept Betts and Price, and shot for 90 wins while paying just $7.5 million in taxes.
But assuming that the Red Sox would go back up to a $243.5 million payroll in 2021 might not be best, though, either. Even with assumed arbitration raises for 2021, the Red Sox commitments look to be a little under $180 million. In order to get payroll back up to $243.5 million, the Red Sox would need to spend about $65 million in new money next winter. Given that the departing Mookie Betts is the only great free agent available next offseason, it would likely take three sizable signings to get up that level. The last two teams to famously reset did not make that kind of splash.
In 2018, both the Yankees and Dodgers were able to reset their tax amounts. In 2019, the Yankees increased payroll, but only to $234 million, which meant a tax bill of $6 million instead of $14 million. The Dodgers didn’t even go back over the threshold in 2019, so resetting in 2018 got them no tax savings at all. Both clubs probably got some of that A’s money, but likely not more than $10 million per club. Even this season, with the Yankees set to go $50 million over the tax amount, their savings compared to having not reset comes to just $10 million. The tax savings aren’t nothing, and you might be able to afford Jordan Lyles with that money, but they really only amount to $5 million to $10 million per year unless a team is going to up payroll beyond $275 million.
Draft Picks
To be clear, teams that go over the tax thresholds, no matter by how much, do not lose any draft picks. If a team goes over the tax threshold by more than $40 million, their top draft spot drops by 10 spots (the top six picks in the draft are exempt from this rule). Keep in mind, this penalty is triggered by going $40 million over the cap amount regardless of whether a team was under the tax threshold in previous seasons; resetting their tax amount has no effect. In any event, the penalty is only worth about $3 million. It’s true that the draft pick compensation the team would receive for players who depart in free agency with a qualifying offer attached would be lessened, and moving from the end of second round to the end of the fourth round is worth roughly $1.5 million. But the team would have to retain Betts to even suffer that loss, so it doesn’t really apply here. And if they were over the competitive balance tax threshold, signing a player who had received a qualifying offer would result in the extra loss of a fifth round pick ($2.5 million in value) and $500,000 more in international pool money ($2 million in value). But again, that loss is more theoretical as it requires the Red Sox to go sign a free agent with a qualifying offer.
A’s Revenue Sharing Money
Last January, I wrote about a quirk in the current CBA that takes part of Oakland’s revenue sharing money and gives it back to teams like the Yankees, with reductions in the amount a team is set to receive if that team goes over the competitive balance tax threshold in at least two consecutive years. The Oakland A’s reside in a large market and large-market teams are typically prohibited from getting revenue sharing money. Any revenue sharing money that large-market teams would receive gets redistributed to the teams paying into revenue sharing. The A’s had an exception to that rule because of their poor stadium situation, but the amount they could receive declined over the last few years and will hit zero in 2020.
The amount Oakland was set to forfeit last year was 75% of their revenue sharing cut, which was expected to be around $40 million. It’s possible their increase in attendance and their playoff run made that amount a little bit less, but if we assume that the $40 million figure is correct, then $30 million would go back to teams paying into the revenue sharing pool. If we assume around $500 million changes hands between the high and low revenue clubs (with Oakland slightly over the average amount), and the Red Sox pay 15% of the revenue sharing pool, then last year, the Red Sox would have received $4.5 million of their $75 million payment back. Because the club was over the tax amount two years in a row, they would have only ended up with $3.375 million, forfeiting $1.125 million. If the team went over the tax amount in 2020, they would forfeit half of their share of Oakland’s money (now the full $40 million) and thus would get just $3 million of the $6 million. In 2021, they would receive $1.5 million of the $6 million they would otherwise be entitled to.
In this scenario, Boston getting under the tax threshold in 2020 would net them just $7.5 million extra over the next two seasons (this is where I differ the most from Speier’s calculations). If we wanted to push the Red Sox’s rebate higher, keep in mind that means that revenues move significantly higher, too. If the Red Sox paid 20% of revenue sharing money instead of 15%, their penalty for 2020 and 2021 for going over the tax amount would increase to $10 million, but it would also mean the club’s revenues are roughly $100 million higher over those two years, combined with their existing average revenue, which is some $200 million higher than the average club’s (without accounting for their 80% stake in NESN).
(Here it’s worth noting that competitive balance tax penalties like the ones the Red Sox have been paying aren’t some small-market windfall. The first $13 million is divided equally among all teams to defray player benefit costs, with 50% of the remaining amount going toward the same and the rest split among all non-tax paying teams. Even including the player benefits portion, teams ended up with a little under $1 million each last season.)
The Real Savings
Even in the above scenario where we assume the Red Sox immediately take payroll beyond $240 million again, the savings beyond this season are minimal. The Oakland revenue sharing money in 2020 and 2021, plus the 2021 tax savings, amounts to just $20 million in the above scenario. The real savings (or rather, the increased profits if we’re being accurate), come from simply reducing payroll. The Red Sox appear to be reducing their payroll below prior expectations by about $40 million in 2020; combined with the tax savings, that means $60 million less spent on payroll for the Red Sox this season with only $20 million in savings elsewhere. The real benefit isn’t resetting the penalties to reduce future costs; it’s in reducing current costs.
Before last season, Forbes estimated the Red Sox’s profits at $84 million. They did win the World Series, so perhaps that figure is $30 million or so above a normal year, though the Red Sox also drew more fans in 2019 than they did in 2018, which likely mitigated the lack of a playoff run somewhat. In any event, it seems reasonable to believe that the Red Sox were quite profitable last season. They will likely be more profitable this year despite actively making themselves worse. The narrative teams like to point to every three years about the benefits of resetting their competitive balance tax penalties undersells where the real savings come from. Teams are just grabbing a bunch of cash today, and using future savings as an excuse for that windfall.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
But remember, if you cancel your season tickets, that means you are a pink hat bandwagoner. It’s a team’s prerogative to get worse on purpose to make more money, and fans have a duty to continue funneling cash into the owners’ pockets anyway. Otherwise, this whole scheme may not even work and nobody wants that.
The White Sox pulled stuff like this forever, claiming that they couldn’t add payroll because attendance was low. I always thought it was like a restaurant promising to make better food in the future if people showed up to eat the swill they were serving now.
Within the parameters they have set for themselves (which you noted are not unique to Boston) where tax penalties need to be reset every ~3 years, this is a very interesting trade to talk about on many levels. Mookie Betts is a great player and is great in an interesting way. Projecting the next decade for Betts, because of how unique he is, is interesting. Appraising that projection in the context of the Red Sox roster is interesting. Estimating the market for him is interesting. Evaluating the risk of him walking away for other reasons, even if your offer is competitive, is interesting. Appraising the value of Verdugo et al and all the other pieces traded is interesting! The marginal value of a win along the win curve and Boston’s place on it is interesting!
You get it. I’m easily interested. Probably many of us here are. And there’s so much potential content available here in one transaction, but most of it is passed over in favor of a piece that wanders into an entirely separate point: the author does not like the parameters teams have set for themselves.
That’s a fine subject, too, and I’m sympathetic to that point of view. But if you just have an axe to grind about team spending, write an article about that. Don’t smuggle that campaign into articles advertised as analysis of other things. You end up half-baking everything and the result is – amazingly, given all the potential mentioned above – just not that interesting.
Why did you read and comment on an article that doesnt interest you?
The title wasnt misleading, and fangraphs will undoubtedly have other content related to this trade.
Is that a real question? Have you never read something you expected to be better than it was?
I didn’t call the headline misleading and I like Craig’s work. That’s the point. I’d like to read more from him on each of these subjects; I just think it gets too muddled the way it’s combined here.
If the only question were “how many dollars are saved in this transaction”, the article could be a paragraph. There’s obviously more to it and the central question is long-term resource allocation.
The opener quotes Henry and sets the table for a great topic: a team balancing sustainable competitiveness against payroll parameters:
Henry’s full remarks from January also include an assertion that competitiveness is more important than getting under the tax threshold, although the team’s eventual trade of Mookie Betts strongly undercuts that argument.
But the author just waves his hand at this rather than exploring it. It’s simply not true that trading Betts “undercuts” Henry’s assertion.
It would undercut an assertion that *maximizing* competitiveness *in the 2020 season* is more important than resetting the tax, but that’s not what Henry said – or what any team says. And we all know that. Navigating competitive windows with payroll constraints is a central theme of organizational analysis.
If you want to argue about whether those constraints are appropriate for teams like the Red Sox, dive in. I’m interested in both topics. But they don’t combine well here. We end up skipping a meaningful analysis of what the Red Sox are doing with the constraints they do in fact have. And even the case that the constraints are wrong/bad isn’t made as well as it could be in its own article. “The Red Sox probably profited a bunch, I think, so the estimated savings is probably unnecessary [to what?]” is pretty shallow.
No. The clear takeaway for me from this article is that the team will save $20 million-ish over two years due to diving under the competitive tax threshold. If the team points to the tax as the bogeyman that forced their hand to cut payroll, well, that would be disingenuous.
Love the breakdown, but this article would be greatly improved by some visual aids. It’s tough to follow calculations without it.
I agree. “The Red Sox appear to be reducing their payroll below prior expectations by about $40 million in 2020; combined with the tax savings, that means $60 million less spent on payroll for the Red Sox this season with only $20 million in savings elsewhere.”
So is Craig saying that their total CBT savings is $40M = $20M this year + $20M in years 2021 & 2022 (which includes the A’s money, the worse draft pick, the worse comp pick if they kept Betts and he signed with another team, and the more compensation they’d have to give if they signed a QO FA from another team)? And that $40M would only occur if they increased their payroll next year above next year’s luxury cap?
$40M (at the most) is an important correction to Alex Speier’s $65M figure. Still, the team was essentially tied with the Rays and Angels at a 93-win projection and just above the Indians & A’s so they’d be in a dogfight for the 2 wild card spots. They’d need another Starter, Closer, and 2B to solidify their team. They probably have enough in their weak farm system to pick up a Closer and 2B at the ASB (who would have cost an additional $8M – $10M for the rest of the year), but not a TOR Starter.
I’d guess it’s not only the $40M savings but their own internal skepticism about how healthy Sale & Eovaldi are and how untradeable Price & JDM are that had them trade Betts.
my back of the napkin was 60 million saved this year? I need a spread sheet. At least a comparison between the Speier and Craig’s numbers (and how they got there). Also, I’d take the Forbes number as far as I could throw it, which isn’t very far, but saving this money increases their profit by 50 odd percent at Craig’s calculation, which you shouldn’t sniff at.
I agree. They were not nearly transparent enough with their cost estimation methods for me to feel comfortable with the analysis. Even then, $84mm in operating income isn’t a ton for a $3B company with potentially limited growth opportunities.
the problem with realizing the larger valuation is that the greater the valuation…. the fewer people who can pay for it. I don’t think you should base most of your team valuation on cashflow, for sure, but it’s important to keep in mind most of this teams’ value is illiquid and mostly an estimate of what a very small handful of “greater fools” is willing to pay for something (read: the value is in fenway, the players, future q)
Seems pretty good on a $516M revenue base and has got to be amongst both the profit and margin leaders amongst MLB teams. We should probably compare more broadly across all sports teams.
Henry in front of his cash register…..chaching $$$$. He got his WS. It’s all about the money. Management, like so many other teams do, gave out huge long term contracts that are now achors around their necks.
I try to not be too argumentative on this forum but some ignorant comments go to far. John Henry is the best thing to happen to the Red Sox in their history. He has made a few suitcases full of money because he spent a few suitcases full of money supporting the Red Sox. He refurbished Fenway Park and made shrewd personnel decisions. It wasn’t always wine and roses for we devoted followers of the Old Town Team. How many here know of the time when the trainer, one Buddy Larue, came close to buying the Red Sox, the bleeping trainer? The dreary years with Haywood Sullivan in control and State Street Bank. Any way that John Henry wants to run the Red Sox is fine with me. All true fans know that he is already thinking about which way is best to continue this wonderful long-running story of success that we have enjoyed. If taking something away from 2020 to make 2021 and beyond better so be it and I am all for it..
Yankees fan here, and I have to agree with you. Henry is a smart, good owner, who rarely lets himself be guided by sentiment, hires smart people for the FO, and I suspect, lets them do their jobs. I’d be very happy if he were worse at his job.
Although Henry has spoken about getting the tax reset I suspect that the motive for the trade is simply that Dombrowski had blown payroll up (for good reason) yet Henry felt 2019 was not an abberation but a warning. It makes sense to pay tax money when you are competitive but this team was not going to be competitive and 400 million ten years of Betts is not the way to make an organization that is low in prospects whole going forward. If in fact he was going to sign with Boston.
You are exactly right. Henry saw Dombrowski taking the Red Sox down the same dirt road to nowhere that he had previously done to the Marlins and Tigers. This became clear when Dombrowski was fired less than a year after winning it all. Henry was determined to stop the bleeding before it reached that point and decided that getting under the cap was part of resetting the organization.
The article seems to avoid the fact that teams that are consistently over the CBT threshold get taxed more and more severely with each ongoing year. That, as John Henry said, correctly, is the reason that a reset every three years is a requirement in order to be able to field a competitive team in as many years as possible. Bringing Oakland into the discussion is a red herring to divert the question away from the fact that the Red Sox were skating out onto thinner and thinner ice and had to make a bold move to be competitive well past 2020. Yes, for the 100th time, I am going to miss Mookie Betts in a Red Sox uniform, but I cheer for the uniform and I am going to thank the present Red Sox management for the great product that they have consistently put on the field since taking over and To ridicule them for sound business practices is uncalled for.
So the thing I don’t understand about this idea going around that the Red Sox could afford to stay above the tax threshold, this is just John Henry prioritizing money over winning, etc. is….isn’t this exactly what the competitive balance tax is designed to do? It’s literally an incentive that was introduced to try and keep large market teams from running up their payroll. If what you say is true, and the red Sox could have just continued getting hit with penalities, doesn’t that sort of mean the tax system isn’t doing it’s job? What would be the point of a tax system if big market teams just ignored it?
Also, as recently as a few years ago, writers and fans were complaining about the red Sox giving out albatross contracts to Pablo Sandoval, Hanley, Price, Porcello, Rusney Castillo, and the list goes on if you keep going further back. At any given point, the red Sox are either being weighed down by big enormous contracts that were dumb to sign in the first place or being miserly with refusing to give out a contract to their homegrown star.
Everyone wants to have their cake and eat it too – John Henry should spend a lot of money, but only on good players that I like, and not on bad player I don’t like.
There’s getting under the tax, and then there’s getting way under the tax by trading your generational homegrown star and not getting the maximum return because you attach an expensive salary to it. Not to mention, for all of Price’s warts he’s still likely to be significantly better than whatever starting pitching they can cobble together with the $16M per year they’re saving in sending him to LAD
Price at $16M per year for 3 years is probably pretty close to what he’d get on the open market – so I’m not sure you’re accurate about them not getting the maximum return (i.e. trading Price while paying half his salary should get them roughly nothing, so the return they got in this deal should be about the same as what they’d get for Betts alone).
The competitive balance tax was literally proposed by big market owners themselves as an excuse not to spend as much as they feasibly can.
It’s *their* idea.
This is untrue actually.
Bud Selig, via Jerry Reinsdorf et al., fought like hell for revenue sharing and, later, the CBT on behalf of small market teams (read: their own financial interests) because a handful of clubs claimed they were forever on the brink of insolvency and couldn’t compete.
The CBT was specifically Bud Selig’s foil to keep George Steinbrenner in check. George supported Bud and wound up voting for it, but that didn’t mean it was his idea or that he was pleased to pay the fines.
There’s a great book called The Game by Jeff Pessah that details Selig’s, ahem, legacy.
It all comes full circle. Selig originally maneuvered the Sox sale in John Henry’s direction (he was the Marlins owner previously) because Henry had experience of life as a small market owner and wouldn’t put up a fight to block the CBT vote.
It can be and is multiple things
Right, many teams and their fans would love to run a $199M payroll like Boston is in 2020
My take is that main Sox motivation was to avoid a free-agent bidding war for Betts – since Teixeira embarrassment policy has been to make preemptive take-it-or-leave-it offers (Crawford, Price), and with Betts pressure would be intolerable. And Price had to go, because many fans would blame his contract for losing Betts (and Price might not take that well).
I don’t think that Betts was traded primarily because of the luxury tax ceiling. Henry probably thought that would be a palatable excuse for the trade and was wrong. The real reason, I believe, was that there was zero chance of signing Betts after the 2020 season. Ownership offered him 10 yrs/$300M a year ago. As far as I know, that 10 years would have included the final two years of arbitration. Next year they wouldn’t offer him 10 years and certainly not at close to $40M per. Dombrowski twisted their arms (especially John Henry) for signing Price and extending Sale, and neither one looks like a good thing to have surrendered on. And those are 5-7 year deals. Betts could age better than Pedroia (who fortunately earned his contract in its first half) but a little guy who depends on his wrists for his bat speed and his legs for everything else isn’t going to be a superstar n his late 30s. Henry and Werner have been baseball owners long enough, and are old enough, to understand that eventually you get to the second half of the contract and it can cripple a team’s ability to compete. I suspect that Bloom agreed with ownership 100%, not being emotionally invested in any of the current Red Sox personnel, and did his best to return as much value as possible for the one year of Betts. And the deal got rid of the unpopular David Price and half of his salary to boot.
“… and did his best to return as much value as possible for the one year of Betts.”
By saddling him with Price’s dead contract? Uh, no. That’s not how this works.
If you had any argument at all, it would be if they actually got as much value out of Mookie Betts as they could.
They didn’t saddle him with Price’s contract – they saddled him with *half* of Price’s contract. Which incidentally is probably right around what Price is worth. Thus Mookie + Price + $48M should give you roughly the same return as Mookie alone. And for that the return was rather excellent.
You keep saying that $10mil or $3mil or whatever isn’t a huge amount, and I was basically agreeing with you in that regards, but at the end when you say the Red Sox made $84mil in their WS winning year makes original savings carry much more weight. If we are to assume something like a WC appearance rather than WS appearance is about $30mil less, that’s profit in the realms of $50-60mil. In which case $13mil in savings is a pretty big deal as that’s 1/4 of the profit. And even going into the luxury tax is a big deal as it could be worth half the profits.
Now, mind you I don’t for a second believe the Red Sox only made $84mil in 2018 given all the ancillary revenue they get from owning the Red Sox. Nor and I crying poverty for the owners. But I am just saying there’s no need to put an opinion on factual information by saying an amount is small or large. When we look at player contracts we don’t say “he would’ve gotten $5mil/yr less but that’s not a lot of money so he should’ve stayed instead of signing with a big market team.” I don’t think it’s any different for owners, especially if we’re looking at their motivations objectively rather than just doing the simple “owners are greedy SOBs and they’re trying to cheat the fans and the players.” In the end all businesses want to make money. That’s capitalism in a nutshell. And clearly for sports teams $10mil in profit is quite important for them even if the teams themselves may be worth billions. Now whether sports owners should try to make $80mil or just $40mil or just break even, that’s another debate. And one I feel may be more important to discuss given that sports teams are partially funded through stadium deals and all that.
This argument would be more compelling if it wasn’t for the fact that Fenway Sports Group has lots of other revenue streams that are less public (like their ownership of NESN), and that the value of the franchise is only growing, so the baseball team could easily operate at a loss every year and Henry et al would still be making tons of money each year.
They can want to make as much money as possible, but that doesn’t mean we as fans have to just go along with it.
Good analysis. We shouldn’t be blaming the tax–owners just want to make more profits, even at the cost of quality of product. If I were a Red Sox fan, with 4 championships in 15 years, I’d feel generally good about my ownership, notwithstanding this salary dump/mini-tank. The owners essentially draw monopoly profits–if your local ice-cream store bumps its prices and switches to an inferior product, you go to another one. But if there is no other one and you really like ice-cream, you are stuck with higher prices for less, until ownership starts to see that the strategy is actually costing them dollars. That doesn’t happen much in the real world of RSNs, huge money through the national contract, revenue sharing where applicable, etc. Dumping Mookie and his $27M creates a lot of profit that won’t all be eaten away by lower beer and hot dog sales.
Regarding whatever the Red Sox (or any of the other MLB clubs) make, how reliable are the Forbes numbers actually? It’s pretty clear to me their ‘America’s Richest People’ numbers are badly inflated, because people like to read the bigger numbers and they so sell more magazines that way. OK, the Forbes MLB numbers are the best out there, but is that actually more a matter of they’re the least terrible numbers out there, and we so have no friggin’ idea how much any of these clubs are making?
there’s no money in figuring out cashflow and revenue unless LP’s become more of a thing, and the LP’s realize their return in more than just the sale of the team (which might be what’s going on with the Marlins- a bet on revenue, and if so, how stupid are they if their numbers aren’t accurate). I think McKinsey keeps some private numbers on team valuations, but they likely have similar problems to Forbes in estimating them.
I think Forbes is wrong, but I couldn’t tell you which way its wrong (what the direction of the error is) or if there’s bias (the magnitude of the error is systematically different for different teams).
Here’s the part that really drives me bonkers: The Red Sox dumped $43M in salary in this trade, right ($27M+$16M)? So before that, they were at about $241.5M. But they started the offseason at about $230M. I suppose you could make the argument that Jose Peraza, Mitch Moreland, and Martin Perez are good deals, but generally speaking, teams that want to punt in 2020 and reduce payroll shouldn’t be spending any guaranteed money on bad players. All they had to do at the beginning of the offseason was dump JBJ (also an an expiring contract) and 40% of David Price’s contract. Or trade Chris Sale (which, I know there are some questions about his elbow, but did you see the contracts being handed out to pitchers this winter?). This was really not the only route they could have taken.
This is leading me to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that they wanted to trade Mookie Betts. Why? Some people have speculated they don’t want to get caught in the crosshairs by fans when he leaves in FA, but that’s insane, because this is way worse than that. I think what’s going on here is that the Red Sox just thought that Mookie Betts, as a six-win player with one year of team control left making $27M a year, was an overvalued asset by the rest of the league. And from there, it says nothing good about what the mindset actually is.
The Red Sox took essentially the same value as Goldschmidt returned, so you’re saying that the Red Sox see Betts = Goldschmidt? I don’t think so. I think this trade shows that Price at less than half his contract still has negative value which weighed down Betts’ return and that’s the same for Sale. No one wants Sale at 5/$75M right now much less the 5/$150M he actually has. You can’t just waive away his elbow problems. The Red Sox are doing their best at unwinding the Dombrowski era.
I agree that if they would have foregone JBJ, Peraza, Moreland, and Perez, they could have found some other way to keep Betts for one final run, but again maybe they’re not optimistic on Sale or Eovaldi, so they thought this was the only way to get prospects back. I also think it’s weird that they waited until after Free Agency has mostly ended to shop Betts. Early in FA, they would have had more bidders
No one wants Sale at 5/$75?? Did you see the contracts Wheeler and Bumgarner got, let alone Strasburg – who historically has not been as good or healthy as Chris Sale. The AAV on Sale’s deal is only $25.6 million. The Sox could have traded him and eaten far less money on that deal than they just did for Price.
The question here is how confident are teams in Sale’s elbow. This is something that likely varies from team to team.
If Sale had finished last year healthy, they could have gotten a haul for him. Now, it’s more like “they probably could have dumped the contract on somebody.” Probably.
For the other big market teams like the Dodgers and the Yankees who have tried like hell to get under the CBT recently, they didn’t have to trade their best player to do it. Sure, it maybe cost the Yankees Machado, or the Dodgers Harper, (although the Dodgers were still able to sign Kershaw to a megadeal, and the Yankees were able to work around Stanton’s megadeal) but they were/are still competitive teams, and probably the favorites in their respective leagues. The Red Sox just made themselves severely worse to get under the tax and that’s why there’s so much backlash over it. And while I agree that it’s better to get something for Betts than just a comp pick in 2021 if I’m trying to be as efficient as possible, it is definitely not a good look for one of the biggest teams in baseball to be trading away the best player they’ve had in decades for the sake of the tax. I think there should be some changes to how the CBT works in the next CBA to make it less likely this happens again. The CBT should exist, I guess, but it could be made better.
The Yankees and the Dodgers didn’t make awful signing after awful signing like Boston did.
So the BoSox saved about $80-100mn to make the team 3-4 wins worse in expectation for one year, but 2-3 wins better in each of the next 5 years (even before that saved payroll is reassigned, which it mostly will be). On a $/WAR basis this makes all kinds of sense even for big-market teams.
If this would have taken the BoSox from being projected as a World Series favorite to out of the running entirely it might be objectionable. Instead, it took them from being projected as a Wild Card contender to being projected as a… Wild Card contender. Those marginal wins might end up hurting a lot in the Wild Card race, but that hardly seems to be egregious enough for Henry to be sent to the guillotine. We criticize owners for mortgaging the future to chase Wild Card spots all the time.
Henry does this regularly with Liverpool FC: never lose a valuable asset for nothing, buy young players and develop them, shop at the top of the market when it’s the perfect fit (but otherwise avoid it), and watch that formula generate a team that is capable of contending across multi-year windows. Liverpool is now the best team in world football, and is set up to remain at a high level for years to come. He built that in less than a decade after taking over a team that was about to go bankrupt and placed into administration. Henry has won 4 World Series in 15 years as owner of the Red Sox, who were pretty terrible before he arrived there.
Maybe, just maybe, he knows what he’s doing and isn’t just some giant vampire squid sucking the blood out of baseball.
There’s also the $400 million they get to keep by not re-signing Betts…