The Red Sox have reportedly traded Mookie Betts -- an MVP-caliber performer and one of the best players in franchise history who's in his prime -- to the Dodgers along with the still-useful veteran lefty David Price. In prioritizing payroll relief over fielding the best roster possible, Boston has done great harm to its hopes in 2020. If previous public comments this offseason are any guide, then the only person who should be surprised by this is ... Red Sox owner John Henry. 

Henry would already be due a rhetorical flogging for allowing the competitive balance tax (CBT) threshold to guide his decision-making despite the club's vast revenues and championship-worthy core that was in place prior to the Betts trade. Compounding his sins, though, is his rank dishonesty throughout the offseason. 

As the 2019 regular season was winding down, here's what Henry said to reporters: 

"This year we need to be under the CBT and that was something we've known for more than a year now. 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."

The CBT threshold for 2020 is $208 million, and clubs payrolls over that line are subject to a schedule of penalties that get more severe with "repeat offender" status and depending upon the amount by which they exceed the CBT limit. That's what Henry's referring to with those comments. The Sox ended the 2019 season with payroll north of $240 million, and prior to the Betts trade they were still $17 million or so over the limit for 2020 (via Baseball Prospectus/Cot's Contracts). So they have reportedly traded Betts and Price and are now under the limit for 2020. No parsing of Henry's comments is necessary. The owner said the team needed to be under the CBT, and so that's what they did. 

Now, however, consider that Henry in January said that the rumors of a Betts trade and the team's desire to get under the CBT "resides with the media more far more than it does within the Sox." A lie is an instance of willful deception. An untruth is a factual inaccuracy put forth without an intent to deceive. So let's give Henry more credit than he merits and say he merely forgot that he himself said the Sox intended to cut payroll and reset their CBT penalties. Such a notion manifestly does not reside "with the media far more than it does within the Sox" when Henry himself spoke those words. Perhaps accurately reporting what John Henry said is freshly beyond the pale for John Henry, but if that's the case then his grievance should be with basic notions of reality and nothing else. 

In that same January email exchange with Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe, Henry also said this: 

" … I reminded baseball ops that we are focused on competitiveness over the next 5 years over and above resetting to which they said, 'That's exactly how we've been approaching it.'"

Less than a month before the Betts trade, Henry flatly declared that competing across a span that includes the 2020 season was more important than sloughing off salary obligations. Still and yet, the Sox traded their best player and an important member of the rotation in the service of payroll reduction. Nothing about the Sox's situation materially changed between the time of Henry's email and the Betts-Price swap. So to repeat:

  • Henry claimed the focus on payroll reduction was a media concoction, but the Sox then reduced payroll.
  • Henry claimed contention was the priority, but then the Sox traded away their best player and a key rotation piece. 

When you have a core of Betts, Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, Andrew Benintendi, and Eduardo Rodriguez -- as Boston did before this trade -- you build around it. You don't lop off the single most valuable piece of that core in the name of payroll relief that you don't truly need. That principle alone makes the Betts trade a self-immolating one, but then you get into the fact that the team's owner misled fans along the journey to that bad decision. 

As for Price, he'll also be missed. The rotation is Boston's pressure point for 2020, and that's especially the case given that the Red Sox toil in what might be MLB's toughest division (the Blue Jays figure to be significantly improved in 2020, and the Yankees and Rays were both playoff teams in 2019). Rick Porcello's innings are now in Queens, and Chris Sale, despite promising offseason returns, is not exactly a known quantity in 2020 thanks to elbow woes. Now Price is gone. That means the Sox right now are looking at a middle to back of Nathan Eovaldi, Martin Perez, and ... the newly acquired Brusdar Graterol, who's probably best suited to the bullpen? Matt Hall? Someone else? Post-Betts, these are small details. 

Boston's dedication to self-defeat should have been apparent from the moment the team fired team president Dave Dombrowski less than a year after the Sox won the World Series. Dombrowski, a future Hall of Famer, did what he was hired to do -- commit resources toward the goal of winning a championship. The thirst for payroll efficiency, though, became too strong, even if Henry would never cop to it.

Sox ownership got what it wanted, which is to reduce their investment in the on-field product. Sox fans, meantime, get a demonstrably worse team wreathed in C suite dishonesty. It's not exactly an urgent bulletin to observe that you shouldn't make a habit of believing what comes out of a team owner's mouth, but the acute reminder from Henry is appreciated.