It's easy to see a Boston Red Sox fan's point of view, that even with the club's top-tier revenue, they chose to trade their best position player in years because of money concerns. I can't convince these fans that trading Mookie Betts is a good idea, but I can tell you what they're thinking. A dozen cheap years of strong contributors -- split between outfielder Alex Verdugo and pitcher Brusdar Graterol -- is a solid return for one year of an elite player and dumping a bad contract, even if it hurts for Boston to officially commit to the opposite of the Dave Dombrowski approach to team building.
It's totally reasonable to complain that the Red Sox can afford to keep Betts if they wanted to. Every MLB team can technically afford any one player. The Red Sox appear to be aiming for something that's about more than any one player: building a model franchise from top to bottom. And trading Mookie Betts has a good chance of making that a reality more quickly, as preposterous as that may sound.
The Red Sox's new baseball chief, Chaim Bloom, comes from the Tampa Bay Rays, the model franchise for sustained contention on a micro-payroll. It will look different in Boston with the franchise's higher payroll ceiling, but the primary strategic focus is to be a perennial contender that won't have to have down years, due to a more sound approach to roster/payroll flexibility, depth and a strong farm system. Betts wouldn't sign a contract extension and his value is so high that he could be used to kick-start the new approach to roster construction.
Dodgers fans still complain about their former Rays exec (Andrew Friedman) doing the same thing, because it means not always paying retail for top players, but Friedman's consistent playoff runs are the example of how to extend the Tampa Bay model to a large-market team. The element of delayed satisfaction isn't fun for some fans to watch and it can seem like the team is being run on a spreadsheet, but like it or not both things are essential elements to a modern baseball dynasty.
The Dodgers make out great here. They got one of the best players in baseball in Betts and depth to their rotation in Price, whose contract gets paid down a bit by the Red Sox. Achieving a sustained winner in Boston meant getting underwater contracts off the books, arguably the hardest thing to do in today's game. Attaching Betts to any such deal was one way to be sure to clear that money. The Dodgers made prudent financial decisions for years to set up this chance to get an elite player at a discount price while taking on another player's bad-money deal. One day, Bloom will likely make his own push-the-chips-in move along these lines when all his ducks are in a row.
The cost to Los Angeles is a controllable, above-average every-day position player in Verdugo and a dependable arm in Kenta Maeda. They didn't have to touch their farm system, much less trade away their top-tier young talents like Gavin Lux or Dustin May. Verdugo offers a wide base of skills, with all five tools grading above average, and providing elite contact ability with emerging ability to get to his power in games. He's essentially the new J.D. Drew and he'll be cheap for a half-dozen years. The one negative is that the 23-year-old Verdugo has a history of maturity issues, but all accounts are that these are behind him.
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Maeda is a nice playoff-caliber starter for the Minnesota Twins, but one who comes at the high price of a half-dozen controllable years of Graterol. He's a monster right-handed pitcher who regularly hits 100 mph with low effort to go with a plus slider, and he has a chance to be a midrotation starter. He's still a bit of a bull in a china shop, so there's some relief risk, but that was also said about Frankie Montas, another similar prospect from a few years ago, who had a breakout half-season as a starter with the A's last year before a PED suspension.
For Boston, this opens spots on the big league team to let youngsters such as infielders Michael Chavis and Bobby Dalbec and pitchers Tanner Houck, Darwinzon Hernandez and Bryan Mata prove if they can become core contributors on the next title-caliber Red Sox club.