On the Boston Red Sox fan site Sons of Sam Horn, the news of Mookie Betts’ trade to the Los Angeles Dodgers was met with a sense of disappointed resignation.
This is a group of smart baseball fans. The members at SoSH are sabermetrically knowledgeable and not prone to buy into either the hysterics of sports radio or the stodgy perspectives of the more senior writers at the Globe and Herald. They are extremely knowledgeable about the minutia of the Red Sox organization: they know of payroll concerns and international investments and the strengths and gaps of the Boston farm system. They are, too, a group that is significantly pragmatic: most of the participants on the boards understand that the Yankees are a stronger team going into 2020, and they understand that the Rays might be a smarter team, and they understand that the familiar names peppering the Blue Jays lineup are going to put Toronto into contention sooner rather than later. With Mookie Betts unwilling to sign an extension prior to free agency, trading him for salary relief, a solid outfielder, and a few upside prospects was, all things considered, a reasonable decision.
My brother, also a Red Sox fan with sabermetric inclinations, had the same response. "This is great," he texted me when the news broke. "One year of Betts isn’t worth much, and this opens up a lot of flexibility to contend down the road."
I have wondered, in the days since the trade news broke, what I should say about it. There is an urgency to say something – Mookie Betts is one of the very best players in the game today, and I am a fan of the team that just traded him away – but I’ve struggled to figure out just what I wanted to say.
What I’ve settled on is this: I understand all of the rationales for the trade, and I understand that there are probably variables none of us know about that have figured into the decision. And none of that seems enough for a team to trade away a player like Mookie Betts.
Rationality has its limits.
I say this as someone who cares about the numbers, as someone who is more apt to side with an objective argument over a subjective one. There is a coherent, objective case for the Boston Red Sox to trade Mookie Betts. For once, I am not convinced by it in the slightest.
I spoke to my grandfather the other day. He is ninety years old, and because of some health challenges, I did not expect him to say anything that would clarify my own thoughts on the Betts trade. But he did. "It’s a stupid thing," he said, "Mookie is the heart and soul of the club. He does everything right on the field, and the fans like him, and the press likes him. You don’t trade a guy like that away."
This sentiment boarders on cliché. We are not meant to think about the ‘heart’ of a baseball team. We are not meant to factor in the sentiment of fans or the press, or whether or not someone plays the ‘right’ way. Playing the ‘right way’ is a loaded term, freighted by a history of codified racism. We are meant to understand the broader contexts, the bottom line. Mookie Betts is worth perhaps 8.0 WAR to the Red Sox, at a cost of $27 million. With any luck, the Red Sox will net more WAR from the Alex Verdugo and Jeter Downs and Connor Wong for less cost.
So it isn’t stupid to trade Mookie Betts, but it isn’t right, either. It isn’t decent.
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It is my thesis - belated articulated - that major league baseball has gone too far in the direction of objectivity, and too far astray from being decent. I hate to use definitions of words to make a case, but in this case it is useful. Decency, as I understand it, is the act of considering and abiding by standards of respectable or moral behavior.
Let me dovetails that thesis to some other trends in baseball, to some other news that I haven’t been able to write about.
There is, first, the trend towards loser teams tanking their seasons to stockpile draft picks for a few years to build a Super Contender. The benefit of this strategy is a chance at a ring on the backs of a few good, cost-controlled players. The cost is five years where a team’s fan base is forced to endure years of losing, garbage baseball, years when the only good players are, in essence, participating in a regular season tryout to be traded to a contender.
Does it work? Certainly.
It is decent? Of course not. It’s gross.
In fact, the whole of the Astros has been a triumph of what is smart trumping, time and again, what is right and decent. We’re talking about a team that signs someone like Roberto Osuna because they might need a few extra innings in October. We’re talking about a team that has an executive office stacked with unmannered jerks. We’re talking about a team that participated in a coordinated (though admittedly goofy) effort to steal signs by banging trash cans.
How is any of it decent? How decent is it to the very good fans in Houston who supported this team through the lean years, in return for a tainted championship and side-eyes every time they put on their ball cap?
A further example of this thesis is major league baseball’s current attitudes to the minor leagues. If the major league teams were decent, they’d do their best to support and build up minor league teams and fan bases, understanding that the wealth stockpiled by major league teams is a kind to trust, and one that they should use to support less fortunate leagues. Instead, the major league teams are talking about contracting the minors…it’s too expensive, too much work. There are too many working parts, and it is not efficient. Major league baseball does not need games to take place in Pulaski, or Salem, or Cedar Rapids, and so very soon there will not be games in those places. The ballparks will sit empty. The men and women who have followed such teams will be left in the dark.
It’s indecent. It is maximizing benefits by sacrificing any consideration of what is right.
And the results are always ugly. Do you think Houston fans are going to keep coming back when the team enters its next rebuild? Are the services of the geniuses behind the Houston breakout going to be hired by other teams? Will these towns and cities dotting the map of America answer the call when baseball realizes that an important part of maintaining a fan base is giving people access to the game locally?
No. When you behave indecently, you burn a bridge. Baseball is burning bridges left and right, and they don't realize who is holding the torch.
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Taking this further: there is, I think, an abandonment of the notion of decency in the narratives we write about the game. We write a lot of stories that do the calculus, a lot of stories that do good objective analysis about the game of baseball. But we struggle to write successfully about the ambiguities of ethics.
Look, I’m part of the problem. I’m someone who very much views baseball through a lens of objectivity, who is motivated by understanding what is true about the game. That’s been mostly positive, but it ain’t perfect. I helped bring this about, and while my efforts were well-intentioned, I think we’ve sometimes gone too far. In seeking the objective truth, we’ve discounted, too strongly, many of the qualities that comprise a concept like ‘decency.’
And we continue to ignore it. The best sabermetric websites – sites like FanGraphs and The Athletic and the corner at ESPN still dedicated to covering baseball news – have largely abandoned the question of decency. They will post endless articles about new zone measurements and statistics designed around batted ball profiles, but there is precious little space dedicated to a serious engagement with the ethics of the game. I did not read a single article on the Betts trade that said that the trade was a terrible outcome for baseball, no matter who the Red Sox got back.
The subject of decency has been largely left to the old guard of sportswriter, to the good and bad who utilize old platforms that old people read. And while I do not want to return to the practices of fixating on notions of ‘grit’ and ‘hustle’, of feeling in the dark for the intelligible intangibles of players in pinstripes, I suggest…strongly….that those of us working in the new modes of media need to learn how to speak to what is decent, in parallel to our efforts to find what it true.
There have been many articles on who ‘won’ the trade, but very few articles that have untangled what Mookie Betts has meant to the Red Sox during his career, so let me fill in the gap.
Mookie has meant a great deal: he is a wonderful player, certainly the most skilled position player the Red Sox have had in my lifetime. He is just a wonderful defensive player: great routes, quick instincts, and a sense of dimension and space that helps in Fenway’s right field. He’s a brilliant hitter and a terrific baserunner. He’s smart: he has an intelligence for the game that is difficult to draw a parallel to. He has a baseball IQ like Joe Morgan, except his intelligence is more inwardly directed, and more confident. Betts isn’t quite ‘graceful’ like DiMaggio, but he is very much aware of his body, aware of its capacities and limitations and in control of it. When there is action on the field, he reads it with the same alacrity that Jackie Robinson possessed - the same eagerness to take an extra base and the same desire to win - but there isn’t the controlled fury that fueled Jackie. He’s terrific fun to watch: watching Mookie Betts play baseball reveals the game in a bunch of small ways that are immensely satisfying.
Mookie was the heart and soul of the Red Sox, and his loss is a terrible outcome that cannot be justified. He shouldn’t have been traded: not for token parts, and not in such a haphazard way. It would have been far better for the Red Sox try to win with their best player this year. If they failed, they would’ve had the chance to get a few prospects while allowing us – the fans – a chance to say a proper good-bye to him. A last ovation in right field. A last chance to call his name.
That would’ve been decent.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com. He is never on Twitter, but you can find him there at @DavidFlemingJ1.