August 25, 2012: Red Sox acquire players to be named later (Ivan De Jesus, James Loney and Allen Webster) from Los Angeles Dodgers for Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez, Nick Punto, and cash.
None of the prospects received by the Red Sox ever amounted to anything but that hardly mattered. This trade wasn’t about restocking the farm system, it was about shedding a quarter of a billion dollars from their payroll.
The Red Sox clubhouse had become a toxic environment in the midst of a mutiny against new manager Bobby Valentine. Beckett vilified himself as the face of the “Chicken & Beer” pitching staff and Crawford became a malcontent who crumbled under the pressure of playing in a big market. Both carried bloated contracts that threatened to hamstring the team’s budget for years as they continued to poison the clubhouse chemistry.
The Dodgers would end up being their savior. Los Angeles was so enamored with Gonzalez that they were willing to take on Boston’s worst contracts in order to pry him away. The Red Sox gladly accepted, hitting the reset button on a dumpster fire of a team loaded with underperforming stars.
Boston used the savings to retool the roster with several cost-efficient players with an emphasis on finding veterans with strong clubhouse reputations to repair the shattered chemistry. The result was a World Series championship the following season.
The Red Sox weren’t quite ready to throw in the towel on the 2012 season when the July trade deadline hit. They waited nearly a month before pulling the trigger on a deal that drastically reshaped the organization but under the new rules, they wouldn’t have that luxury. There are certainly reasons why having one firm trade deadline will benefit baseball but this deal with the Dodgers is a prime example of why this change matters.