Boston Red Sox: Fixing the team in four easy steps

Step 1: Mookie Betts

I think we’re all probably sick of the constant Mookie rumors by now. There have been innumerable stories on whether the Red Sox will trade him, where they’ll send him when they’ll do it, and what they can hope to get in return.

I myself have written several articles about the entire situation around Betts and it’s not my intention to dwell on those anymore in this one. This is supposed to be what I would do if I ran the Sox, remember?

So what would I do? First, I would do everything I could to pay Mookie. I’d do everything I could to not pay him the $420 million over twelve years that he supposedly asked for, but I’d try to improve upon the $300 million and ten years the Red Sox did offer.

Meeting in the middle, an offer of around $380 million for ten years should get it done. That would put him at an AAV of $38 million, but I would structure the contract a bit differently.

I’m frontloading this contract so that the majority of the money is paid out in the first five or six years. Mookie is twenty-seven right now which means he’ll be twenty-eight when this contract would kick in.

With most players entering their decline phase in their early-to-mid thirties, I’m not going to want to pay him $38 million a year in his age thirty-four to thirty-eight years…just look at Albert Pujols (or soon, Giancarlo Stanton) as a cautionary tale.

Ideally, I would structure his deal such that ~65% of the money ($247 million) would be paid over the first five years of the deal (at a whopping $49.4 million/year…remember, this is just hypothetical).

The remaining $133 million would then be paid out over the final five years (at $26.6 million per year). While those numbers are staggering, it would at least guarantee that the Red Sox are paying the largest amount of money for Mookie’s most productive years.

Frontloading Mookie’s contract also gives the Red Sox flexibility down the road. Since they won’t be paying as much in his decline years of age 34-38, the $26.6 million/year won’t hurt as bad (and by the time he gets there in 2026, that’ll probably look like a steal).

Also, if they decided to trade him to a team that might want a veteran player, it would be a lot easier to offer someone making $26 million than $38 million.

I know these numbers seem crazy and this scenario seems unlikely and I also know that it would be contingent on Mookie meeting the Red Sox in the middle (let’s assume for the sake of this article that he does), but if it were up to me I’d give it some serious thought.