There's more than a little irony in the fact that the Red Sox will (eventually) trade Mookie Betts and David Price to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
And no, it has very little to do with the fact that those two players helped the Red Sox cap their magical 2018 season by beating the Dodgers in the World Series, with Price earning the victory in the decisive Game 5 in the ballpark he will soon call home.
No, it's much more than that.
Although the two franchises exist on opposite coasts, separated by 3,000 miles, they share a common heritage. Both franchises were, for the longest time, unable to defeat the New York Yankees. Both endured decades-long championship droughts -- the Sox for 86 years, while the Dodgers were without a title for more than the first half of the 20th century before finally breaking through against their rivals in 1955.
But this isn't about the past; it's about the present.
When Chaim Bloom, the new Red Sox chief baseball officer, looks at the Dodgers, he sees a model for what he wants the Sox to become.
That's not an accident, of course. The Dodgers are capably run by president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, who was Bloom's boss in Tampa Bay for Bloom's first decade with the franchise. Friedman proved himself a master of doing more with less while with the Rays, building a pennant-winner in 2008 and regularly constructing rosters which punched above their slight financial weight.
Since taking over the Dodgers after the 2014 season, Friedman has overseen a team that has won five straight N.L. West titles, reached the World Series twice and the NLCS another time.
Even more remarkably, Friedman has done so by actually cutting payroll. After inheriting a team with a bloated budget and beset by long-term commitments, he's succeeded in overhauling the organization's minor league system to the point where the Dodgers have hit the Daily Double of 21st-century baseball: good enough to regularly compete for a championship while boasting of a bountiful player development system, ready to supply young (and inexpensive) players to the major league roster on an annual basis.
Moreover, Friedman has done so without saddling his team with long-term obligations. On the current Dodgers roster, no player has a salary commitment past 2022. The biggest, longest salary commitment on the books for Clayton Kershaw who has two years and $62 million coming to him.
In fact, in another bit of irony, the Dodgers' longest and biggest financial commitment on the books is to Friedman himself, who recently signed a long-term extension and remains the game's highest-paid executive.
(Contrast that to the Red Sox, who will have five players in 2021 drawing eight-figure salaries: Chris Sale, J.D. Martinez, Xander Bogaerts, Nathan Eovaldi and Dustin Pedroia. Together, those five are due $99.5 million; the Dodgers entire 2021 payroll commitment currently stands at $89.4 million).
It's this business model that Bloom seeks to replicate: sustainable, affordable and with minimal long-term risks, all the while with the capability of reaching the postseason on a yearly basis. And while it's true that the Dodgers have ultimately come up short when it comes to championships, surely reaching (at least) the NLCS three times in the span of five years is a run most teams would gladly sign up for.
Any suggestion that Bloom is in Boston to turn the Red Sox into the Rays North is without merit. Ever-conscious of fan reaction, this current ownership understands that such measures would result in a full-scale revolt by the fan base and would never be tolerated.
Instead, the Red Sox hired Bloom to do what his mentor has accomplished in L.A. To wit: building a consistent winner, once regularly augmented by cheap homegrown talent, all the while eschewing burdensome contracts which stifle roster flexibility.
Friedman has managed a delicate juggling act by maintaining a winning team on the field and overseeing a fertile minor league system, the latter of which is the envy of most franchises. Across the game, there was universal acclaim that Friedman was able to obtain a player the caliber of Betts without sacrificing a single player off his team's Top 10 prospect list.
Meanwhile, it's likely that Tristan Casas would be the only Red Sox prospect who could crack the Dodgers' Top 10 list, and even then, only toward the bottom of the list.
At the major league level, the Dodgers are clear and prohibitive favorites to win the National League pennant and finally capture a title for the first time since 1988. The Red Sox, as currently constituted, are projected as only the third-best team in their own division.
Friedman has achieved all of this in a relatively short period of time. The Red Sox hope that Bloom is able to match his mentor.
Perhaps then, the Red Sox will be in the position the Dodgers are this week: adding to an already strong roster a franchise player who had become too expensive a proposition for his former team, and doing so without jeopardizing its own bright future.
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