But the brief post-Devers success hasn\u2019t quelled the concerns of every fan when it comes to how the Red Sox are operating.<\/p>\n
\u201cHalf of Red Sox Nation was viewing the deal through the bigger picture of what ownership has done in the last five years, which is to say they dumped Mookie Betts for money reasons,\u201d said Mike Schur, the “Parks and Recreation” creator who is also a lifelong Boston fan. (For years, Schur wrote under the pseudonym \u201cKen Tremendous\u201d for the baseball blog Fire Joe Morgan and elsewhere.)<\/p>\n
In 2020, Boston traded Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have since won two World Series with him on the team. Betts was the American League MVP in 2018 and also made four All-Star teams while he was in Boston. He was sent to Los Angeles after he rejected a contract offer from the Red Sox. <\/p>\n
Even if Devers is not the player Betts is, the decision to trade him clearly echoed the Betts saga to fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere is the money going, [and] why is it not going to Mookie Betts? Why are we not winning? Why are we not getting quality talent?\u201d Himanshu Patel, a Red Sox fan, told WFXT-TV of Boston<\/a> outside Fenway Park the day after Devers\u2019 departure. <\/p>\n \u201cYou traded away your best player, your highest-paid player, for what I\u2019m calling Big League Chew and a bag of balls,\u201d NBC Sports Boston analyst Trenni Casey said<\/a> in the wake of the trade. \u201cThis is a salary dump, and that should frustrate people.\u201d<\/p>\n Schur cited shortstop Xander Bogaerts\u2019 signing with the San Diego Padres in 2022 after 10 years with the Red Sox as another prime example. <\/p>\n \u201cTheir homegrown stars have been repeatedly going somewhere else, and other teams are just paying them more money,\u201d Schur said. \u201cThe Red Sox have a big-market advantage in a sport with no cap. They should be paying these guys.” <\/p>\n Schur added that there could have been justifiable baseball reasons for the Red Sox to trade Devers, who ranked 83rd in defensive wins above replacement among AL third basemen in 2024. While Boston may have potentially mismanaged Devers\u2019 positional change, the team was also justified in moving him. <\/p>\n Financially, however, the Red Sox are lagging behind their contemporaries.<\/p>\n Boston ranked sixth among MLB teams with $514 million in revenue last season, according to CNBC\u2019s calculations<\/a>. Boston\u2019s operating income last year was $120 million, according to Forbes<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, the Red Sox\u2019 payroll is only the 13th-highest in MLB. While calculations vary and are not exact, Boston\u2019s 2025 payroll is roughly 33% to 37% of its 2024 revenue. <\/p>\n The New York Mets, meanwhile, are estimated to be spending 74% of their 2024 revenue on payroll this season.<\/p>\n While Red Sox fans may see an ownership group that\u2019s no longer willing to spend, at least one former executive is encouraging patience.<\/p>\n \u201cYou cannot allow a player to talk to the front office or about the front office the way Devers did,\u201d said former Miami Marlins president of baseball operations David Samson, who added Boston\u2019s ownership group (which has won four championships this century) deserves more grace.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have shown when it\u2019s time to spend, they\u2019ll spend,\u201d Samson said. \u201cThey\u2019ve also shown that they\u2019re smart. I just don\u2019t understand how they don\u2019t get the benefit of the doubt.\u201d <\/p>\n (Samson, it should be noted, oversaw a Marlins organization that routinely traded away homegrown talent because of financial fears \u2014 though Miami was and is in a much different revenue sphere from the Red Sox.)<\/p>\n Schur conceded that “the cold, hard economic calculations are not always necessarily a bad thing.”<\/p>\n “You want your team to be smart. You don\u2019t want them to overvalue guys,” he said. “The problem is they are doing this with their own homegrown players. Like, the economics of this shouldn\u2019t matter anymore when it comes to Mookie Betts. <\/p>\n \u201cThe Devers thing was this perfect collision of being smart about economics and also this nagging feeling about the ownership caring when it comes to the long-term stewardship of this team.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the mild success of the team since it traded Devers, Schur is level-headed, pointing to an easier schedule and the small sample size. He also added that he\u2019s the ownership\u2019s dream fan, because he will support the club no matter what. <\/p>\n \u201cBut they do have to worry about people who are a little less intense than I am,\u201d Schur said. \u201cBecause if you only evaluate guys year-to-year what are you worth, then the franchise gets a little less fun to root for.\u201d<\/p>\n Samson, however, believes Boston will soon reallocate the money it was spending on Devers. He also said it would be \u201ca terrible way to run a business\u201d for the Red Sox to overpay players simply because they can afford to.<\/p>\n \u201cI understand what the fans are saying,\u201d Samson said. \u201cBut on the other hand, are Mets fans happy Steve Cohen spends like a drunken soldier? I would say that they won\u2019t be happy if they lose in the first round. But maybe I\u2019m wrong.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But the brief post-Devers success hasn\u2019t quelled the concerns of every fan when it comes to how the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-22885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}