Mookie Betts could have signed a $300-million extension last year. Credible reports had the Red Sox offering him the decade-long deal in the offseason, the latest in a string of attempts to keep him in the fold for the long term. For the best position player in Major League Baseball not named Mike Trout, however, the numbers were nowhere close to what he felt he deserved. And so he countered with $420 million over 12 years, figures that then compelled his employers to reject as untenable. Instead, they inked him to a single-season deal worth $27 million last February, and, as expected, promptly looked around for trade partners.
A month later, Betts found himself heading to the Dodgers along with former Cy Young Award recipient David Price and cash considerations, flipped for young talent to kick off a rebuild by the Red Sox. And not long after, the league, and the rest of the world, wound up being upended by the novel coronavirus pandemic. Considering the opportunities he thought awaited him and the realities now confronting him, not a few quarters have had reason to wonder if he’s filled with regret. No, he said. “Once I make a decision, I make a decision,” he argued in a press conference yesterday. “I’m not going back to question myself. I don’t worry about that. The market will be what the market is. We’ll just kind of cross that bridge when we get there.”
Significantly, Betts isn’t confident there will even be a 2020 campaign. That he’s highlighting the uncertainty of the situation early in “Summer Camp” speaks volumes of how he believes the short term will unwind. Make no mistake. He’s angling, and continuing to ready himself, for MLB’s truncated schedule. Officials have pegged July 24 as Opening Day and September 27 as the end of the 60-game regular season. “I’m definitely preparing the same way; I’m fully expecting to play.” Still, he said, “that doesn’t mean there aren’t doubts that kinda go on when the facts aren’t in front of you.”
Betts has cause to do a double take, to be sure. The Athletics, Astros, Cardinals, and Nationals have already experienced workout delays due to testing issues. And, in the absence of a bubble environment akin to the National Basketball Association’s, more hurdles are to be expected. All the same, it’s All Systems Go for the MLB; in the face of mounting financial losses, the need to generate any semblance of revenues is paramount. It knows the problems will keep coming, and hopes it will learn enough along the way to cope. As he noted, the season is “in someone’s control, and whoever’s control it’s in has to find a way to make it work.”
Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and Human Resources management, corporate communications, and business development.
