ANGST IN THE BAY AREA...
The Dodgers locking Mookie Betts up is, uh, not great for the Giants
By Grant Brisbee
About 700 months ago, in January 2020, it looked as if the Giants were
going to finish in second place for Mookie Betts next offseason. There is no proof that the front office would have tried hard enough for him to spawn a stray rumor, but I’m still choosing to believe that the Giants effectively finished in second place. No other team was better prepared to drop out of the sky this offseason, like Thor onto the Wakanda plain, and disrupt the Virtual Winter Meetings.
It was going to be a slow offseason, with teams licking their financial wounds. Only a well-diversified team that had been stashing money away during a rebuilding process could even think about Betts. The Giants were one of those teams. And Betts made a
wild amount of sense for them, even before the pandemic scuttled the plans of possible competitors.
Printing money is forever better than stashing money, though, which always made the Dodgers the overwhelming favorite. The incumbent team should reliably be the favorite if they have a little money, and they’re definitely the overwhelming favorite when they print it. So the Dodgers signing Betts for
12 years and $365 million isn’t much of a surprise.
So the Dodgers will be better for longer, and they’ll keep spitting prospects out like wartime grommets, one right after the other, on a conveyor belt that stretches up to the moon, which will subsidize their huge expenditures, over and over again, and their dominance will never, ever end. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m not sure how to end this paragraph, which means this depressing story might never publish.
But Betts is a worthy fascination to have, even when the news is grim, because he’s at the intersection of
everything to do with modern baseball. He’s a way to tell the story of the sport. Now that technology and data have removed a substantial amount of the guesswork that was a much larger part of baseball even just a few years ago, teams such as the Dodgers are essentially
Maxwell’s demon. The contractual rules of the sport allow it, if not encourage it.
Again, here’s the general idea:
- Develop players who are underpaid while they’re younger, which is also when they’re the most productive
- Use the savings to invest in the rare talents who are likely to be good investments, even as they age
- Develop players who are underpaid while they’re younger, which is also when they’re the most productive
- Use the savings to invest in the rare talents who are likely to be good investments, even as they age
- Develop players who are underpaid while they’re y…
It’s a recursive loop, and the Dodgers have been in the middle of it for a while. Clayton Kershaw’s salary is subsidized by Walker Buehler. Betts’ salary is subsidized by Gavin Lux. In the future, if they’re worthy, Buehler and Lux will have their salaries subsidized by kids who are in high school right now. And so on and so on.
Wait, I remembered that good news, which is that
this is the Giants’ plan, too. They just have a long way to go. And the worst part about the rumored Betts extension — other than, you know, how the Dodgers will employ a generational talent for a decade-plus — is that it likely scuttles the Giants’ best chances of doing it sooner.
Before considering anything else, remember that
the only player on the Giants’ roster with a guaranteed contract for 2022 is Evan Longoria. The Giants will owe him $14.5 million after the Rays pay down his salary. That’s it. That’s all they have to worry about. If everything goes according to plan, the 2022 Giants will have players like Joey Bart and Patrick Bailey and Heliot Ramos and Luis Toribio and Hunter Bishop and … look, if even a quarter of these players are entrenched by then, it would be an absolute coup, and the Giants would have gobs and gobs of money to find the spare parts to fit in around them.
And they would still have a huge pallet of cash to give to the right young superstar. In theory.
This is why the previous Giants regime almost nabbed Giancarlo Stanton. It’s why the current Giants regime wasn’t put off by the ownership mandate to go after Bryce Harper. When you play around with the stats and historical comparisons, both of those players had performed in a way that portended future success, even as they aged. When the next wave of inexpensive, young and talented Giants arrived, having an expensive, young-ish superstar already in place made all kinds of sense.
This is why the Giants were always going to finish second for Betts while desperately trying for first. Because he made more sense than Stanton and Harper combined. He was the perfect long-term candidate, with the kind of fast-twitch muscle memory that allows him to bowl 300 games now and will allow him to lay off sliders in the dirt when he’s 40. He would have helped the 2022 Giants, the 2026 Giants, and probably the 2030 Giants as they continued to develop underpaid prospects. In theory.
With Betts and Harper gone, and with Stanton looking like a bullet dodged, is there a player who could still fill that role for the post-Longoria Giants?
This is the worst part of the Betts extension: Probably not right away. You have to assume that Cody Bellinger isn’t going anywhere, and both Christian Yelich and Mike Trout are locked up for the better part of the decade, as are Ronald Acuña, Jr. and Ozzie Albies. Juan Soto isn’t a free agent until after 2024, and he plays for a franchise that isn’t shy about spending. The White Sox are copying the strategy 0f the mid-’90s Indians, signing players like Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jiménez to long-term deals before they do a whole lot in the majors.
Even if you’re scribbling fan-fiction about Fernando Tatís, Jr. spurning the Padres, that wouldn’t happen for years. The greatest young talents who might have been available for the 2022 Giants are disappearing from the shelves. Betts was so obviously the best option for the Giants, I wouldn’t be surprised if the looming shadow of Zaidi earned him an additional $20 million.
There are still electric young talents who might tempt the Giants. George Springer and Marcus Semien could be available this offseason. Carlos Correa will be just 27 if/when he’s a free agent after the 2021 season, and he might be on the market with Francisco Lindor, Javier Báez, Corey Seager and Trevor Story. It’s possible that these are players the Giants would build around.
But I can make arguments against a lot of them, whether it has to do with age, injury history or a skill set that isn’t as likely to age well. No, it was always Betts, Betts, Betts in my pea brain. He was the perfect player at the perfect time for the Giants, and it wasn’t even close. Now they start over with a new, less obvious pipe dream.
Maybe they’ll be the first in line when a team such as the Red Sox decides that they’re not going to keep the next Betts. It’ll cost them prospects, but the plan will always be to have more than they can use. Maybe another player will enjoy a Yelich-like transformation and become a superstar, and that’s who the Giants will get before the 2022 season. Or maybe Bart, Ramos and Marco Luciano will be so productive right away that the franchise won’t have to worry so much about impact talent from outside the organization. If you’re going to daydream, you might as well daydream about the best-case scenarios.
The franchise is still pointed in the right direction. They will still have money to spend, and they’ll have it soon. A rival re-signing a superstar doesn’t change any of that.
For now, though, the player who made the most sense for this offseason — and the decade of offseasons after that — is off the market. He’s staying with the Giants’ rival, which certainly doesn’t help. Betts fit the Giants better than any potential free agent since Barry Bonds. The timing was all there.
Back to the drawing board, then. There will still be gratification for Giants fans one day. It just won’t be the instant kind, which would have been a lot cooler.