When the numbers for Mookie Betts’ contract extension with the Los Angeles Dodgers were revealed, they were big, but not big enough that the Boston Red Sox could say they were justified in dealing him. Immediately, Red Sox fans were even angrier than they were when the trade was made as they thought with great hope that there was a good chance of the club re-signing him as a free agent. Had that been a consideration at the time, they would not have attached David Price’s contract to Betts, nor would they have traded him to a team that had the financial wherewithal to retain him.

They did both, which essentially sealed their fate as moving on from Betts permanently, whether they admitted it to the fans and media or not.

Regarding the contract, its parameters are less than what was expected for a player of Betts’ abilities at his age. Clearly, COVID-19 was a factor. Given the current circumstances with a fractured season, the pending free agent market hindered by the health crisis and unavoidable labor strife on the horizon, Betts took the money rather than risk illness or injury.

The ongoing pandemic has impacted just about every aspect of sports on and off the field and it wasn’t until the first of the top-tier free agent dominoes began to fall that its ramifications on contracts came clear. Betts and the Dodgers agreed to a 12-year, $365 million contract extension to preclude his pending free agency and save the Dodgers from trading for what amounted to a scam timeshare that was severely damaged by a hurricane and ended up living with Snooki and The Situation.

Could he have gotten more?

Maybe.

Would he have?

One year ago, yes. Now? Just like everything else with this bizarre season with daily turmoil and an unpredictable outcome, it’s impossible to say.

Had the Red Sox known that the price tag would drop by around $100 million compared to the initial numbers being batted around to sign him, perhaps they would have pulled the trigger on that trade anyway. It was widely-panned and accurately viewed as a salary dump to get David Price’s contract off the books, but getting rid of Price did have value.

Mike Trout’s contract is the star whose gravity dictates the rotation of other players’ contracts. Betts isn’t Trout – nobody is Trout other than Trout – but is Betts worth $70 million less when he’s a year younger and has the lithe body type that tends to age better than the bigger, bulkier Trout? As people, they are exactly the type of players who clubs are wise to invest that kind of money in. The Red Sox went in a different direction.

Saying the Red Sox should have retained Betts and figured another strategy to get Price’s contract off the team is a reasonable position…in hindsight. At the time, however, the club was calculating the offers for Betts vs. the value of trading Betts, getting some decent prospect return and the massive benefit of dumping half of the $96 million remaining on Price’s deal.

The status of the team is also a contributing consideration. The Red Sox are starting a pseudo-rebuild. One of the drawbacks, if you can call it that, of being a big market team with cash available and some remaining talent in the organization is that the option to burn it to the ground, lose 100+ games for two or three years and tank for the future is off the table. With their history and ticket prices, they cannot do that. Still, their tacit lack of on-paper improvement, that they hired a caretaker manager Ron Roenicke to replace the fired Alex Cora, and that they replaced Dave Dombrowski with Chaim Bloom from the financially-strapped Tampa Bay Rays made their intentions clear. Even before COVID wreaked its havoc and turned MLB into a mishmash exemplar of inexplicable contemporary art sans dealers and collectors expressing its poignancy, they had conceded the 2020 season and probably the 2021 season as well. Their starting rotation is arguably the worst in baseball. They’re in a division with the powerhouse Yankees and the very good Rays. The team has no shot to win this year with or without Betts. They punted.

It is theoretically possible that they planned to try and re-sign Betts, but the club was circumspect about it while Red Sox fans and observers seemed to take it as a given when the likelihood of all the pieces falling in place for that to happen was quite small given Betts’ age, talent level and production. Once the numbers reduced to a level where the Dodgers would have been foolish not to pull the trigger on an extension, the delusion of Betts returning to Boston ended.

The question here is why are so many teams reluctant to retain their own stars when they have the money to do so and there is not a strategic blueprint in which they are trading the player or letting him walk as part of a comprehensive plan.

Hype aside, Bryce Harper is a level below Trout and Betts, but the Washington Nationals allowed him to leave with a perfunctory offer not made to retain him, but to say they tried when they really didn’t. They were proven right in that Harper’s Philadelphia Phillies similarly underachieved as Harper’s Nationals had with him in the fold and then won the World Series without him. At the time, simply allowing a 26-year-old former Most Valuable Player to walk away for nothing when the team had the money to sign him was bewildering. They did the same thing with Anthony Rendon. The Dodgers traded for Manny Machado and did even put up the pretense of trying to retain him. These players are young stars in their primes, but clubs exhibit no qualms in saying goodbye.

Personalities and on-field play aside, this is a philosophical change in which large market teams mimic small market teams in their spending decisions without the financial excuse to do so. Had this been a case of Barry Bonds and the Pittsburgh Pirates when the team did not have the money to retain him after 1992, then fine. It wasn’t. The players were in Boston and Washington. The Red Sox certainly could have paid Betts, but financial wiggle room aside, teams are increasingly wary of putting such a massive percentage of their payroll into one player, no matter how great he is; how young he is; what a tremendous person he is. Obviously, that does not hold true for all teams since Trout, Harper and Betts got their contracts for $330 million to $426 million, but it happens to a notable degree and it’s every year.

Statistics and objective valuations have changed sports forever. It was the Red Sox determination that they were better-served to take the offer on the table for Betts and get rid of Price that dictated this road. If there were factions who believed there was an off-ramp to get Betts back, the Dodgers and COVID blocked it.

There’s no doubt the Red Sox could have matched the contract Betts signed. But pre-COVID, does he accept that offer from them? It’s difficult to envision. Panning the trade, questioning the Red Sox motives, wondering why they were willing to deal a superstar in his prime for a mediocre return and salary relief – all are viable. To say they should have signed Betts to that deal ignores the fact that Betts would not have signed it last winter had there not been a pandemic to alter the landscape of, well, everything.

Former Boston Red Sox president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski discussed his firing for the first time in a podcast appearance with MassLive.com’s Chris Cotillo.

Those expecting a scorched earth, bridge detonating display of indignant rage at the audacity of Red Sox owner John Henry discarding him after he achieved everything asked of him when he was hired in 2015 will surely be disappointed and have paid zero attention to Dombrowski’s four-decade career in baseball.

Regardless of agreement or disagreement with his methods, he did not get where he is in baseball by alienating people. He’s well-liked and has maintained solid relationships throughout the game, even with people who have fired him. That and his history of success is why he keeps getting jobs. Currently, Dombrowski is working to bring a major league team to Nashville, but if another general manager opportunity opens up and there is a fit for what he brings to the table, he will eventually be back running an established club.

“What he brings to the table” is key and directly ties in with why the Red Sox hired him. It’s also why he should have expected to have a short run as their baseball boss and would eventually be dumped once he’d served his purpose.

In discussing the Red Sox situation, Dombrowski said the dismissal was “jarring” as he expected to receive a contract extension. He also refused to criticize the Red Sox in how it was handled with the club making a terse statement after midnight – the equivalent of a news dump. All he said was there was “a lotta change.” He didn’t want to leave and said so. The 2019 Red Sox were never a serious contender to defend their title and the 84-78 season was, according to Dombrowski, “disappointing.”

Obviously, ownership felt the same way. It’s reasonable to say that he probably should have expected something to happen during a down season when the team was not negotiating a contract extension and was ominously silent throughout the summer about the status of the baseball operations department.

There’s a certain naïveté to Dombrowski. Either his poker face is state of the art or he did not seem to realize that he was a desperation hire and it was an extended run of failure that spurred Henry to act. The 2013 season is counted in that span despite the Red Sox winning the World Series. When that team won the title, Henry was surprised and said so. Objectively, the 2013 club was a patchwork group of likable mercenaries cobbled together out of the same desperation that led to the hiring of Dombrowski. Those types of teams rarely achieve their objective, but that one did. As the team again floundered in 2014 and 2015, Henry’s belief that 2013 was a fluke grew increasingly louder. The confluence of events and best-case scenarios on the field resulted in the championship, but that team had the following records under Cherington:

2012: 69-93

2013: 97-65, winning the World Series

2014: 71-91

2015: 78-84

It was in August 2015 when, shortly after Dombrowski had been fired by the Detroit Tigers, he was hired by the Red Sox. Henry, a sharp judge of personnel and rarely swayed by surface results when there was decay beneath, acted and gave Cherington a boss he did not want and with whom the philosophical chasm was too great for them to work together. As a concession, Cherington could have stayed had he wanted to, but that was for public consumption. For all intents and purposes, he had been publicly castrated and had zero interest in being a powerless front man taking orders from Dombrowski.

Dombrowski’s hiring to replace Cherington was as, if not more, surprising than his firing 10 months after winning the World Series in a dominating team performance comparable to the Big Red Machine Cincinnati Reds of 1975-76, the 1984 Detroit Tigers, the 1986 New York Mets, and the New York Yankees of 1998-2000.

As much as the pre-Dombrowski Red Sox tried to sell an image of targeted free agent signings and trades in which they refused to part with their “best” prospects to get veteran players they needed, they generally failed to adhere to it while claiming they did.

In this sense, Dombrowski’s lack of pretense is notable. There’s no overhyping of prospects or selling of “his” method to have a book written about him. While it is assuredly not the cheapest way to build a championship team, the fastest way is to buy players on the free agent market and trade unestablished youngsters for known entities. This will never change and Dombrowski knows it.

He’s not playing a part to sell to the masses. Teams tell him what they want him to accomplish and he goes about accomplishing it. It’s simple and nuanced at the same time. Still, once that championship had been won and the Red Sox looked at their bloated payroll, declining farm system and the sleepwalking, underachieving club from 2019, there were a litany of convenient excuses for Henry to do what he might have done anyway: jettison Dombrowski to hire someone who would adhere to the principles he prefers. He wanted to cut payroll with a GM who is not hired because he’ll cut payroll, but because it’s part of his “plan.” He got that in Chaim Bloom.

Under Dombrowski, there was said to be little collaboration with the underlings in the front office. They felt marginalized and ostracized by the eye-rolling and unabashed disregard they faced from Dombrowski lieutenants Frank Wren and Tony LaRussa. Dombrowski comes from an era where the GM makes the decisions and there are no committee meetings to reach consensus before acting. Today, that structure is rarely, if ever, used in any sport. The New England Patriots are a notable exception, but their success is the main reason it has continued as is with Bill Belichick the unquestioned football despot.

Despite the seeming callousness with which he has operated and deflected taking blame, is there a better sports owner than Henry? That holds true not just for the Red Sox, a club that has had unparalleled overall success under his stewardship with four World Series wins after not having any for nearly a century, but also for Liverpool FC in the English Premier League, its newly crowned champion.

He spends money; he puts people in charge who know what they’re doing and achieve the stated goal; and he wins.

Dombrowski was a part of that, but clearly not to the extent envisioned by him in that he thought he’d get a contract extension and be accorded the right to rebuild on the fly. His hiring was a short-term decision to win at all costs. And he did.

In fairness to Henry, what else was he supposed to do in a case with diminishing returns? Spend more money? Surrender more prospects from a diminished pool? Hold the line and try to move forward with what the team had knowing how loaded the New York Yankees were? Let Dombrowski oversee the reboot when his strength as an executive is doing what he did from 2015 to 2018 and not what the Red Sox wanted to do for 2020 and beyond? Henry needed to start over with a new front office that adhered to the stat-centric, financially reasonable tack he favors.

Henry’s coldblooded, analytical assessment of Dombrowski mimicked what it was that led to Cherington’s ouster and Dombrowski’s hiring in the first place. To that end, the dismissal was no shock. In fact, it should have been expected, especially by Dombrowski.