The Red Sox dealing star Mookie Betts to the Dodgers for a mostly underwhelming package of prospects was one thing in theory and something much more ominous in reality. If you're a Cubs fan connected to Kris Bryant or a Cleveland fan invested in Francisco Lindor, you woke up Wednesday in a different baseball world -- one that's considerably less fun.
We can debate any aspect of this -- the presumption that your homegrown MVP will enter free agency despite the absence of meaningful negotiation, the owners' cynical use of the self-created luxury tax threshold as a de facto salary cap, the inability of some fans to empathize with the player and their decision instead to make excuses for bloated plutocrats, a collectively bargained system that's now woefully inadequate in compensating the best players fairly in what we now know are their highest-value seasons or why too few MLB teams are now incentivized to actually do all they can to win. There's plenty to be said about all of it.
But now that stuff just got real, and the market takes shape. One year of the second-best player in the game was given a tangible valuation, and now the wonks can get to crunching on what two years of service would be worth for Bryant, who from 2015 to now has been the third-most valuable position player in baseball behind only Mike Trout and Betts (per total fWAR).
To illustrate just how unlikely a scenario the Betts trade was, Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer employed Baseball Reference's WAR calculation as a measuring stick. He examined total value of a player 28 or younger in the two seasons immediately preceding a trade and found that no player that age topped Betts' 17.7 WAR. The next-closest in improbability was when a 28-year-old Jimmie Foxx was dealt from the Athletics to the Red Sox in 1935 after two seasons that added up to 17.4 WAR.
Even opening it up to players of all ages ever, Betts is the fifth-unlikeliest by that metric to be moved in baseball history.
So this is where we are, looking at the good chance that two more of these blockbuster trades are about to go down, albeit with two players whose recent WAR totals have been affected by injuries.
What makes it even more discordant is the fact that in Betts, Bryant and Lindor, we have three players who embody so many aspects of what we would consider an ideal player both on the field and off of it, good people as well as good players. It adds to the sting of our new and cold environment in which the dispassionate business of baseball churns on so soullessly.
There was a time when proud owners felt some obligation to draft and develop stars with the intention of doing all they could to keep them when the time came -- and fans who held them to it. We now have a vastly different mentality in which fans seem to pull for their team's business as much as anything else, conditioned to equate a flexible balance sheet and undervalued assets with opportunity to win.
It might not be as human as it was, but it might not be wrong. This is when we all start getting used to it.