Sure, every team in baseball would have loved to have Mookie Betts at any point over the last five seasons or so. But there was one club that was ahead of the curve when it came to trying to pry Betts away from Boston.
Speaking to MLB.com, former Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington noted that Milwaukee and its GM at the time Doug Melvin were the first to inquire about acquiring Betts in trade.
The ask came way back in 2013 when Betts was still a Single-A second baseman. The offer from the Brewers was reliever Francisco Rodriguez.
“Doug Melvin was the first to ask, so I always give Doug credit,” Cherington, now the Pirates GM, told MLB.com. “He was the first one to ask for him.”
"We knew we weren’t going to get what was considered a top-level prospect, and Mookie sort of went under the radar if you went by the so-called MLB Pipeline or whatever," Melvin passed on to MLB.com. "I don’t think at the time he was in their top 10-15 prospects. But I remember between our analytics department and Zack [Minasian’s] scouting department, I said, ‘Just give me some names.’”
The former Brewers chief decison-maker added, "“Mookie was one of the names that came up from the group. I always felt we worked well together, with both the analytics and scouting. I’d get names from both sides. And with Ben and the Red Sox, sometimes you call and ask for a top, top prospect and you almost [upset the other GM]. This wasn’t like that. Ben knew they had a good player, but it wasn’t like [Betts] was one of their top three prospects. We weren’t asking for Xander Bogaerts. It was more like, ‘Let’s go get a good A-ball player.’”
Betts would have a breakout year in 2013 with two Single-A teams, finishing with a combined OPS of .923 and .314 batting average. According to a source, another team that asked about his availability that season was the Chicago White Sox, who ultimately executed a three-way trade deadline deal with the Red Sox and Tigers, sending Jake Peavy to Boston.
Betts made his major league debut a year after those initial inquiries, breaking into the big leagues in 2014.
To read the entire MLB.com story on Betts, click here.
