Again, the Boston Red Sox have a history of doing things like this with their star players. Nomar, Pedro, Manny, Lester, Ellsbury, and Kimbrell were all pretty much given the boot out of Boston because they refused to take team friendly deals.
If you're trying to tell me that the Red Sox ownership is cheep, they're not. They have paid for talent my entire life. I have no doubt that they won't pay for talent moving forward. They will continue to be, if not the top payroll in baseball, in the top three. They have delivered 4 championships to a baseball club that thought just getting one was an impossibility.
I hate that the Red Sox players are not treated right and are given the option of either taking less than they're worth or getting shipped out of town. But at the same time, Red Sox ownership has proven that they know how to assemble a winning team and know how to rebuild.
It's a weird dynamic. Ownership does not have "In Bill We Trust" type levels of a pass from me, but they have some type of pass for always having some kind of a plan and converting.
We traded Nomar and won the world series that same year. We let Pedro walk in 2005 and won a championship in 2007. We ran Terry and Theo out of town in 2012, tried to frame Youk as a clubhouse cancer, and traded our core of AGon, Beckett, and Crawford out of town and won the next year in 2013. In 2014, we let Ells walk in free agency to the Yankees and then lowballed the dick out of Jon Lester after trading him away. Again, we walked away with a world series shortly after paying up for Price, Sale, and JD.
I don't know. I love Mookie and I love the Red Sox and I wish it could have worked out. But if I had my way in the past, I probably would only have 1 championship in my lifetime instead of the 4 that I have now. So I'm going to be grumpy in the present, hope to god that this trade falls through because of the medicals, and see where things go from here. If 2020 is a rebuild year, at least it'll be during an Olympic Summer.