Why is Mookie Betts’ monstrous contract a win for other MLB stars?

The baseball mega-offer, presumably a thing of the past since the arrival of the coronavirus, was resurrected on Wednesday. As with any proper resuscitation, there were double shots, bulging eyes, and open mouths, all the ingredients for a proper derp face. Thirteen years and $ 392 million have that kind of effect.

It doesn’t matter that Mookie Betts and the Los Angeles Dodgers might have been the perfect candidates for a contract of ‘until death do us part: he is extremely talented, the revenue giants, together better than the alternative. There are some realities that one gets used to in the midst of a global pandemic, and one of them is that baseball teams, which claim to be losing money, are not particularly inclined to guarantee more than $ 400 million to a man.

And yet here we are, the Dodgers did, and Betts avoided free agency. I could have waited 3 and a half months and tested the market. Instead, he managed to kill two birds with 392 million stones. There was the part of receiving the payment, of course, but also the fulfillment of something important for him: taking advantage of his situation in a significant result for other players.

What is difficult for Boston fans to understand when they see that Betts is traded to the Dodgers in February and sign with them six months later is the beginning, not a dislike to Boston or the Red Sox organization, it guided him. Free agency was not attractive simply because of the money. Betts was going to be stupidly rich anyway. No, it’s that free agency, typically, is how players set new standards and reward future generations. And the Red Sox contract extension offers to Betts didn’t exactly match that bill.

Wednesday, now that was a standard-bearer. It was Betts telling Francisco Lindor and Javier Baez and Trevor Story and Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa and Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger and the handful of other stellar caliber players with an eye on the nine-figure pay numbers that, no matter how much property may cry bad these days, the teams will still reward the stars.

The trickle economy doesn’t exactly apply to baseball, so it’s not as if the Betts contract saved the game’s swift middle-class contraction or rescued what is still expected to be a lazy winter for the teams. What it does is allow George Springer and Marcus Semien to poke fun at lowball deals in November. Remember the all-time class of 2021-22: Lindor, Baez, Story, Bryant, Correa, Corey Seager and Nolan Arenado if you terminate your contract, so you don’t panic.

No team, not even Los Angeles, will guarantee a player the second-biggest money in game history if they don’t believe in the game’s future, its ability to recover from the coronavirus and find something akin to normal. The Dodgers don’t just bet on Mookie. They are betting on baseball as a whole.

Betts had also bet on himself, and is a roster for Judge or Trea Turner (Class of 2022-23), Bellinger or Matt Chapman (Class of 2023-24), Fernando Tatis Jr. or Pete Alonso or Juan Soto or Gleyber Torres (Class of 2024-25): For the few who don’t settle for a below-market contract extension early in their careers. Those are getting rarer, and they can reap rewards that feel exponential.

What Betts did is what Betts likes to do. In refereeing, he set records by pushing the limits and training his agents, Ed Cerulo and Steve Veltman of VC Sports, to fight. The extension took that spirit and dreamed big. The Dodgers now have one of the game’s top five players met and locked up until 2032.

This is how a contract negotiation is supposed to end, with fairness and satisfaction. Not all teams can resist a $ 400 million investment in a player, so it’s not as if the mega offer was an egalitarian principle meant to satisfy everyone. No. It is for the players that justify it as Mookie Betts, for the teams that absolutely can afford to deliver it, for the sport that at least felt normal for a day.