COMMENTARY
Let’s call it two years, 11 months.
On Feb. 4, 2020, the initial (and better) version of the Mookie Betts trade broke. An organizational failure spanning three baseball bosses, and a punt to the groin that fundamentally changed how a sizable percentage of people viewed the Red Sox.
By Jan. 4, 2023, their likes had only grown, and the snowball of that day had rolled down a lot of mountain. The austerity talk. The trades, and their diminishing returns. The two dreadful seasons that sandwiched a best-case-scenario 2021 playoff berth.
All leading to Xander Bogaerts and a season-long lie about genuine interest in keeping a player who, while not quite Betts’s equal, made it unequivocally clear he wanted to be here.