Jeff Gordon: Tipsheet: Betts, Price, Pederson are latest MLB luxury cap casualties

Feb. 6--The baseball world is still digesting the three-way trade that would send Mookie Betts and David Price to the Los Angeles Dodgers, Alex Verdugo and Brusdar Graterol to the Boston Red Sox and Kenta Maeda to the Minnesota Twins.

For the moment the deal is held up over medical concern about Graterol, but insiders insist the trade will still happen one way or another.

The overriding takeaway from the Betts trade is this: Baseball's luxury works as a spending deterrent. It motivated the Red Sox to move Betts and Price and it inspired the Dodgers to part with Joc Pederson in the corresponding move.

So it serves as a soft salary cap. At the same time, MLB does not have a salary floor for teams -- and therein lies the challenge for getting the next collective bargaining agreement with the players.

The industry can't have one without the other and still deliver the appropriate revenue to the players. The system can't limit spending on one end without forcing spending on the other.

At least that's the ways players and many fans see it.

Here are some more thoughts about the trade:

* Salary dump! That's what motivated this trade. The Red Sox accepted less for Betts because the Dodgers were willing to eat a big chunk of Price's contract too. Remember then the Red Sox outbid the Cardinals in a big way for Price when Dave Dombrowski was the boss in Boston? Those were good times.

* Verdugo is a good outfield prospect, but not a sure thing. Graterol might end up on the bullpen. Or he might not end up in this trade after all. So it's not like the Red Sox got huge rebuilding blocks while dealing away the multi-talented Betts. What the franchise does in 2021 and beyond with its payroll flexibility tell us how smart or stupid this move really was.

* Dodgers baseball czar Andrew Friedman has been a careful shopper, so his franchise had the payroll flexibility to take on both Betts and a share of Price's deal. All he had to do was move Pederson down the road to the Angels. By adding real star power to an already great team, he has shifted the media's focus from the front office to the field.

* Look out for the Twins. Maeda's role diminished in LA, but the Twins gladly to add him to their pitching staff for their postseason push. He is one more piece of the load-up.

* With the long-discussed trade finally out of the way, the Chicago Cubs could take center stage by finally auctioning off Kris Bryant. Might he be headed to the National League East?

So there is a bit of intrigue as pitchers and catchers begin heading back to work in Our National Pastime:

Here is what folks are writing about the bustling marketplace:

Tom Verducci, SI.com: "The Boston Red Sox, one of the richest franchises in the game, traded the very epitome of a franchise player. No matter what you will be told, nothing motivated this deal more than Boston wanting to reset it luxury tax rate. The Red Sox chose not to ride out the season to see if they could win again with Betts, the way Washington did with Bryce Harper, and not to defer their decision until July when they could take stock of their standing, the way Baltimore did with Manny Machado. They chose not to pay Betts as the Angels did Anthony Rendon, at around $35 million per year, or the Phillies did Harper with a total outlay of $330 million. Betts is an outlier. None of the top 16 contracts in history have ever been handed out to a player less than six feet tall. Prince Fielder is the only player that short to be paid more than $165 million -- and Betts weighs about a hundred pounds less than Fielder. I get it. Accountants everywhere are high-fiving one another. What the Red Sox are doing in trading Betts to the Dodgers, and scotch-taping the three years left on the contract of David Price along with him, makes economic sense. As three-time 'offenders,' Boston was looking at a progressive tax rate of 50% tax on the overage, up from 20% in the first phase. The Yankees and Dodgers in recent years have hit the reset tax button themselves, paving the way for the coastal titans to snag the two best players to change teams this winter: Gerrit Cole is in New York and Mookie Betts is in Los Angeles."

Kiley McDaniel, ESPN.com: "It's totally reasonable to complain that the Red Sox can afford to keep Betts if they wanted to. Every MLB team can technically afford any one player. The Red Sox appear to be aiming for something that's about more than any one player: building a model franchise from top to bottom. And trading Mookie Betts has a good chance of making that a reality more quickly, as preposterous as that may sound. The Red Sox's new baseball chief, Chaim Bloom, comes from the Tampa Bay Rays, the model franchise for sustained contention on a micro-payroll. It will look different in Boston with the franchise's higher payroll ceiling, but the primary strategic focus is to be a perennial contender that won't have to have down years, due to a more sound approach to roster/payroll flexibility, depth and a strong farm system. Betts wouldn't sign a contract extension and his value is so high that he could be used to kick-start the new approach to roster construction."

Mike Axisa, CBSSports.com: "Boston just traded one of the best players in baseball for an outfield prospect with a back injury, a pitching prospect who might end up in relief, and payroll flexibility they can't even use right away because the offseason is over and free agency has been picked clean. That gets a yikes from me. Even with his free agency looming, Betts had enormous value. Look at the Paul Goldschmidt trade. One year of Goldschmidt fetched a good starter (Luke Weaver) and a great catcher (Carson Kelly), plus more. Betts is better than Goldschmidt and he returned two prospects and salary relief. I don't like it for Boston."

Hannah Keyser, Yahoo! Sports: "And what's really rich: The Red Sox have already proven that spending money on this specific team works -- they had a historically dominant season that ended in a championship in 2018. They can keep that very successful team relatively intact -- the only catch is they have to pay them like winners. John Henry, estimated net worth $2.7 billion, can afford to do so. If he's not interested in building and enjoying the best team his money can buy, why bother owning a baseball franchise at all?"

Ben Lindbergh, The Ringer: "The Red Sox can try to mollify their Betts-bereaved fan base by citing the star's escalating salary: He's due to earn $27 million this season, a record for a player in his final year of arbitration eligibility. They can note that Betts is 10 months away from free agency, that he reportedly rejected modest extension offers and expressed some willingness to test the open market, and that if Boston was outbid for his services next offseason, the Sox would have had only a draft pick to show for the loss of their star. They can spin their desire to plunge their payroll below the competitive balance tax threshold as a means of boosting spending in seasons to come. They can point out that the Sox missed the playoffs in 2019 even with Betts, and that the Yankees and Rays are still strong. They can draw attention to the considerable talents of Verdugo and Graterol and tally the two players' remaining team-control years. But Betts was already a top-10 position player in Red Sox franchise history, and he was just getting started. Verdugo and Graterol are promising players, and the Sox may eventually put their savings on Betts and Price toward signing some other stud. To heal this wound, they'll have to, because Betts is the rare talent who takes two or three stars to replace, and like (Mike) Trout, he's virtually impossible to overpay."

Buster Olney, ESPN.com: "For all practical purposes, the brick and mortar beneath the Mookie Betts trade was laid the day Gerrit Cole agreed to a $324 million deal to be the ace of the New York Yankees, and the construction accelerated when the Boston Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora. Once Boston's primary rivals got the ace they needed, and once the Red Sox lost their most important staffer, the Red Sox situation gained clarity: It's going to be a year of turnover, the crossroad to the next big thing. Without Cora, without Betts, Boston could still compete for a playoff spot in 2020, and if everything went right for the Red Sox and everything went wrong for the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays, it's possible that the Sox could win the American League East. That latter scenario would require, for starters, many, many injuries manifesting in New York and Tampa Bay and Rafael Devers delivering an MVP performance. But it's much more likely that this will be remembered as the year the Red Sox reset and took a turn back to consistent relevance, just as the Yankees did in 2016, when they traded Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman, extracted Gleyber Torres from the Cubs and introduced Aaron Judge to the big leagues."

Gabe Lacques, USA Today: "It will be a summer to savor for Los Angeles Dodgers fans, rich beyond their dreams with MVPs playing alongside each other in the Dodger Stadium outfield, Mookie Betts and Cody Bellinger putting on five-tool clinics every night in pursuit of an elusive championship. Yet before we ponder the promise of Cody and Mookie and so much California love, it's worthwhile to pause a moment and consider the Betts era in Boston -- and why the team-team trade that marked its end Tuesday night symbolizes the best and worst of the game . . . Boston cannot ask anything more of Betts: He became an American League MVP and World Series champion there, a player far more dynamic and electrifying than any doddering slugger who sparked the Red Sox's first three championships this century. It's also instructive to ponder what Betts wasn't -- in Boston and beyond. He was loved at Fenway Park, though perhaps not revered. Such is life for an athlete whose career blossomed as David Ortiz's was ending -- and Big Papi would remain an outsized presence even in retirement. In another era, Betts might have owned Boston; in this one, he was another great athlete showering an embarrassment of championship riches on New England -- Brady and Gronk and Papi and Mookie and Bergeron seamlessly blending one season into the next in a haze of Duck Boat celebrations. He was known to baseball fans -- but not in a manner befitting his greatness."

Andy McCullough, The Athletic: "Thirty-one seasons have passed since the Dodgers won a championship. Five of those seasons occurred on Friedman's watch. The drought agitates fans and vexes the organization. Friedman understood those emotions as this winter began. He insisted he would not react just to react. He formulated an answer that solidified his team's place atop the National League. He did his part. It will be up to the players -- a group that won 106 games in 2019, a group still mostly intact for 2020, a group that now includes Betts and Price -- to end the drought."

MEGAPHONE

"I think we've got a very, very good group of young players, and it's going to be that way for the next two or three years. We'll see what happens when some of these guys hit free agency. But we've got a good solid base here for a good three years."

New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner, on the state of his franchise.

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