I don't get any Red Sox fan who says "It was clear he never wanted to be here" or believe the 12/420 report, that was only reported by Lou Merloni, who is a grade A doofus and would probably believe anything the team told him. I'll bet anyone on here $50 that Mookie doesn't get those numbers. Very few people know what Mookie is thinking, certainly not any of us fans. What's clear is that he loved being a part of Boston and the community and loved the fans. Who knows what he thought about the team, maybe he was disgruntled about the arbitration offerings, but he's a Scott Boras client so he's not going to take a hometown discount, nor should he.
Instead a minority of Sox fans are blaming Mookie, when we have a front office that made a series of horrific deals that were clearly bad as soon as they were signed, and then claimed poverty when it came time to resign someone who could have been the best Red Sox player since Ted Williams. The Red Sox could obviously have afforded him. They rake in hundreds of millions in profit each year and the owner is worth billions. Paying him an extra 5 million a year would relative to the 10/300 we offered would clearly have been fine. I don't see how people get all worried about the finances of the team when there's only a tax, not a cap, which we could get under in a year or two if we stopped giving out contracts to Price, Eovaldi, Sandova, Castillio, and the rest of the riff-raff.
Nobody should sign with ownership on this. I saw rumors that they want to sell the team in a couple years anyway so this is just a move to help that process - no baseball reasons whatsoever, just a huge dump on the fans to they can exit and make billions. **** John Henry. I hope someone swabs the deck of his yacht with coronavirus.