Six years ago, on Oct. 28, 2018, the Boston Red Sox won their ninth World Series championship in team history. The title came on the heels of a historic regular season in which the team went a franchise-best 108-54 and cruised through the playoffs with a remarkable 11-3 record, including crushing the LA Dodgers in five games to take the MLB crown.
That Red Sox team was indeed loaded, and there was no reason to believe that entering the 2019 season that the team would be significantly different or much less successful. But the team didn’t repeat in 2019, and on Sept. 9, the Red Sox fired the architect of that 2018 championship team, Dave Dombrowski, after the team lost 5-0 to the Yankees to drop the third-place Sox to 76-68.
They would eventually finish 84-78 and miss the playoffs a year after they had run roughshod over all baseball had to offer during the regular season and postseason. Little did Red Sox fans know that things were going to get much, much worse in the subsequent years , with nothing more shocking than the Feb. 2020 blockbuster trade that sent the team’s heart and soul — outfielder Mookie Betts — along with teammate David Price and half Price’s salary, to those same Dodgers for Jeter Downs (cut loose after just 14 games), Connor Wong, and Alex Verdugo (traded to the Yankees last offseason after four seasons in Boston in exchange of the immortal Richard Fitts, Greg Weissert and Nicholas Judice).
Betts was a year away from unrestricted free agency, and.