Dodgers Acquire Josh Beckett, Adrian Gonzalez And Carl Crawford In Blockbuster Trade

And here you thought that deal was done more than a month ago!

Some parts of the deal read “and a player to be named later”, even though names were dropped and we pretty much knew them then. Thursday, those players were officially named:

Fast-forwarding to today, one month after one of the largest and likely most significant trades in baseball history, and the Dodgers are now 4½ out of the second wild card, the only avenue to the playoffs left to them. They were 68-58 before the trade; they’re just 11-17 since. According to Baseball Prospectus, their playoff chances have dropped from 45 percent to 0.9 percent in the span of a month. Did the reportedly toxic Red Sox clubhouse move west as part of this deal, sabotaging the Dodgers from the inside like some kind of Trojan Malcontent? It’s less devious than that, but just as sad if you root for Los Angeles.

Ramirez has played 49 of his 56 games in Dodger blue at short, and he’s hit .262/.314/.457 for them. Prior to Hanley’s acquisition, Dodgers’ shortstops combined for .232/.285/.319, the worst of any position on the team. Ramirez has been 20 percent better than your average shortstop via split-adjusted OPS+, and even greater than that when propped up against those he replaced.

He concludes:

That sounds about right. It could work for both sides, and only because all the above factors aligned, it happened. We might never see something like this in baseball again.

In 2012, a professional baseball team acquired Carl Crawford on purpose. That’s still stunning. When a team overpays for a premium free agent like Crawford, they’re expecting the value of the deal to be front-loaded. Instant success, followed by a slow decline. That’s the plan, at least. The Red Sox got absolutely nothing from Crawford during the first two years of his contract, yet somehow they got out of the decline phase. Crawford could rebound. It’s just stunning that another team is taking that chance.

He used to be good. Mumble mumble something about NL West parks and competition mumble shrug he could be good again.

It’s been popular to refer to the Los Angeles Dodgers as “Yankees West” -- heck, I did it just ten minutes ago -- but that overlooks the fact that the Yankees are actively working to get under the competitive-balance taxes established in the new collective bargaining agreement. The days of unlimited spending are over for the Yankees, who still owe Alex Rodriguez at least $143 million over the next five years.

That leaves just the Dodgers. The Yankees aren’t even pretending they’re “Dodgers East” these days. There was only team in baseball who could have thought it was possible to look at Carl Crawford as a tariff that came along with Adrian Gonzalez, and that team was the Dodgers.

Dave Cameron at FanGraphs took a look at what the Dodgers could have done this offseason instead of absorbing $260 million of contracts for three players, two of whom could offer dubious production. He assumed the Dodgers could get anyone they wanted for this thought exercise, and here’s what he came up with:

So, you can’t just look at this and say that the Dodgers could have signed three premium free agents this winter with the $60 million they just spent, since the future commitments drop off significantly after Beckett’s deal expires. To line this up more with what they got, we need to essentially look for two potential long term deals and one shorter deal, though we’ll give ourselves the freedom to move money around within the deals to fit other options as long as the future commitments come out similarly.

From The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, on the blockbuster:

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But does anyone know just how much they’ve spent since last November? $400 million? $500 million? Going through Cot’s Baseball Contracts (and prorating the 2012 salaries for mid-season acquisitions) gives us the following:

Six hundred and seventy-five million dollars. Or, if you want a more down-to-earth comparison, that’s enough to feed one Ramen-eating college student for longer than the human race has existed. By a lot.

The collective bargaining agreement requires teams that spend more than $178 million on payroll in any given year be taxed 20 percent for each dollar beyond that threshold.

At the moment, the Dodgers already have a pretty full roster, assuming that Ramirez eventually slides over to third base for Dee Gordon. They’ll still need to add a backup catcher, but Stephen included $1 million in the calculated payroll to cover that expenditure.

Buchanan notes that the Red Sox will likely have some serious cash to play around with this offseason, possibly around $70 million in payroll. That should allow the team to re-tool far more quickly than most teams that shed the kind of talent that Boston has recently.

Obviously the Red Sox could go in a bunch of different directions with their freed up payroll, but Buchanan specifically mentions White Sox starter Jake Peavy and Rangers catcher Mike Napoli as two names that could ultimately fit quite well.

The centerpiece of the trade, Gonzalez, is showing off his philanthropic side as he is more concerned with charity than baseball. The Red Sox are currently running a Jimmy Fund campaign, and Gonzalez says he will not abandon that. Also, if you could help Gonzo out with any new charities, he would be much appreciated:

Beckett expresses his love for Red Sox Nation:

Gonzalez, Beckett and Punto are on their way to Los Angeles as we speak, according to Heyman’s tweet.

For more on the Dodgers, be sure to visit True Blue LA. And, for additional Red Sox coverage, check out Over The Monster.

Marc Normandin at Over the Monster provides some background on the two pitching prospects heading to Boston in the deal. De La Rosa is a righty with very limited MLB experience and lots of potential. Normandin discussed how that talent might translate to the big league club:

As for Webster, Normandin writes that the Sox are getting a possible mid-rotation arm that adds some depth to Boston’s stable of minor league arms. Webster joins De La Rosa as the main haul for the Sox:

Boston will send Los Angeles between $10 and $12 million dollars, which the league office must approve. The Dodgers will be on the hook for over $260 million of the salaries owed to Gonzalez, Beckett and Crawford.

For the latest on the Red Sox, head over to Over the Monster. For Dodgers news, head over to True Blue LA.

When co-owners John Henry and Tom Werner promoted Theo Epstein to serve as the franchise’s general manager in 2002, among Epstein’s first orders of business was to promote payroll flexibility. From Seth Mnookin’s book, Feeding the Monster:

Epstein had never agreed with Duquette’s approach, with its emphasis on a handful of big-name superstars who invariably demanded enormous contracts. He also thought that one of the team’s historic problems was its fixation on immediate gratification. Instead of building a strong farm system that would produce high-quality players whose inexpensive early years would be under the team’s control, the Sox scrambled year after year, trading away their future for the fantasy of succeeding in the present.

According to Mike Silverman of the Boston Herald, the Red Sox are saving a ton of money:

The deal will be worth in excess of $275 million to the Red Sox including luxury tax savings and salaries for the remainder of this season and beyond. Over the next six years, the Dodgers will receive $12 million from the Red Sox, with the payments to begin next year.

No, of course you haven’t. You just woke up, it’s Saturday morning, and you’re lazily checking here to see if there’s any news.

There is one bit of new information:

There have been multiple signs of this deal coming to fruition; here are some of them:

De La Rosa had just been recalled and made one appearance; sending him back down would allow him to be a player to be named later in the deal.

The Dodgers are, quite clearly, up to something.

Instead, it’s quite possible the Red Sox would just let him go. Here’s the contract, Los Angeles, and we’ll reinvest elsewhere.

Maybe.

The Red Sox could also just give Gonzalez to the Dodgers. Here. You take his $126 million. No backsies. The Red Sox could just start over.