{"id":7975,"date":"2024-12-06T02:09:44","date_gmt":"2024-12-06T02:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatoday.azontree.com\/?p=7975"},"modified":"2024-12-06T02:09:44","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T02:09:44","slug":"we-now-know-why-the-red-sox-traded-mookie-betts-and-it-tells-us-something-about-the-juan-soto-sweepstakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatoday.azontree.com\/?p=7975","title":{"rendered":"We now know why the Red Sox traded Mookie Betts . . . and it tells us something about the Juan Soto sweepstakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some tea was spilled in Boston last night.<\/p>\n

\"MLB:<\/picture><\/span><\/span>Photo by Brian Rothmuller\/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images<\/cite><\/span><\/figure>\n
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Don\u2019t feel bad if you don\u2019t know the name Zack Scott. From 2004 through the end of 2020, he worked on the baseball ops side of the\u00a0Red Sox<\/a>\u00a0front office, though never in a particularly public-facing role. In December 2020, he jumped ship to the\u00a0New York Mets<\/a>\u00a0to work under newly-hired GM Jared Porter, who himself had worked for the Red Sox from 2004 through 2013, and then with the\u00a0Cubs<\/a>\u00a0under Theo Epstein.<\/p>\n

When Porter was caught in a\u00a0sexting scandal<\/a>\u00a0and fired after less than two months on the job, Scott was named the Mets acting GM. . . only to lose that job a few months later, when he found himself in the midst of\u00a0his own scandal<\/a>\u00a0arising out of a DWI arrest. (Ladies and gentlemen: the New York Mets!)<\/p>\n

Scott was eventually acquitted of the drunk driving charges, with the court concluding that the prosecution failed to prove that he was drunk as opposed to just really, super-duper tired (he was pulled over at four in the morning after attending a fundraiser at Steve Cohen\u2019s house, so either explanation seems plausible), but he hasn\u2019t worked for an MLB team since.<\/p>\n

Recently, Scott\u2019s picked up his Twitter activity, posting rather candidly, like a man who has finally come to terms with the fact that he\u2019s never working in baseball again. It was Scott, for instance, who first broke\u00a0the news about the Red Sox asking baseball ops personnel to take pay cuts\u00a0<\/a>(reports which were later confirmed for multiple members of the media). And it was Scott who, just a few days ago,\u00a0revealed that the Red Sox<\/a>\u00a0were in trade talks for Aroldis Champan in 2015, only to back out after leaning of his domestic violence incident.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no question that Scott is chasing online clout. But that doesn\u2019t mean that what he\u2019s posting isn\u2019t true. This brings us to some interesting and revealing information he posted about the Mookie Betts trade last night.<\/p>\n

The conversation started when Scott pushed back against Lou Merloni\u2019s implication that the Sox intentionally went into a rebuild mode five years ago when they traded Mookie. As Scott tells the story, the front office fully intended to keep competing and believed that they could:<\/p>\n

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And, in doing so, he flipped a longstanding theory about the deal (that the ill-fated Sale extension put the team in such a precarious financial position that they had no choice but to trade Mookie) on it\u2019s head. The truth, Scott says, is that the Red Sox only extended Sale\u00a0after<\/em>\u00a0deciding that they would not extend Mookie:<\/p>\n

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