Should the Cleveland Indians just go all-in for Mookie Betts?

If the Red Sox decide to trade Mookie Betts this winter, what are the cases for and against the Indians pushing all their chips into the middle?

Aside from the fact that everyone in the baseball world without a vested interest in the club wants them to trade Francisco Lindor, the Cleveland Indians have become yesterday’s news.

The Indians were an easy-to-latch-onto national story in 2016 and 2017, but after sleepwalking their way through the AL Central in a boring 2018 season and falling behind the Minnesota Twins in 2019, the national baseball media seems ready to move on from the idea that the Tribe can win a World Series with the core they have in place.

As such, the narrative has become: The Indians should trade their franchise player.

But what if they added one of the very few players in the game who could be fairly argued as “better” than Lindor, while also keeping their franchise shortstop? How would that change the outlook?

That player, of course, is Mookie Betts. The Indians aren’t the only club facing the trade-him-or-let-him-walk-for-nothing dilemma; Boston finds itself in a similar yet definitely self-inflicted situation with Betts.

Chris Sale, David Price, and Nathan Eovaldi will tie the Red Sox up for nearly $240 million through 2022. Sale is on the books for three years longer than that, but it’s the immediate financial future that is of primary concern to Boston. All three endured injury-plagued 2019 seasons that render their respective price tags as hurdles to overcome for the time being.

Unless he does something like break the single-season home run record in 2020, 32-year-old designated hitter J.D. Martinez is probably not going to opt out of a deal that will pay him more than $62 million over the next three seasons.

Xander Bogaerts will also make $20 million a year through at least 2025 if he doesn’t opt out of his contract in 2023. While that looks like a sound investment as of this writing, it certainly detracts from the flexibility the Red Sox would ideally need to extend Betts.

Betts is set to become a free agent after the 2020 season, and is projected to make about $28 million via arbitration in his final guaranteed year with Boston. He’s a near lock to get a similar (or higher) AAV in a long-term deal next winter.

Long story short: there are few junctures in the fiscal cycle of a franchise that make for worse circumstances than the Red Sox are in with their former MVP right fielder. Consequently, trading Betts is a realistic possibility for Boston if there are teams out there willing to pony up what is sure to be an (appropriately) astronomical asking price.

If the Indians truly wanted to turn the tables and change the conversation, there are worse ways to push all their chips into the middle than to trade for Betts this offseason. Slotting him into a lineup that already features Lindor, Jose Ramirez, Carlos Santana, and Franmil Reyes on a team with one of baseball’s best starting rotations would catapult the Indians to no lower than the second-best team in the American League.

Gauging where the Indians stand in their proverbial “championship window,” the club’s primary goal at the moment should be to win a World Series while Lindor is still on the team. That is admittedly the only positive of this hypothetical, dream-scenario trade: that acquiring Betts would give the Indians their best Opening Day odds at a championship since at least the 1990’s. While that’s a pretty humongous positive, there are undeniable drawbacks.

The first of these is financial. Assuming the Indians would inherit the entirety of Betts’ arbitration salary, they’d be left with virtually nothing else to spend on the rest of the roster. Not that the Indians need to spend excessively on their infield or bullpen depth regardless, but having no resources to push toward these position groups would likely hurt the club overall during the long grind of what could be a seven-month season if it goes the distance.