by Cary Osborne
Press conferences became the norm at Dodger Stadium this offseason. At last count, it was five.
This was after the two last year for Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Freddie Freeman’s was at Camelback Ranch in 2022.
But it’s almost as if the one on Feb. 12, 2020, created a domino effect.
On Feb. 10, 2020, the Dodgers had just pulled off a megadeal with the Boston Red Sox, acquiring Mookie Betts and pitcher David Price for outfielder Alex Verdugo and prospects Jeter Downs and Connor Wong. Two days later, Betts and Price were introduced at Dodger Stadium as the newest members of the Dodgers.
Betts at the time was 27 years old, a season removed from winning the American League MVP and a World Series titles, and very much in the prime of his career.
The trade has turned out to be one of the most important in franchise history, giving the Dodgers an annual elite performer and one of the faces of the game. But in another sense, it also gave the Dodgers a magnetic player.
At the time, it was a trade the Dodgers hoped would elevate them from championship contender to champion.
They had been to the World Series in 2017 and 2018 and won 106 games in 2019 before being knocked out of the postseason by the eventual World Series champion Washington Nationals.
In 2020, Betts’ first season as a Dodger, they won the World Series, he was National League MVP runner-up and one of the jewel franchises in baseball just seemed to shine a little brighter.
Subsequently, the Dodgers have signed some of baseball’s top free agents over the last half-decade — Freeman, Ohtani, Yamamoto and Blake Snell among them. Each player has had his own reasons for signing with the Dodgers. But the concept of elite players wanting to play with other elite players is not lost on the Dodgers.
“Other players want to join good teams and good players, and it’s always helpful to have talent,” said Brandon Gomes, Dodger executive vice president and general manager, last year. “Attracting talent is easier to do when you already have talent on your team. So I think there’s a lot of benefits to that. And Mookie, he’s somebody that people gravitate towards. He’s fun, and he works hard and obviously he’s a joy to watch on the field.”
Getting Betts has often been labeled as a masterstroke. But the mechanics behind getting Betts are the often untold brilliance of the deal.
The Dodgers parted with Verdugo, who at the time was 23 years old and coming off a 3.0 bWAR season — his first full season in the big leagues.
Wong was the Dodgers’ 2017 third-round pick and was considered a strong Minor League prospect at the time. But the Dodgers’ scouting and player development units were creating hits at the catcher position at the time. They had built up a surplus of high-level catching prospects at the time, including Keibert Ruiz and Diego Cartaya as young Will Smith emerged at the Major League level.
Downs arrived via a bold Dec. 21, 2018 trade. The Dodgers sent the popular Yasiel Puig and Matt Kemp (coming off a resurgent season), effective starting pitcher Alex Wood and utilityman Kyle Farmer to the Reds for Downs, pitching prospect Josiah Gray and veteran pitcher Homer Bailey.
The move alleviated a logjam in the Dodger outfield, gave the Dodgers more financial flexibility and injected the team with two high-level prospects in Downs and Gray to develop. Downs was a top performer in the Dodger Minor League system in 2019, taking a considerable leap from the year before in the Reds’ system.
All of that went into creating an attractive package for the Red Sox to send Betts, with one year left on his contract, and Price, with three years remaining on his deal, to the Dodgers.
The trade went through five years ago today. Betts signed a 12-year deal with the Dodgers on July 22, 2020.
“Each and every move leading up to Mookie that we did or didn’t do kind of sends you down these different paths,” Gomes said. “And there were things that by not making a move or not making a trade it allowed us to then trade for Mookie and then extend him. We were betting on this incredible athlete who has been an elite performer, who has great makeup and work ethic, that they’re going to produce at a high level for the entirety of this contract.”
Betts’ 27.4 bWAR ranks third in the Majors since 2020 behind Aaron Judge (33.0) and Juan Soto (28.4) among position players. In five seasons, Betts already ranks 21st in Dodger franchise history in bWAR among position players. With that pace, he will rank 14th in Dodger history after 2025 and ninth after the 2026 season.
He owns the Dodgers career leadoff home runs record (32). One more Silver Slugger Award would tie him with Mike Piazza for most in franchise history. He ranks in the top five in Dodger postseason history in doubles (15, second), stolen bases (14, tied for second), runs (38, tied for third), hits (56, tied for fourth) and RBI (30, fifth).
And he is a two-time World Series champion.
And he has eight years left on his deal to add to all of this.
Five years ago: The game-changing Mookie Betts trade was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.