Boston Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom addressed the trade that sent Mookie Betts and David Price to the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time on Monday.
Bloom said trading the pair was the best move for the Red Sox in \"the big picture.\"
\"What Mookie and David are capable of on the field is a lot,\" he said. \"I think it\'s reasonable to expect that we\'re going to be worse without them. We have really good talent coming back, we\'ve added talent to the roster this winter, and I think it\'s important to point out that at the beginning of the winter, this team had a lot more talent than the 84 wins we put up last year. We still think there\'s plenty of talent here to compete.\"
Bloom added that the Red Sox would have considered trading Betts, who will be a free agent after the season, even if owner John Henry hadn\'t set a goal of getting under the luxury tax threshold.
\"The goal to get under the CBT was not an end in itself,\" Bloom said. \"It\'s part of a larger goal, our biggest goal, to put ourselves in position to compete and win sustainably for as many years as we can. Using our resources is a means to that end. It\'s part of that goal. What we wanted was to get under the CBT in service of that larger goal, and we weren\'t going to do it in a way that wasn\'t going to help us or help us toward our goal.\"
Via Joon Lee/ESPN