Mookie Betts' Latest Announcement Gives Red Sox More Reason For Shame

Everything Boston Red Sox fans disagree with about the way their favorite team runs as an organization dates back to the Mookie Betts trade.

Betts was the first in a long line of Red Sox stars to leave town in the 2020s, followed by Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, and now Alex Bregman. After winning a Most Valuable Player Award and a World Series in Boston in 2018, Betts has gone on to win three more rings with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It's been six seasons since Betts departed, and Red Sox ownership shouldn't be allowed to go a day without being reminded of that fact. But it's the fan base that has to deal with those constant reminders, and out of the blue, those fans were recently slapped in the face with how much longer they'd last.

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Betts plans to play until 2032

During a recent appearance on Roku's "What Drives You With John Cena," Betts confirmed that he plans to play until the end of his 12-year, $365 million extension with the Dodgers, which means he's anticipating hanging in until the end of the 2032 campaign.

“I’ll be 40, my little girl will be 14, my son will be 10,” Betts told Cena. “My parents were always there, and I want do that same thing for my kids.”

The Dodgers are certainly set up to do a lot more damage over the next seven years. Having won back-to-back World Series titles, they added superstar right fielder Kyle Tucker to play Betts' old position for the next four seasons. And, of course, they already had Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and a half-dozen others who could be the best player on a given team.

That's part of what makes Betts' Dodgers tenure even more painful for Red Sox fans. The 33-year-old just finished his worst offensive season in the majors, and is outshined on his own team by a handful of others.

He accepted a move to shortstop and has frankly gotten far better at it than anyone would have anticipated, but baseball was at its best when No. 50 was gliding around the spacious right field at Fenway Park and setting the tone at the top of the Boston batting order.

The Red Sox not paying a player like Betts what he was worth was far more damaging to the hierarchy of the sport than the Dodgers paying the Ohtanis and Kyle Tuckers of the world life-changing money. Mookie Betts and John Cena didn't need to talk about that for us to know it to be true.

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