Mookie Betts 2020 season: Dodgers have 3 options, one will surprise you

Option 1: Trade Him

Are you crazy?! Would the Dodgers really trade Mookie Betts only months after acquiring him in an on-again/off-again trade that felt like a poorly scripted romantic comedy? Given the current environment, perhaps they should consider it.

Now bear with me for a second.

At this point in time, nobody knows how the spread of the coronavirus will impact our daily lives on issues far more important than baseball. Whether or not the 2020 season is played is far down the list of priorities for public health officials to consider, other than in terms of providing guidance on when it is suitable for large public gatherings to meet again.

But if the 2020 season is canceled, it’s possible the Dodgers could have traded young assets for nothing other than a few photoshoots with Betts wearing that beautiful Dodger blue. If that is the case, trading him offers the team an avenue to recoup some of their losses.

Now, this option might never materialize as Major League Baseball is putting a temporary freeze on roster moves once their agreement with the Players Association on how to deal with the 2020 season is finalized. However, the two sides will eventually need to decide when to lift the freeze, and it’s possible a window could open before the season begins to make a move.

Most likely, the roster freeze will be lifted when the schedule has been decided, at which point the Dodgers will know exactly how many games they are working with in employing Betts’ services. Is it possible the schedule morphs into something unrecognizable and the Dodgers decide they can live without Betts for a small sprint of games?

“I think we need to get into what does the season actually look like,” Friedman recently told the LA Times when asked how a shortened or canceled season might affect his evaluation of the original trade.

Of course, there are real human beings involved in making trades, it’s easy to write about something on an internet blog, and it’s another to make families pack up and move, especially if they just did that exercise a few months earlier.

If the Dodgers have hopes of signing Betts over the long-term, it might not be the best way to get in his good graces by trading him months before they try to woo him back to La La Land. That said, a player at the top of the game like Betts will be demanding a contract that only a select few teams will be able to afford. The Dodgers will be in the running for the superstar centerfielder no matter what happens, as long as they come to the table with a dump truck of money.

Could a small market team looking for a revenue infusion look to pay a premium for Betts over a few months to help them sell tickets and generate interest on a lost season? It’s something to at least consider.