Some tea was spilled in Boston last night.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know the name Zack Scott. From 2004 through the end of 2020, he worked on the baseball ops side of the Red Sox front office, though never in a particularly public-facing role. In December 2020, he jumped ship to the New York Mets to work under newly-hired GM Jared Porter, who himself had worked for the Red Sox from 2004 through 2013, and then with the Cubs under Theo Epstein.

When Porter was caught in a sexting scandal and fired after less than two months on the job, Scott was named the Mets acting GM. . . only to lose that job a few months later, when he found himself in the midst of his own scandal arising out of a DWI arrest. (Ladies and gentlemen: the New York Mets!)

Scott was eventually acquitted of the drunk driving charges, with the court concluding that the prosecution failed to prove that he was drunk as opposed to just really, super-duper tired (he was pulled over at four in the morning after attending a fundraiser at Steve Cohen’s house, so either explanation seems plausible), but he hasn’t worked for an MLB team since.

Recently, Scott’s picked up his Twitter activity, posting rather candidly, like a man who has finally come to terms with the fact that he’s never working in baseball again. It was Scott, for instance, who first broke the news about the Red Sox asking baseball ops personnel to take pay cuts (reports which were later confirmed for multiple members of the media). And it was Scott who, just a few days ago, revealed that the Red Sox were in trade talks for Aroldis Champan in 2015, only to back out after leaning of his domestic violence incident.

There’s no question that Scott is chasing online clout. But that doesn’t mean that what he’s posting isn’t true. This brings us to some interesting and revealing information he posted about the Mookie Betts trade last night.

The conversation started when Scott pushed back against Lou Merloni’s implication that the Sox intentionally went into a rebuild mode five years ago when they traded Mookie. As Scott tells the story, the front office fully intended to keep competing and believed that they could:

And, in doing so, he flipped a longstanding theory about the deal (that the ill-fated Sale extension put the team in such a precarious financial position that they had no choice but to trade Mookie) on it’s head. The truth, Scott says, is that the Red Sox only extended Sale after deciding that they would not extend Mookie:

I always appreciate it when teams are given the benefit of the doubt, but this isn't how I see it. If we signed Betts, we don't sign Sale. Then, they likely don't sign at least one of Story or Yoshida. Perhaps there's less pressure to overpay Devers. Letting X walk made sense to… https://t.co/picEu9WAyH

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 4, 2024

100% false. We only signed Sale once we knew we couldn't sign Mookie. https://t.co/ZOE0thpMXm

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 4, 2024

He went on to flatly debunk the “Mookie never wanted to stay in Boston” narrative:

He should be beloved. Mookie would have signed with us for maybe even a little less. We didn't get there.

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 4, 2024

Mookie would have signed if we met the price. We were negotiating only months after winning the WS.

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 5, 2024

And he then provided some interesting insight on the way the Red Sox operated with respect to the luxury tax and their philosophy towards big deals in general:

That’s when we got the really interesting Mookie stuff:

We decided in spring of 2019 that the Red Sox weren't in the business of giving mega contracts. Much like we decided years before that we weren't in the business of investing large sums to pitchers in their 30s like Lester. And then we changed our minds with Price. 🤦‍♂️

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 4, 2024

Yes. We made our best and final offer to Mookie in the spring of 2019. Once that door was closed, we pivoted to other investments. In July 2019, we nearly traded Mookie to the Dodgers for a better return than what we'd ultimately get.

— Zack Scott (@ZackScottSports) December 4, 2024

You can also connect the dots and see that the team’s “best and final offer” wasn’t even close to what it would’ve taken to sign Mookie. They never even topped the $300 million mark:

Scott’s tweets provide us with more insight into the second-most infamous trade in Red Sox history than we’ve ever had before. We can now answer several questions that have been lingering since February 2020 (questions that John Henry could simply answer for us if he didn’t find it beneath himself to talk to the people whose passion for the Red Sox has made him spectacularly wealthy, but what are you going to do?)

1. Did Mookie want to leave Boston all along? No, he was negotiating in good faith and would have signed an extension had the Red Sox offered him a market-rate deal.
2. Was Mookie intent on going to free agency? No, but he was intent on not taking a discount.
3. Did the Chris Sale contract prevent the Sox from signing Mookie? No, they already knew they would not be signing Mookie when they gave out the Sale deal.
4. Were the Red Sox hesitant to extend Mookie because a weak farm system forced an early closure of their competitive window? No, they believed they could continue to be postseason contenders as the farm developed.
5. Did COVID spook Mookie into taking a deal with the Dodgers that he wouldn’t have taken with the Red Sox? No, and the Sox best offer never came close to the Dodgers’ offer.

So why, then, did the Red Sox fail to reach a deal with Mookie Betts? The answer seems to be that, as Scott said, John Henry simply did not believe in giving out mega-contracts. You can call this cheap if you want (really! You can!) but there is a bit of nuance here worth exploring, because it wasn’t just Henry who wanted out of mega-contracts, it was the entire baseball world.

The Texas Rangers signed Alex Rodriguez to the biggest contract in baseball history (10 years, $252 million) in 2000. That contract remained the biggest contract in baseball history for the next seven years, only topped when the Yankees subsequently gave A-Rod a $275 million deal in 2007. It would be another seven years before that contract was finally topped by Giancarlo Stanton, who continued to hold on to the top spot for five more years. For the better part of two decades, MLB owners essentially went on a capital strike.

You can call MLB owners collectively cheap if you want (really! You can! You can even call them collusionary!) but it’s also true that, at the time, there was a pervasive believe throughout the game that mega-contracts always ended badly for the teams that offered them, hamstringing roster flexibility and their ability to build depth. While I have no doubt that John Henry wants to pay his baseball players as little money as possible — and while I have no doubt that the emergence of RedBird Capital Partners as significant minory owners has had a real impact on the way the Sox do business — I also suspect that Henry sincerely believed that giving out mega-contracts was a bad idea not just for his bottom line, but for the ongoing competitiveness of the Boston Red Sox.

This is all, literally, old news. And yet it may be revelatory with the respect the current free-agent pursuit of Juan Soto. Here we are five years after the Red Sox reportedly got out of the mega-contract business, and they’ve offered Soto a contract worth nearly double what the Dodgers pay Mookie, despite the fact that Soto has never compiled as much bWAR in one season as Mookie has in his best three (yes, Mookie is that good).

What’s changed? It’s hard to say for sure, since John Henry isn’t talking. But one thing is clear: Henry’s policy against mega-contracts has proven to be spectacularly misguided. Mookie’s deal — which tops out at 12 years, $365 million but, because of deferrals, only amounts to $306.6 million in present-day dollars — is now an absolute bargain. The man who has compiled the third-most bWAR in all of baseball since 2020 (and who was number one in 2023) will likely pull just the 17th-highest yearly salary in baseball on opening day in 2025 (as calculated by the deal’s average annual value). And that #17 ranking is only going to do down even further from here.

It was plainly a mistake not to sign Mookie Betts to a market-rate deal five years ago. John Henry may now finally realize that. If he has, maybe Fenway will soon be home to the Red Sox’ next great Dominican superstar.