Red Sox Stars are Expendable: Solid Strategy—or Worrisome Pattern?

There was a time when Red Sox fans argued about lineups. About rotations. About whether the bullpen was one arm short or three. Somewhere along the way, the argument shifted. Now it’s not who’s batting cleanup—it’s who’s leaving next, and who’s coming in to explain it.

For years, the Red Sox were defined by stars who felt permanent. You watched them grow up. You bought the jersey assuming you’d get more than a couple good summers out of it. You believed—maybe a little stubbornly—that if a player was great and wanted to be here, the team would find a way.

Then Mookie Betts was traded. Xander Bogaerts walked. Rafael Devers followed. Chris Sale was shipped out. Alex Bregman signed with the Cubs. Ranger Suárez arrived in Boston. And permanence, quietly, stopped being part of the identity.

Each move came with a rationale. Payroll flexibility. Long-term planning. Risk management. In isolation, you can make a baseball case for almost all of it. Baseball, though, doesn’t happen in isolation. Neither does fandom. That’s where the explanation starts to thin out.

Start with Betts, because that’s where the ground really shifted. He wasn’t just a star—he was the star. Homegrown. Electric. The kind of player you assume you’ll be talking about for twenty years. Trading him told fans and players that even doing everything right didn’t guarantee anything. The return was framed as flexibility. The result has been one playoff appearance since, while Betts has stayed right where October expects him to be. It’s fair to wonder whether that’s just timing—or whether it says something bigger.

Bogaerts hurt differently. That wasn’t a trade. That was a door quietly closing. He didn’t want to leave. He said so, more than once. Letting him walk rewrote the rules. Loyalty—even mutual loyalty—didn’t carry much weight anymore. Bogaerts wasn’t just a shortstop; he was continuity. When he left, something familiar went with him, and the absence lingered longer than expected.

Devers was the tipping point. For years, fans were told he was the next cornerstone. Losing him made it hard to keep calling this a temporary phase. At some point, the pattern became the story: stars arrive, stars perform, stars get expensive, stars leave. You can only reset so many times before it stops feeling like a reset.

Chris Sale sits a little outside that group, but the feeling was similar. Sale represented ambition. A willingness to push chips in and live with the risk. Trading him felt less like planning ahead and more like closing a competitive window without really saying so.

To be fair, the front office isn’t operating without a theory. Long-term contracts age badly. Plenty of teams are still paying for deals they regret. The luxury tax isn’t imaginary. Flexibility matters, especially in a division that doesn’t forgive mistakes. From that perspective, discipline isn’t cowardice—it’s restraint.

That’s where a move like bringing in Ranger Suárez fits. He helps. He stabilizes the rotation. He raises the floor in a way the Red Sox badly needed. It’s a smart baseball decision. What it isn’t—fairly or unfairly—is a replacement for what was lost. Suárez makes the team better. He doesn’t carry history with him, and that matters more than front offices like to admit.

And then there’s the other side of it. Watching Alex Bregman, a player of that caliber, land in Chicago didn’t sting because Boston “missed out.” It sharpened the larger question instead. If you’re not keeping your own stars, and you’re not landing other teams’ stars either, what is this supposed to feel like while it’s happening?

On the field, the effects are subtle but real. Team chemistry erodes when leaders cycle out without replacements growing naturally. Clubhouses drift. Accountability gets harder to pin down. Young players don’t always know who the room belongs to. Veterans stop assuming they’ll be around long enough to build anything lasting.

Player trust takes a hit too. Homegrown players notice patterns. Free agents notice them as well. When the message—intended or not—is that commitment doesn’t really move the needle, negotiations stop being conversations and start feeling like countdowns.

The fan side might be the most underestimated cost. Red Sox fans understand the business. What they struggle with is direction. When stars leave and the replacements feel interchangeable, skepticism fills the gap. Jerseys stay in drawers. Emotional investment becomes conditional. People still show up, but they ask more questions on the way in.

Winning would smooth most of this over. It always does. But sustained winning hasn’t followed this approach. Instead, the Red Sox have lived in between—never fully rebuilding, never fully contending, always explaining. Always framing the next move.

So has trading superstars helped the Red Sox? Financially, maybe. Structurally, on paper, possibly. But baseball isn’t played on paper, and Fenway isn’t filled by spreadsheets.

What’s been lost—trust, continuity, belief—is harder to replace than payroll space. The Red Sox don’t need to keep every star forever. But they do need to decide what they want to be known for.

Right now, it feels a little too much like a place where stars pass through, not a place where they stay.

Around here, that still matters.

Written by: Tim Hourihan