Mookie Betts. Xander Bogaerts. And now Rafael Devers. Ben Lindbergh is right: the dismantling of the World Series–winning 2018 Red Sox is now complete. And Sox pundits are furious, from Bill Simmons to Dan Shaughnessy. … I’m only a bandwagon Sox fan. But even I know this isn’t exactly a Money Ball-style analytics move. Indeed, the Sox haven’t been playing true Money Ball for a long time. It’s more like hybrid-Money Ball, i.e. using analytics some of the time to build a team, throwing money at the problem other times, and then jettisoning a high-paid star for attitude problems not necessarily tied to stats (i.e. Devers). Lately, if anything, John Henry et gang’s hybrid-Money Ball has started to resemble Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs’s style of ownership, i.e. spending just enough on payrolls to appease fans, but not spending enough to produce a consistent championship-caliber team. …

… I got to thinking along these hybrid-Money Ball lines after receiving the following email from WW Reader: “No idea who Bryan Joiner is, but this is another good analysis of the Red Sox situation (that raises) a key question: how does a World Series Champion turn itself into the Moneyball Edition of the Oakland A’s?”

OK, maybe my Jeremy Jacobs comparison is unfair. Maybe all of this is tied to a necessary unraveling of the bloated 2018 payroll. But it still points to a hybrid-Money Ball pattern of up-and-down payroll spending, mixed with a growing private-equity mindset, as WW Reader points out.