IMO hindsight is something you have AFTER you know how things have played out. As of today we know nothing more than we knew last week, last month or even four months ago other than the roster has changed and payroll has been shed. You asked, "If you could jump in a time machine and go back to the spring of 18 what would you do as the ownership group differently to both put together a club capable of competing for multiple championship AND enable a CBT reset? " The groundwork for this MAY have been laid. I can't judge this until I see how it all plays out. I mean just look at some of the threads we have here. All of a sudden people are becoming open to the idea of taking in Wil Meyers. There was no way anyone wanted him for Mookie, but now that Betts is gone we're entertaining the idea that it might be a good thing? My point being there are lots of wheels in motion here. If Mookie went without Price being packaged with him the return would have been different. If Price goes separately do they get the payroll relief they were looking for? Does Price get packaged with someone else after the Betts deal? There are a fuck load of moving parts here and until the dust settles we still won't know the makeup of the roster, the total payroll $$$ shed or the return in prospects/cost controlled players.
As part of an effort to build a contender for 2020, Myers sucked.
As part of an effort to build a contender for 2022-25, Myers (as the price to bring in a young SP and a good catching prospect) is pretty interesting.
They trade Price then, the angry thread here is at 15,000 posts by now
I don't think that's so certain. If I remember, we were all assuming that the team would be choosing one of Price or Sale, as they have in fact now done. I think the most likely scenario appeared at the time to be that Sale would be the one leaving, after the extension he signed with the White Sox was completed, because I don't think anyone really expected that we could have
two ~$30m AAV pitchers on the roster long-term. And... now we don't.
Some people would have been upset, of course, but most would have reasoned that Price was brought in to win a WS, he won one, and now it was time to get out of the back of the deal while the getting was good, even if the return was slight, which it likely would've been, playoff heroics or no.
If the team chose
neither Price nor Sale — if they dealt Price without extending Sale — then I think your point would be more accurate. Perhaps that's what you meant.