David Ortiz mocks Red Sox for trading Mookie Betts on FOX postgame

FORT MYERS, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 29: Former Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz looks on prior to a Grapefruit League spring training game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees at JetBlue Park at Fenway South on February 29, 2020 in Fort Myers, Florida. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)
FORT MYERS, FLORIDA - FEBRUARY 29: Former Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz looks on prior to a Grapefruit League spring training game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees at JetBlue Park at Fenway South on February 29, 2020 in Fort Myers, Florida. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) /
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Yankees fans will love a sad, shamed David Ortiz goofing on the Red Sox front office for trading Mookie Betts.

With the Boston Red Sox coming off a disappointing (ha!) last-place shortened season in the AL East, as well as a catastrophically boring follow-up to their 108-win campaign in 2019, the last thing those fans needed was to watch a traded Mookie Betts tear up the World Series for the Dodgers. Coincidentally, that was the first thing Yankees fans needed to see, specifically because it involved a Rays beatdown, too.

Wow, that ruled!

At this point, Boston’s icons are far beyond the point of defending the front office for exiling Betts instead of even pretending to extend him, and that includes David Ortiz. Big Papi had to host the FOX World Series postgame show after watching the ex-Bostonian shred the Rays at MVP levels, and when Alex Rodriguez confronted him about his old team’s penny-pinching ways, he couldn’t justify any of it.

If Ortiz hadn’t retired following the 2016 season, he would’ve willingly dumped some of his own salary to get Mookie on the books. That’s a good teammate.

Unfortunately, this time around, nobody asked any Sox to do something like that, and certainly none of them volunteered. Instead, we got about a year of the lie that Betts simply had to go test free agency, and then Betts didn’t test free agency because a team that cared about him actually paid him.

And now we’re left with Betts on the West Coast, doing things in World Series play that literally no one has done since Babe Ruth, who just so happens to be the last guy Boston ushered in a curse by selling away.

As “20-18!” threatens to be the new “19-18!” it’s comforting to watch Papi squirm, knowing that so much more could’ve been done to keep this icon in place.

As the Red Sox famously tweeted, “If you know, you know.” Papi’s not celebrating that luxury tax reset, if you know what we mean.