Boston sports radio took a hard turn into fantasyland this week. Rob Bradford, a longtime MLB insider, went on the Jones & Keefe show and basically told the Red Sox to go all-in on Bobby Witt Jr. The pitch was simple: trade the farm, figure it out later, because a player like Witt doesn’t come around often.
Bradford didn’t just call Witt a good player. He called him the next David Ortiz. That’s not subtle.
“Would people be upset if you traded everything that you would need to trade for Bobby Witt? Obviously, Roman Anthony, Kyson Witherspoon. Whoever it is, would they be upset? I think no, they wouldn’t be upset, because Bobby Witt is the next David Ortiz,” Bradford said. “If you’re going to find a guy who they should find at some point, the guy who was going to be the foundation guy, the guy who was going to be the centerpiece guy for the organization, it is a guy like Bobby Witt.”
He’s not wrong about the talent. Witt is wired differently — that kind of personality that makes you want to build a franchise around him. The Royals clearly know it. That’s why they locked him up early. But here’s the thing: Kansas City isn’t stupid. They’re not giving him up for anything less than a haul, and the Red Sox would have to gut their already-thin prospect pipeline to make it happen.
Witt is on the injured list for the first time in his career, which is the only reason this conversation even exists in July. If he were healthy and mashing, the Royals wouldn’t take the call. But even now, the ask would start with Roman Anthony and Kyson Witherspoon, and it would keep going from there.
The Real Cost of a Franchise Player
The math on a Witt trade is brutal. Boston is sitting in the middle of the AL East, not bad but not great. They could use a jolt. But trading three or four of your top prospects for one guy — even a guy like Witt — is the kind of move that either wins you a title or sets you back five years. There’s no middle ground.
Bradford knows this. He even admitted it’s probably not realistic. “I don’t know if you could ever get him, but you gotta try. Like, why not try?” he said.
That’s the thing about trade deadline speculation. It’s fun to imagine Witt in a Red Sox uniform, hitting rockets off the Green Monster and becoming the face of the franchise for the next decade. But in reality, the Royals have zero incentive to deal him. They built their whole plan around him. Moving him now would be admitting the rebuild failed before it really started.
So yeah, it’s a dream. A good one, maybe. But it’s probably staying a dream.
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