The Boston Red Sox aren’t in this year’s World Series, but quite a few familiar faces are. There are seven former Red Sox split between the Yankees and Dodgers’ rosters, but two stand out.

Mookie Betts and Alex Verdugo will face off on opposite squads in the 2024 Fall Classic. Boston traded Betts and David Price to the Dodgers for Verdugo, Connor Wong and some prospects in 2019 in one of the team’s worst deals in recent history. Five years later, Verdugo isn’t a Red Sox anymore and he may help the Yankees take home their first Commissioner’s Trophy in 15 seasons.

Fans have let the Red Sox organization have it for allowing the Betts trade to pan out this way, and MLB media has begun to weigh in on the front office’s moves. Insider Jon Heyman roasted the Sox on his latest Bleacher Report livestream.

“This is not a great Red Sox series, where you’ve got Verdugo in the series and you’ve got Betts in the series, that doesn’t look good for the Red Sox,” Heyman said. “They need to make up for [trading Betts].”

“Red Sox, time to try.”

Jon Heyman tells Red Sox front office it’s ‘time to try’ to build a good team this offseason

Heyman, Red Sox and MLB fans have come to the same consensus that Boston traded Betts to dump his salary and avoid a pricey extension. The deal was Red Sox ownership’s first clear shift into a small-market budget structure, and things have not changed since, despite multiple offseason’s worth of promises from ownership.

Heyman has previously called out Sox owner John Henry for his miserly moves that have kept his club at the bottom of the American League East and out of the playoffs. Boston hasn’t been far off from success in the last few seasons, and its most recent 81-81 record proves the players are worth investing in.

It is — and has been — time for the Red Sox to try. Boston is the third most valuable team in MLB, and seeing the only two bigger squads in the World Series should be motivation enough for ownership and management to make big-ticket additions this winter.

Betts and Verdugo were both billed as the future of the Red Sox franchise during their separate times in Boston, but ownership had no intention of building around them. The Red Sox’s failures of the last five out of six seasons are entirely self-made, and they can be fixed if the front office spends to build around the quality players they already have.