THE fire sale is one of baseball’s most venerated traditions. Ever since Charlie Finley, the owner of the Oakland Athletics, unsuccessfully tried to sell off his stars to the highest bidder in 1976—the sport’s commissioner intervened and blocked the transactions—Major League Baseball (MLB) teams have traded away bunches of highly-paid players in exchange for cheap, unproven youngsters. Such decisions tend to alienate fan bases for years to come. Supporters of the Chicago White Sox—Barack Obama’s favourite club—still rue the so-called “White Flag Trade” of 1997, when management gave up on a roster with an excellent chance to make the playoffs, and sent three of the Sox’s best pitchers to the San Francisco Giants. Following the trade, the Florida Marlins went on to win the championship that year—and then promptly dismantled their roster, shedding virtually all their talent and finishing the following season with the worst record in baseball. Wayne Huizenga, the former boss of the Blockbuster video-rental chain and the owner of the Marlins at the time, remains persona non grata among the team’s devotees 15 years later. On August 25th the Boston Red Sox set a new standard in fire-sale efficiency, when they unloaded a whopping $261m of salary obligations in a single trade. They gave the Los Angeles Dodgers three players—Adrián González (pictured), Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett—who were seen as cornerstones of the franchise coming into 2012, but who had disappointing years. In exchange, they received a handful of prospects with the potential to become valuable players down the road. It was a stunning surrender of the 2012 season—and quite possibly of 2013 and 2014 as well—for one of the game’s richest and most successful teams. Even more surprisingly, Boston’s rabid fans and sportswriters applauded the club’s capitulation. Mr Beckett, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher acquired in a trade in 2005, had an up-and-down career in Boston. In 2007, the last year the Red Sox won the title, he was the toast of the town: he led the American League (AL) in wins and was voted the Most Valuable Player of the AL’s championship series. Just last season he posted the best earned-run average, a standard measure of pitching effectiveness, of his career. But he performed poorly in 2006, 2010 and (so far) 2012. His fastball is now three miles (five km) per hour slower than it was at his peak. Moreover, he had enraged fans by allegedly consuming beer and fried chicken in the clubhouse, and by playing golf after saying he could not pitch because of an injury. Red Sox Nation was delighted to be rid of him, and of the $47m he is owed from 2013-15.

Mr Crawford was almost as reviled by the Boston faithful. A superb defensive outfielder, he starred for the Tampa Bay Rays, who reached the World Series in 2008. After his contract there expired, the Red Sox signed him as a free agent in December 2010 to a seven-year, $142m contract. They hoped that the quirky dimensions of Fenway Park, their stadium, would be particularly well-suited to a lightning-fast left-handed batter with a penchant for hitting the ball into the gaps between opposing outfielders. It was not to be. During his first year in Boston, Mr Crawford had the worst season of his life. He has missed most of this year because of injuries, and is currently recovering from elbow surgery.

Mr González’s case is not nearly so bleak. The Red Sox gave up a valuable package of young players to get the hard-hitting first baseman in a trade in December 2010, and then signed him to a contract extension that would pay him $148m over seven years. He was fantastic during his first year in Boston, struggled at the start of 2012, and has since rebounded over the summer. The Red Sox were not eager to part with Mr González. But they were willing to include him in order to unload the contracts of Mr Beckett and Mr Crawford.

The Dodgers, meanwhile, have embarked on perhaps the greatest in-season shopping spree in baseball history. Even before their giant deal with Boston, they had bolstered their roster by trading for Hanley Ramírez, a power-hitting infielder; Shane Victorino, a speedy outfielder; and Joe Blanton, a middling starting pitcher. They also signed Matt Kemp, their star centre fielder, to an eight-year extension worth $160m. Los Angeles seems to be taking over the role previously occupied by the New York Yankees, and buying up all the talent they can find, with no regard for cost.

Conventional wisdom holds that Los Angeles got fleeced. According to Dan Szymborski, a statistical analyst, the market value of Mr González, Mr Beckett and Mr Crawford over the time period covered by their contracts is $76m less than what the Dodgers will have to pay them. If the prospects Los Angeles surrendered develop as the Red Sox hope, the Dodgers’ deficit will grow further still. Yet there may be a method to Los Angeles’ madness. And Boston could conceivably discover that they have been too clever for their own good.

There is no single strategic blueprint for making money in baseball. All clubs have a baseline income from television rights, transfers from the league’s central fund, and a bare minimum of attendance no matter how badly they play. They can then expect to earn additional money for each regular-season game they win, and for each round of the playoffs they advance to. But the weightings of these variables are different for each team. The figures used by observers such as Mr Szymborski are simple averages, which take no account of specific local market characteristics, or a team’s competitive position at a given point in time.

If the Red Sox were an average team, then their trade with the Dodgers would indeed have been a heist. But Boston is a high-revenue club, with one of baseball’s most demanding fan bases. The Red Sox have not had a losing record since 1997, and during the last decade they have begun every season as one of the favourites to win the title. That has led to a steady stream of sellout crowds, and to juicy subscriber fees for the New England Sports Network, the cable-television station that broadcasts Red Sox games and belongs to the same company that owns the team.

With this business model, Boston can ill afford to take a few years out of contention to “rebuild”, as typical fire-sale teams in small markets tend to do. The damage to the club’s brand and its fans’ loyalty would be immense, reducing its long-term revenues by far more than the $261m saved in salary. Thus, the question for the Red Sox is whether they can deploy that $261m to buy better players than Mr González, Mr Crawford and Mr Beckett.

In theory that should be possible, since the triumvirate’s fair market value is only around $185m. But in practice, the offseason free-agent market is illiquid: only a handful of top players are available in any given year, and many of them play positions where a potential buyer already has an incumbent. The 2012 free-agent class is full of question marks. Josh Hamilton has slumped after a hot start, and his history of substance and alcohol abuse makes him a big risk for a long-term deal. Zack Greinke has fared poorly since his trade to the Angels. And Nick Swisher and Aníbal Sánchez are nice complementary players, but not the cornerstones of a championship team. Would any of them be markedly better risks than simply hoping Boston’s underachievers returned to form?

Meanwhile, the Dodgers’ all-in move carries significant benefits that are not included in a simple dollars-per-win analysis. First, they get the players now, rather than having to wait for the season to end and the free-agent market to open. Los Angeles is currently in a very tight battle for a playoff spot. By adding so much talent, they have transformed themselves from a longshot for the post-season to a near shoo-in. For a team in America’s second-biggest media market, a playoff appearance in 2012 might well be worth $60m—almost the entire amount they are thought to be “overpaying” to their new acquisitions.

Moreover, the Dodgers have some serious fence-mending to do with their fans. From 2004 to 2012 they were owned by Frank McCourt, whose stewardship was nothing short of disastrous. Last year, as the salacious details of Mr McCourt’s messy divorce dominated the headlines and the team floundered on the field, the Dodgers’ attendance plummeted to 36,236 spectators a game—far below their average of 45,350 from 2004-09.

Moreover, their crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, have made a powerful bid to supplant the Dodgers as the area’s most beloved baseball team. Last winter the Angels signedAlbert Pujols, perhaps the game’s best player, to a giant ten-year, $254m contract. And in 2012 they have benefited from the emergence of Mike Trout, who recently made the cover of Sports Illustrated for his transcendent debut season. If the Dodgers fall behind the Angels in Los Angeles fans’ loyalty, their new owners—led by Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a former Los Angeles basketball star, and financed by Guggenheim Partners, a financial-services firm—will have no hope of recouping their $2.15 billion investment in the team, which was two and a half times the previous record price for an MLB club.

Having a passionate fan base is a double-edged sword for professional sports teams. On one hand, it allows a club to maximise its revenues when times are good. But on the other, it forces management to try to put a winner on the field no matter what—even if a team is at a point in its “success cycle” when its stars are in decline, and the optimal strategy is to tear down and rebuild.

A team like the Seattle Mariners—which led the AL in attendance from 2001-03 when the club was a contender, but now draws less than the league average while the team struggles—will have a hard time making a profit, because they have to spend money in order to make it. In contrast, the Chicago Cubs, whose fans show up to enjoy the summer sun at Wrigley Fieldregardless of how the team performs, have ranked fourth or fifth in the National League in attendance every year since 2004, while the team has oscillated between first and last place in its division. That is effectively a license to mint money. Elie Wiesel, an essayist, once wrote that “only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference.” When it comes to fans’ sensitivity to a team’s performance, MLB club owners would beg to differ.