How did it come to this? How did Cleveland get to the point of not only trading its magnetic, magnificent star shortstop, Francisco Lindor, but also a frontline veteran starter in Carlos Carrasco to a team from New York (not the Yankees, thankfully, but still pretty painful) for a four-player package (infielders Amed Rosario and Andrés Giménez, pitching prospect Josh Wolf and outfield prospect Isaiah Greene) that, to many fans, looks pretty thin?

Well, that’s a complicated question. But it’s definitely one being asked in Cleveland and elsewhere as people process this inevitable-but-emotional deal with the Mets.

• Lindor, Cookie sent to Mets in 6-player swap

Let’s just begin at the beginning and work our way to the conclusion.

1. The Lindor origin story.

You have to understand that Lindor’s guiding principle from the very beginning was to be not just a Major League player but the elite of the elite.

Lindor is a native of Puerto Rico and wears his heritage with great pride. But baseball is his driving force. His entire family uprooted and moved to the Orlando, Fla., area when he was 12 years old so that he could pursue better developmental opportunities and attract the eyes of more scouts. It was a major commitment rewarded when the Indians made him the eighth overall pick in the 2011 Draft. Lindor received a $2.9 million signing bonus.

2. The breakout.

After a runner-up Rookie of the Year finish in 2015 and a fantastic 2016 regular season that earned him down-ballot MVP support, Lindor’s true coming-out party was the 2016 postseason. The then-22-year-old’s energy, his grace in the field, his clutch hitting and, of course, his smile all made it seem like that stage was meant for him. And with his “Believeland” cleats and the lucky penny he carried around that had been sent to him by a young fan, a city already enamored with Lindor fell totally in love. Hard.

3. The attempt.

After Cleveland’s postseason run came agonizingly close to the city’s first World Series championship since 1948, the team made an attempt to lock up Lindor. In the early 1990s, the Indians franchise had basically invented the now-common practice of extending young players prior to their arbitration years, and Lindor was an obvious target.

At the time, Lindor had less than two years of service time and had yet to elevate his power performance (his slugging percentage in 2015-16 was a good-but-not-extraordinary .454). Within that context, the Tribe’s offer -- in the realm of $100 million (the number of years has never been public knowledge, but one could venture a guess of six or seven) -- appeared reasonable. For the sake of reference, in 2014, Mike Trout signed a six-year, $144 million pact with the Angels when he had just north of two years of service time.

Lindor turned that offer down. It was an extraordinary amount of money to leave on the table, but he had two aces in his back pocket -- the original signing bonus he had received in 2011, and, importantly, a newly inked pact with a team of a different sort.

You see, it wasn’t just Cleveland fans who fell in love with Lindor in October 2016. The whole baseball world was watching this sparkling star. New Balance, looking to expand its baseball business, made Lindor its face of baseball the following offseason at what can only be assumed was a lucrative price for the youngster.

4. The surge.

Long story short: Lindor exploded. From 2017-19, he wasn’t just a flashy fielder and consistent bat. The dude was blasting bullets all over the field. In those three seasons, he had a combined .514 slugging percentage with 237 extra-base hits. This was now one of the top five position players in the sport, and his decision to basically bet on himself was paying off handsomely.

5. The financials.

This is where our story devolves from just about Lindor to about baseball finances as a whole. If you’re here, if you’re reading this, if you’ve followed the game, you know that frustrating part of the story. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much a team loves a player and a player loves a team. As Patty Smyth and Don Henley taught us (in a song that came out a year before Lindor was born), “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough.”

It comes down to money. Lindor had spent his life developing himself into one of baseball’s elite players, and he had an eye on an elite price tag. He has earned it. And going into the 2020 season -- given the contracts that had been recently signed by Manny Machado (10 years, $300 million with the Padres), Bryce Harper (13 years, $330 million with the Phillies) and Trout (12 years, $430 million with the Angels) at relatively similar ages to Lindor -- it was fair to put a price tag between $300 million and $400 million on him.

Could the Indians pay Lindor that kind of price? The answer is an unqualified yes.

Where it gets hairy, though, is with the rest of the roster. Everybody has their own opinion on what a particular baseball team’s payroll ought to be. You can spark all kinds of argument here. But we do know this much: In this century, there has not been a World Series winner that had a single player occupy 25% of his team’s payroll. Only one World Series winner in that span (the 2003 Marlins, with Pudge Rodriguez) had a single player making as much as 20%.

So if Lindor was worth (one assumes) $30 million per year, it can be argued that a proper payroll to surround him with a championship-caliber roster is, at minimum, $150 million – or more than $15 million higher than the franchise-record payroll of $134.9 million in 2018, per Cot’s Contracts. After raising the payroll 29% between 2016 and 2017, the Tribe lowered it by 11% between 2018 and ’19 after successive quick exits from October and successive attendance ranks in MLB’s lower-third. The payroll has been lowered all the more since then.

You are free to bring your own opinions to the table, but Cleveland clearly wasn’t ready to commit to the kind of payroll it would likely take to build a viable contender around a player making, in all likelihood, $30 million or more in average annual value.

6. The last gasp.

The Indians, though, were willing to do a lesser deal. Last spring, around the time the Brewers inked MVP outfielder Christian Yelich to a nine-year, $215 million deal, the Indians discussed with Lindor the parameters of a deal that would have been north of $200 million. It was a non-starter.

7. The trade talks.

This fit within the broader context of Cleveland determining what to do about the approaching free agency of its signature star. With only two years of contractual control remaining with Lindor and little chance of an extension, the 2019-20 offseason was a sensible time for the team to deal Lindor. And indeed, trades were explored. But the Indians maintained a high price on Lindor, and it was not met.

By way of example, one player who was of particular interest to Cleveland at that time was young Dodgers infielder Gavin Lux, who had only recently made his Major League debut. The Dodgers, who would go on to make a blockbuster deal for Mookie Betts, had six full seasons of contractual control of Lux, their No. 1 prospect. The industry valuation of prospect talent has changed considerably in the last decade, and a fair industry valuation at that time was that six years of Lux was worth more than two of Lindor, despite Lindor being the established star that he is.

So this, too, was a non-starter. Cleveland wound up taking Lindor into his walk year.

8. The end.

Another long story short: Everything went off the rails. The coronavirus pandemic upended the baseball season and baseball finances. And by the looks of it, it upended Lindor, who has always fed off the energy of the crowd. Now, there was no crowd to watch Lindor have his worst season in 2020, with a .750 OPS that is 83 points below his career norm. The Indians were again a quick exit from October.

With so many teams scaling back their payrolls mid-pandemic, with Lindor only a year away from being a part of a free-agent class with a historically deep shortstop class (Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, Trevor Story and Javier Báez are all in the same position) and with Lindor’s 2020 performance not bowling anybody over, whatever leverage Cleveland might have had in Lindor trade talks this winter vanished. This was evident in a deal the Padres made for Cy Young runner-up Yu Darvish that cost them a package primarily revolving around teenage talent. The $57 million the Padres took on from the Cubs was a prevailing factor in the deal.

That’s where Carrasco enters the picture. He has quietly been one of the more reliable starting pitchers in baseball over the last seven seasons. He valiantly fought and beat leukemia to return to the rotation in 2020. He’s a beloved ballplayer on a very reasonable deal ($27 million over the next two seasons) at a position with scarce elite talent available in this winter’s free-agent class. Lindor’s surplus value in trade discussions was greatly impacted by the conditions, so Carrasco added to the surplus value the Indians had to offer.

With all that in mind, this ensuing package from the Mets is both underwhelming and fair, under the circumstances. The 22-year-old Giménez finished seventh in the NL Rookie of the Year voting with a breakout 2020 and is a strong defender and baserunner, but his hard-hit percentage was among the lowest in MLB. Giménez supplanted the 25-year-old Rosario as the Mets’ starting shortstop, as Rosario posted a disappointing .643 OPS last year. The two prospects in the deal -- Wolf and Greene -- are recent second-round picks who are far from the big leagues. MLB Pipeline ranked them ninth and 10th, respectively, in a Mets system that itself is ranked 20th in baseball.

Ultimately, Cleveland moved upwards of $50 million (the money due Carrasco, plus Lindor’s likely salary in his final round of arbitration) in the pandemic-altered market. There’s no getting around the fact that this was the driving force in the deal.

Team president Chris Antonetti said this will give Cleveland the flexibility to address a roster that now has the lowest projected payroll in MLB. We’ll have to see where that leads, as it is, ultimately, a major factor in this situation.

For now, the phrase “That’s it?” was undoubtedly uttered when this trade was announced. And yes, that’s it. This trade is the product of a player’s big desire, a team’s not-so-big budget and, to be sure, some awful luck for a Cleveland team that opted to ride its star for one more season only to run smack right into a global catastrophe.