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Admittedly, depending on pieces like Castillo, JBJ, Panda and Hanley doesn't look great. Having a guy going on 40 with a bum Achilles on his last year still be the center piece of whatever offense the Sox can produce is also not that appealing. But there are so many FA's left out there still looking for work....no telling where those guys are going to end up. If the O's don't have Davis, that is pretty much a different team for one. So far it looks like they have decided to wait it out and hope Davis comes back to them. For Davis's part, the O's offer seems to have hung out there as the best offer for a long time now. Gotta' think interested teams have already thought this through and are just not willing to best it.

The problem with Spier's piece is that it suggests a degree of organizational structure that is just short of rampant cross functionality when it fact, the Sox organization has often been plagued by rampant cross functionality and the overstepping of virtually all of those boundaries of which Sprier speaks so eloquently. Drove Theo first nuts and eventually out. It worked to some degree early in this ownership groups tenure, if you take the fans view that "works" means being competitive and winning championships. I think as much because they were so dedicated as a group to bringing a championship here and because Theo was at least two steps ahead of anywhere BC ever thought of being both as a pure GM and in Theo's unwillingness to just roll over and allow Larry to scratch his belly. Since then it has "worked" as a business because Larry is a "business man" of estimable talents who understands the business value of assets and how to manipulate them. They have a ball park that is a "destination" in baseball and they are also able to squeeze out more capacity as THEY see fit, always keeping the total capacity of the park in such a state that tickets are for the most part in demand and virtually always outstrips the supply. I always laugh when people talk about the BURDEN Fenway represents to this ownership group. Burden my butt end. They will be dragged out of this place kicking and screaming. But as it turns out, no truer words were ever spoken than those by JH in the last few years of the previous organizational structure. "LARRY RUNS THE RED SOX", spoken with enough emphasis so that you did not even have to be that bright to read between the lines.. Your darn right he did and Larry's favorite business environment is Marketing and Sales....Hence the concentration on bricks and bats instead of the field performance of the team. I believe Larry felt that this ownership group had given the fans two championships in short order and he, Larry, was going to make it his business to maximize their monetary return and increase the asset value of the business. JH for his part let Larry have his head....to a fault as it should be clear to us how easy Larry would have been to convince on the Panda and Hanley signings just as an example of how bad things can get when your defacto Pres of Baseball Ops really sees that function through the prism of the club Presidency. They own the Network that carries Sox baseball. Tom gets the NESN piece and has done a terrific job with that again from a business perspective even given the almost hokey nature of its production capabilities. The business aspects of the Sox is a thing of beauty and largely why if you could just separate out the defacto Pres of Baseball Ops function that Larry had from the more standard functions of the club President, Larry is the best Club President this club ever had...hands down...nobody else who had that job can even polish his shoes.

Once again JH chooses expediency. Larry gets to keep his title without having a functional role attached to it. What the heck is the CEO/Pres of the Sox doing mucking about with the Pawsox? Not only does Larry not have a functional role directly with the Sox, he no longer has a contract as JH let it expire at the end of the 2015 season. While there are all sorts of accepted formula for personnel management and the cutting the cord part of it, I have never seen anybody take a circuitous route more often than JH. I suspect the plan for Larry is for him to just fad into the sunset......eventually....whenever the heck that is! Remember we already know that Kennedy and DD report directly to JH. Where does that leave Larry functionally?

Here he would have been dropped so far down the totem pole that he would have had to look up to find the bottom. Would not have been surprised if they dropped him all the way to Dir. of Player Personnel which does not sound like much. But where you were one step away from the defacto Pres Baseball Ops and maybe considering yourself the heir apparent to that job once JH separated out Larry's role as he should have and eventually did, that Dir of Player Personnel job represents a heck of a drop. DD gets the aforementioned Larry role and becomes Pres of Baseball Ops in fact. Kennedy takes the other half of Larry's job and becomes Pres of the Organization. It was rumored right from the start that DD would hire his own GM and the max role BC is looking at is now at least two rungs below where he had hoped to go. That would have been a tough tough thing for anybody to swallow I would wager. The end would have been IMO far worse for BC if he had hung on in that situation. Ultimately he could easily have been driven so far down the totem pole as to be invisible and still could have found himself fired this time from a much less visible position. Remember how long BC has been with this one club..... Now he is backed that far down the ladder doing stuff he was doing 6-7 years before. In spite of my obvious disappointment in BC as Red Sox GM, this was the smart move for him to make. He has left open much more opportunity for himself doing this than if he had hung on in Boston IMO.

Kimmi is right....BC was not fired. But as I stated earlier that was a set up and we should at least credit BC for seeing it for what it was. Henry was going to leave that firing to DD or possibly Kennedy after some appropriate time had passed and BC knew it. He had no real place there....especially with Larry gone and he knew that too. We can't "Really" say BC's firing was premature. We could say that BC "jumped the gun" in deciding to cut the umbilical cord so soon after DD was hired. But I really don't think he did nor do I think it mattered. IMO, BC will have a job in baseball again. He has the one thing that people do value.....contacts.....he now has a working relationship of a sort with the other baseball execs. Now part of the reason they will take his calls is probably tied to having been fleeced by the Cards. But fine. At least he has their phone numbers and they will pick up the phone for him. I just don't think he will land something like a Pres Baseball Ops job (clearly what he would want next) unless it is with a very very small market franchise..... a team that simply can't make the kinds of funds he seems to have a problem understanding how to use effectively available to him. Some team that really can value BC's contacts around baseball without being as concerned that he will spend a fortune on potential assets that would be considered highly speculative at best. That would not resolve the issue of getting fleeced in trades though. Even a GM job would likely be with a team that had a very strong Pres Baseball Ops overseeing his activities.

Don't let him bother you. He doesn't bother me. I used to engage with him and even agree with him often. But notice not once does he offer any specific counter to any specific point other than the one about Fenway and doubles which Elk quickly stomped into the pavement where it belongs. There are BC apologists and Larry apologists all over the Internet. It is like THEY can't separate the good those guys did from the bad and then accuse everybody else of the same thing. Go look in a mirror. In reality most all of what BC did well he did in the position he was born for apparently. Not the GM role which he really only functioned in at Larry's good graces. That simply did not turn out to be the balancing act JH hoped it would be. I have never liked anything about the Apprentice Baseball Exec in training idea, not for a high profile job like Boston. At the end of the day, all you really have to look at is Larry's new address and BC's new address. I really don't think JH would have preferred Exec in training either. But JH is a strange duck when it comes to what it takes to earn his trust. Theo tired of waiting for JH to get Larry off his neck and even with all their water over the dam, JH STILL would not give Theo the job he and we needed for him to have. Theo had to go to Chicago to get the job. Given Larry's reaction to that I think Larry believes JH blames him for that. Heck for a period, Larry would not let Theo back in the building! Ultimately I think even when DD stumbles which is inevitable, it would always have taken somebody like DD that JH trusted in that position for its occupant to actually be able to do that job, for the organization to not be utterly chock full of cross functionality with people having responsibilities they did not want. Larry loved Marketing. He did not love IMO having the responsibility of Pres, Baseball Ops. People do what they love and can be easily manipulated when it comes to the rest. What we had was a concoction totally based IMO on JH's steadfast insistence in having people spending his money that he has developed great trust in over years of interaction and his lack of trust in both BC and Theo for that matter. JH has that particular malady to a fault IMO and it really didn't do him any good in the end. JH drew a relatively meaningless line in the sand regarding pitchers over the age of thirty...in the meantime, Larry/BC were spending like drunken sailors, double dipping on Hanley/Panda as if the Agons/Crawford double dip had never happened. Nice move guys. As for the 2013 effort.....Larry, a guy who hates the word bridge, called the 2013 team a bridge publicly just as the season was starting. I nearly fell off my chair. But that is how little Larry thought of the 2013 team going in. I would have thought Larry would have preferred a trip to the dentist to publicly calling any Red Sox team a bridge. That is what they thought they were doing. Its a great championship and I won't be returning the flag. But it is not repeatable and therefor does not represent a "strategy" or a "process". If you want to thank somebody for 2013, thank the players first and foremost, especially the vets on that team, especially the vets who really felt they had something to prove. While the things they wanted to prove were specific to them as individuals, they saw their path through that specific team and subjugated their roles to that team, something i don't expect anytime soon from Mr. Can't push himself away from the table, let me see if I can get hooked up for a date while in the game, 3rd baseman. Then when one of those guys from 2013 went down we had guys in the wings like XB and Iggy that were really on their last years as subs of any sort. It would have been nice for example if BC knew that his best closer was buried four deep on the depth chart or even had an inking. "Darn, now I have to depend on this guy Koji to close.....WHAT AM I GOING TO DO!!! A year later, XB was starting and Iggy was gone. But for the remainder of the that season and in the post season, the best option at Short for that team was Drew, an experienced defensive specialist right were he needed to be for post season play, which is high on pitching and run prevention. In fact, Drew flat outplayed Iggy in their direct post season match up with Iggy making more spectacular plays but in the end hurting the Tigers by not being able to make the tough but less spectacular play. Conversely nothing got past Drew in that post season. I think he booted one ball out of countless tough plays and was a rock for the whole post season. If you want to thank somebody for that championship thank the players and especially guys like Drew. As much as he is criticized here for his many failings, we don't win that crown without Drew playing Short. Every one of the "got something to prove to continue my playing career" guys were major contributors to that team's effort. So I am fully able to credit BC for the job he did as Director of Player Personnel, wish he was never pulled out of that job and think there is little question that if you could just have given LL Kennedy's job now, Larry would likely still be doing it. Larry should go down as the best President the organization ever had. Just not capable when it came to the way JH decided to jury rig Baseball Ops. If anything it cost us Theo and gave us BC. BC should go down as the best Director of Player Personnel we ever had but one of its worst GM's.

But that is the point.....toss that many X factors on one 25 man roster and you are just asking for it. There was close to nothing you could really rely upon as anything more than quicksand under your feet in the construction of the 2015 effort. Too many guys changing leagues, too may guys being exposed to pressures they had never seen before in their careers, too many outright dice rolls in the form of Hanley in left carrying around 20 more pounds of bulk he had purposefully put on (not too bright) while offering that he would "work" to become a LFer (sure you are Hanley), Panda signed here without a weight clause when SF wouldn't do that sounds like something that should not have been ignored. Anybody that thinks carrying around all that tonnage does not become more of an issue as the player ages has absconded with Alice's looking glass, Porcello suddenly thrust into the spotlight because we just had to extend him offering him what would likely have been every single greenback he could have expected to have attracted in a FA market best case scenario. Castillo....another mystery, dice role signing. You can claim that there are too many X factors but somebody put those X factors all on the same roster and did it without exercising much in the way of a rational thought process. Now we are stuck with a switch hitter that can no longer switch hit because his swing looks like he is wrapped in bungee cord when he bats from the Right Side, doomed to bat LHed. That means he becomes even more of a singles hitter in this ballpark, trundling around the bases trying to keep his pants from splitting. We have a guy that simply does not want to play anywhere in the field but we have to find someplace for him and HOPE. Oh by the way, now the aforementioned tubby gets to throw across the diamond to the guy that really does not want to play anywhere. Then there is Castillo, a guy for whom we just keep our fingers and toes crossed turns out to be any kind of baseball player AT ALL while he carts home his millions. Lets not even talk about Clark who we will conveniently forget still gets a check every week and now gets a mighty big check at that. This could only have been the concoction of bad management personnel shoehorned into a bad organizational structure. Thank God both the structure and the personnel are gone. The shame of it is that Larry might have been the Best President this Organization ever had...just not suited to also be the defacto Pres of Baseball Ops overseeing BC. BC for his part might have been the best Director of Player Personnel the organization ever had. But if he should have been the GM, JH would not have had to make Larry his baby sitter. Now we are strapped with boatloads of sunk cost in players going nowhere fast, with radioactive contracts that nobody will touch with a ten foot pole in an MLB that has slowly but surely been mitigating that good ole' fashioned big market team advantage to the point where it is just about no advantage at all. I think DD has done a terrific job with a bad BAD situation. I also think it will take more than one off season of work no matter how brilliant to correct this mess.

Another element of team building that uses the stats without using them to exclusion of everything else is building the team to the confines and characteristics of your own park. Do you guys really think the Royals excel in their own park because of some fan enthusiasm thing or "JUST BECAUSE". They are built to excel there. Conversely, only people who do not understand Fenway Park think it is a HR hitter's park. It is not. It is the best doubles park in all baseball bar none. In most of the last twenty years the Sox have been 1st in doubles and if not first 2nd and until last year there was only one exception in the last sixteen years. Last year we spent most of the time mired in the bottom half of baseball in doubles...just unheard of here and ultimately struggled up to 6th I think by the end. 6th might sound impressive to some. But in truth, 6th here is almost criminal.

Not trying to put words in the man's mouth but i think what Elk is saying is that a team that ONLY "looks good on paper" is tantamount to a team that is an assemblage of stats. IMO, it is just as bad a process as not paying any attention to the stats. A team that is an assemblage of stats alone is no team at all. You should not be surprised when a team like that is unable to develop any sort of meaningful offensive process to score runs. More often than not, you end up with each guy going to the plate to protect his own hind end with no rhyme nor reason to what they are doing....guys with no speed that end up hitting singles and clogging up the base paths....guys with at least some power up with nobody on, guys that represent a very low possibility of hitting one out constantly swinging for the fences...stuff like that....sound familiar??? But of course we will get the Fantasy crowd utterly convinced that they can do a GM or Pres Baseball Ops job using their success in Fantasy Leagues as proof positive of that.

You are right 700. Assembling players that look good on paper has a place in this world. It is called "Fantasy League Baseball"

For my part I almost never separate Larry from BC often referring to the period as the Larry/BC era. Larry had the job. He was the defacto Pres of Baseball Ops while holding the title of Pres of the Red Sox. However IMO though JH gave Larry the job as a check and balance on and to manage BC, Larry always saw the job through the prism of his Pres of the club title. His motivation was marketing. BC wants to bring two guys here that hold significant marketing potential, Larry would very likely sign off on those deals based on just about any argument BC would make. Poor John Henry, done in no matter how hard he tried to check BC. Porcello appears to me to be an instance where Larry let BC have his head and I tend to think Castillo was half Larry insisting that everybody was getting one of these guys from Cuba and half BC somehow convincing himself that this guy was a player. We missed Bobby Abreau. So in typical knee jerk reaction they went right after the very next guy available...Castillo. Never mind whether he stands any chance at all of being what Bobby ABreau was....he's the next guy from Cuba'. He's ours. Castillo playing the best he could play had no chance of ever being Abreau. He is not the same kind of player at all. So explain to me why you miss the guy you want and then go after a guy that is not even close to the same kind of player? Both Larry and BC are now out of their former jobs because Larry did not do the job JH wanted and BC was incapable of doing that job. JH would have stabbed himself with a dull knife before naming BC to the Pres Baseball Ops job. Credit BC for recognizing that not firing him outright was a set up. JH would have left DD to do that job after some period of time had lapsed and BC knew it. If there is one aspect of personnel management that JH has never handled well here it is firing somebody, choosing instead every circuitous route you can think of. As for the other parts of my post: We know Hanley lied to get Sox names on the line that was dotting We know that Panda's weight owns him now and we know SF would not sign a contract with him that did not include a weight clause We know Porcello did not need to be extended when he was and that he was extended for much more money than was necessary We know Clark has been a complete bust and will now start making big money this year and next with Kelly receiving strong consideration for the pen We know Castillo can't hit breaking balls at age 29. If you can't hit breaking balls in this league at age 29, you are usually on the way out unless you are one of the greatest Fast Ball hitting power hitter's playing. Any chance of Castillo being that???? If it were not for his ridiculous contract, Castillo would very likely be on the way out instead of logging time as another of our OF projects.

The Larry/BC regime was a stark staring mess. BC never had JH's confidence and Larry simply saw his defacto Pres of Baseball Ops position as a subset of his President of the Sox role and did the job that way. Neither was responsible for 2013. By Larry's own admission, they had no idea that the 2013 team had that sort of potential and they had not built it for that purpose. It was in their eyes the very definition of a bridge and no less authority than Larry called it that publicly. Serendipity built that championship...entirely and completely unrepeatable by that route. It is virtually impossible to repeat a combination of vets each individually with something to prove with young guys about to burst on MLB, pretty solid pitching and getting 4 deep into closers before you stumble upon the best guy you had [but didn't know it] right from the start. As for last year's mess......Hanley bamboozled BC to get the job...lied through his teeth in fact and fanboy handed over $20m of JH's money for the privilege. Then went on to call Hanley's efforts Heroic. Fanboys don't get much responsibility in MLB Front Offices. Panda was signed without a weight clause...something SF was not willing to do and now we have a player that is literally owned by his weight issues. Many of us saw this as soon as he was signed but hoped he would not be owned by the issue for at least a couple of years....instead of right from year 1. There was no earthly reason to extend Porcello when we did for what we did. We literally gave him more money than he could have ever hoped to have secured in FA. Lets not forget Castillo, the Mr. potential to be a JAG at best being paid millions of $$. Then there is getting fleeced by the Cards who clearly knew more about the players they were trading to us than we did. No folks.....it will IMO be a long long time before somebody in MLB gives BC a job where he is making major decisions involving millions of $$. BC should have never risen above Director of Player Personnel here.

Well I would think that if that was the thought process, they would have done it by now. Vaz was certainly a question before the winter meetings and he is a question today. Not much has changed and we are now past the off season period that is mostly trade biased. I actually would not mind a trade involving Swihart that brought a solid starter here now as long as his deal went through 2018. Lets face it, MLB likes Swihart. So if the Sox were thinking that way, it would seem it would have been done during the trade biased part of the off season IMO. Hanigan/Leon is even weaker offensively than Vaz/Hanigan if Vaz is healthy and it is certainly weaker than Swihart/Hanigan. If you really do decide to sort of ignore the whole Vaz health question, the only rational I can find for not having moved on Swihart is that the Sox themselves fear that for 2016 they are right on the edge of being irrelevant in the division offensively already with Hanigan/Leon v Swihart/Hanigan possibly being the straw that breaks that particular camel's back. I don't know how many times we have to be hit over the head with our offensive inadequacies in this division to finally realize that this is not a strong offense relative to the other division rivals. Were it not for the ridiculous band box the Yankees play in, I would say the Sox have without doubt caught the 2016 Yanks in that regard but have really not changed that particular dynamic to the other division rivals compared to where they were in 2015. It is not a power lineup and it is not a speed lineup. It is ....a tweener. For example, without question the most interesting aspect of the 2015 offense occurred during that 3-4 week period when JBJ was hitting. We had JBJ batting 8th but mostly 9th in front of Mookie batting lead off and for that period they were right in the middle of everything the Sox were doing offensively. But when the most interesting thing about your offense is your unreliable and mainly ineffective 9 hitter batting in front of your lead off hitter, you have got problems! But as you have probably guessed, I would take interesting and fun to watch in 2016 as long as it: a) does not include embarrassing keeps them on track to actually be a serious contender beyond a WC spot for 2017/2018 But then again, I am enough of a baseball junkie that I can make an interesting season out of things like seeing how many baseballs clank off of Panda's integrated chest protector or conversely, how much I can correlate lost weight to improved Panda play...how many times Castillo makes plays with his back to the infield vs the number of times he Ole's the ball with his back facing the wall and whether that arm of his makes up for some of his other issues, how many times Hanley forgets how many outs there are, or whether JBJ hits for more than 3 weeks....etc etc. It does not take much for me to be totally engrossed in the season where the Sox are concerned.

People have got to give DD a chance for crying out loud. He has already had a better off season than we have had in awhile. Surely he is gambling that Panda and Hanley can recover just enough value to make something possible on one or the other and DD has done this already as long as the player gives him just anything at all to work with. Don't kid yourself. JH knows DD has done this before and he is looking for DD to do it again at some point probably between now and 2017-2018. For Panda it is all about the weight. He has finally reached a point where it owns him. But that also means that if he can keep enough of it off, he will play better again..... Hanley only needs to show something at 1st to open up both leagues as candidates in his case. If not, he will IMO be much tougher to move than Panda. Even if the Sox eventually end up paying big chunks of their salaries, they are making so much that it still would amount to big chunks coming off the books. Castillo is the guy that may not be movable at all and Clark may just never come back to anything going into years where he is about to make serious coin. DD has already likely done enough to pull the team out of the basement. They don't have to be contending for a WS in 2016 to be an interesting, fun team to watch. There is plenty for real baseball fans to enjoy at this point. People who have to see the team legitimately contending for a WS to enjoy their home team are not baseball fans to me. They have to avoid being embarrassing and they have to be on a recognizable path to real contention. Embarrassing does not fly here and they have been that for two years running. Frankly while we see many "forum" comments about what the Sox must do, they have proven time and time again that they can create enough fan interest to keep the rating up and keep the park drawing without being on a path to a championship. Any Sox fan worth his salt has already got to be hooked by the various tasks and challenges they have before them and the questions that must be answered in 2016.

They will go over but they will also get back under again. Nobody is stupid enough to stay above for multiple years and eat that tax hit. DD needs to have some things fall his way and some players rebuild some value in 2016. He has done this before if the player just gives him a little room to work. He has nothing to work with off of 2015 performances.

I don't think there is much of any chance of either Panda or Hanley going anyplace this year. Maybe one or the other or both builds back some value through 2016 and gives DD a little room to work with before 2017. They have to rebuild some value though. Neither player is playing anywhere near a place that gives DD somewhere to go with them.

You are right...it is really shallow in 2017. Probably stuck with a trade for 2017. Just not sure there is really much of interest of the remaining FA this year that would be better than hoping one of the young guys establishes himself for 2017 or one of the remaining crop of "emergings" from 2015, like Porcello or Kelly make the grade. If DD does see another guy worth bringing in to fill the #2 rotation spot for 2016 great...But what remains from this crop just looks like overpays to duplicate the sort of potential we already have, not solid major market contender #2 timber. In part that is why I think going after one of these guys just digs a deeper financial hole without really buying anything. One of the question marks for 2016 is the whole Swihart/Vaz thing. While it does not look like it pans out before the start of the 2016 season, surely it becomes quite a bit less of a mystery before 2017. So maybe DD squeezes some money from Panda/Hanley and together with the trade value of a package around Swihart..... presto......a rotation 2!

I think a genuine problem on the money end is that JH is already over the luxury tax cap which is fine...for one year. But stretch that to two and you are really throwing money down a rat hole. They have to get back under again for 2017. That says to me, that the real gamble DD is taking is a hope and prayer that either or both of Hanley and Panda reestablish some value for him to work with allowing him to get out from under some part of their money by 2017 and hopefully set up the team for a serious run in 2017 and 2018. If that gamble does not pay off, every dollar they spend more at this point for 2016, makes it harder to get back under for 2017. I don't see this year as the year to try to make more of this team than it can be. Too many holes, too many question marks, too much money invested in assets that are not only mediocre at best but that must play. That is sort of a rotten combination. Can't play very well but must play. We have at least three spots like that in the starting nine and possible four if JBJ never can hit for more than three weeks at a time. Then we have Ortiz on his victory lap obviously very concerned about not blowing the Achilles in his last year which almost did blow on him the end of last year plus a lame duck manager on a team with proven lack of appreciation for lame duck managers. While securing TL's services by overpaying him is a brilliant move, it is really only brilliant if the Sox are pretty sure they are going to dispense with Farrell at some point during the 2016 season. Lame duck status is bad enough with this team....lame duck status with a guy sitting next to him that some team members will clearly prefer to have managing is another order of magnitude worse. A team with some guys preferring the "other guy" as manager might be pretty difficult for any manager to get to stay focused over the long grind of the 162. Their focus might wander quite a bit over the first 62 if they get off to the kinds of season starts we have seen lately. As for Swihart, he really can't go anywhere without Vaz being ready to play.

I keep hearing a few pundits saying that "DD can't be done". But the money is basically done I think. So I am not sure what magic DD has to coax a better rotation 2 in here at least this year. Basically, I think he is done as well. Instead of last year's "we are all Aces" it almost seems like this year's theme is "we are all 2's" when in fact after Price we have our usual abundance of 4's and 5's and maybe a 3 in the bunch. Some are all over him for not having offed either Panda or Hanley but I would be willing to bet he tried and nobody wants either one of them.

Well Greinke, Gallardo, Zimmerman, Iwakuma, Anderson. Chen, Lackey, Sumardzija, Kennedy and Estrada all received QO's. So going after any of them will this year cost the Sox a pretty low draft pick. There are plenty left but a lot of the quality just left the building unless DD is willing to give up the pick. Seriously doubt he will want to do that having just given up four guys from the system. Of course we could bring in Colon or Arroyo or how about Brandon Beachy. Do we really want to look at guys that didn't even do much in the NL, never mind the AL or guys that are old as dirt? Not sure what Doug Fister is doing these days. Happ might be interesting but we likely don't like the looks of his AL stats. With the QO guys costing you the pick I would guess Buehrle is the most interesting of the guys that are left other than Cueto and Price. The rest of it is a bunch of been there done that. i really don't think we want to do a bunch of Porcello deals. Bunch of names occupying a bunch of lines on a sheet of paper really does mean that much to a team that sort of did that already. So I think OUR list is somewhat shorter than the general list of FA's. Guys available that might actually help this team without adding a bunch more potential high risk, sunk cost are not that many.

As for position players being set. Sure they are set...that is the problem. Panda at 3rd...be still my heart. The no hit twins at corner outfield. That will be fun. Then the creme de la creme....Hanley at 1st. Yup that team is going straight to the top of the division in 2016.

Swihart possibly....JBJ no. Putting JBJ at the middle of a deal does not get you to those guys, Grey, Sales etc. We probably can't trade Swihart at this point even if we wanted to do that. Plus this is the trade season...now...followed by the FA season. Trades will slow later on as the FA part of the off season heats up....especially with so many FA bodies out there for teams to choose from. They will for the most part want to get trades behind them and concentrate on the FA's. In our case, we have a pretty darned low draft pick on the line for us. So I don't see all those FA's as guys DD will likely be interested in. So what would we be saying if DD got nothing done during the trade heavy part of the off season. We would be going wild that's what. Never happy...we have already started with whatever DD does its wrong.....unbelievable. He makes a move...its wrong..He does not make a move.... its wrong. Well there is no doubt in my mind that DD could not afford to stand pat and hope something fell his way later this off season. You actually want him to wait around and hope "things change". Holy Cow!!!

I think you guys are both right in your own ways. I think ultimately we will find that DD is on more of a 2-3 year plan but is using trades like Kimbrel to prime the pump. If for example he does a rental for 2016 at enormous cost in either players or cash I will be surprised and disappointed. That does not mean he won't bring somebody in for one year. i just don't think it will anybody with a cost attached that we would notice. Hill for what would have been $5m plus for example.....no way. We have made so many mistakes the last couple years and you just can't wash them through and out overnight. $5m with the potential for a complete flop attached to it is not something we can afford right now. Myself I would be satisfied with a return to respectability for 2016....IMO as mentioned earlier we were awful in 2014 but embarrassing in 2015. What does respectability means in 2016 ranking .....maybe an honest run at a Wild Card spot and possibly an earlier than usual exit from the post season if we get there. 2017, maybe an honest run at the division, a possible division win, but a shoe in Wild Card and maybe a more interesting post season....potentially everything falls into place (meaning in this case almost falls into our laps) and we do in fact win it all. Then a real deal shot to win it all in 2018....maybe the consensus favorite going into 2018 to win it all, a division win by enough games to set up for the post season and a real shot at winning the crown. In my opinion, DD will have to have rebuild our pitching assets including a more potent pen, will have to by then have removed both Panda and Hanley replacing them with productive if not exciting assets. He will have to have flushed through these OF projects we seem to have been hung up on fooling with the last few years...some worthwhile, some not so worthwhile. That is one of those things we can't change now but have to flush through.....just like we have to flush through Panda/Hanley. We will have to have made our Swihart/Vaz decision along the way. As a consequence the team should become more athletic, offing the crummy defenders along the way and end up with a more solid pitching asset. ....DD has to do it while keeping a watchful eye on the age clock ticking for some players. If DD goes this way the team may not exhibit the traditional power base it has had. But in truth, Fenway is NOT the best HR park in baseball nor is it close to the best. It is the best doubles park in baseball bar none and if I was configuring a team it would be a team that would try to hit doubles more than a team that tried to hit HR's. DD has to make these changes with nary a mistake made as well as the organization has made about 5 years worth of mistakes in 2. He has little wiggle room. I think that is one reason why he was willing to overpay for Kimbrel. I think DD is not likely willing to accept much risk of a player turning out to be an outright flop. Outright flops have been far too much a possibility in recent years and sure enough we have had outright flops strapping the organization with sunk cost making little to no contribution. Not to beat a dead horse but just count up the money we have tied up in negative WAR.....while WAR is far from perfect if you look across your organization and find that you have paid a fortune for a bunch of negative WAR, you better take note. So I think that is the plan DD envisions and I think he can do it. I hope it is the plan he envisions. He will have to be almost flawless in his executions and hope the injury bug is kind to him.

Those doors people might be worried DD closed were already closed. There is no way we were going to pull a Sale or a Grey or any of the Mets young starters in here without giving up players nobody wants to give up. As for overpaying....DD is trying to minimize downside risk because the last two doo-doo birds ate up all the downside risk we had to give. DD has very little wiggle room here. So he overpaid.....what.... did we expect to get out of this mess painlessly?

We were bad in 2014 and embarrassing in 2015. I don't see us making it all the way back to WS contention in one year but you can hardly blame Sox nation for being mad. Nobody is interested in seeing this team embarrassed. Embarrassing is why Larry was on the way out anyway and why BC was really not left an option regardless of how that might have looked. The problem is not that there aren't lots of FA pitchers out there...but there are few that will not cost you the 12th pick in the draft. DD would be an absolute idiot to give up that pick for the bulk of the FA pitchers out there. Cueto does not cost you that pick....Price does not cost you that pick.