I guess I just have a little more faith in his acumen than that. He's made some mistakes but I think generally he's done a pretty good job, and made some very sharp moves.
I don't have all the facts, but I would assume there were some other teams in on Kimbrel.
I tend to think there was a bit more logic in DD's process than what you're suggesting.
I don't disagree. I just think the value of the 'reset' is a little overstated, I guess, because it implies that the team is going to utilize it to spend big all over again.
Sort of like going off the bottle for a week so you can go on a huge bender right after that.
There were plenty of chips left. Dave wasn't stopping till he cleaned out the farm, remember?
And of course Price's arm issues have nothing to do with this particular debate.
Personally I think we're a little hung up on the whole reset thing.
What is the basic premise behind resetting?
It's like this: get your tax rate back from 50% to 20% so you can spend big again and give yourself tax problems all over again!
I don't really buy this.
If I did buy it, then I would also buy that Ben acquired Bailey, Hanrahan and Melancon because they were 'name closers' at the time.
Of course it is.
But if you're not willing to give out any risky contracts, your team is probably going to suck.
And the teams are still making piles of money in spite of the bad contracts, so no one should feel sorry for them.
Let me answer it this way: I think John Henry knows what he's doing. If he thinks it's OK to invest XXX dollars in payroll in 2019 or any particular year, I think he's probably right and that he's basing it on fairly sound baseball and business reasons.
No argument that the players are the main beneficiaries.
However, I think you could certainly argue that the current system has been pretty damn good for the Red Sox franchise.
I don't think a GM of a big market team like Epstein, Cashman or DD would call it dumb. I think they would call it a necessary evil that has to be used judiciously, but that you will get burned on sometimes regardless. If I'm not mistaken Theo Epstein actually said something pretty close to that when he was here. And he's obviously decided to keep utilizing it for the Cubs.
If the Red Sox come in last place this year, some of it will fall on Dombrowski, yes.
The only exception to this, in my opinion, is if the downfall is clearly attributable to multiple injuries to key players such as what happened to us in 2006.