That's a weird thing on Swisher. He's been pretty clutch in the regular season and horrendous in the postseason. No explanation for something like that except the mental factor.
Here's a stat nugget I dug up on Napoli. In 238 AB's in the 5 AL East parks he has 19 HR's, which is one per 12.5 AB's, which is huge of course. And his worst ratio, 2 HR's in 50 AB's at Camden Yards, is still decent.
The 2.6 billion and 100 million figures represent the assets that Henry's firm was managing for investors. Henry himself still has a net worth of 1.5 billion as of Sept/12 per Forbes magazine.
I understand the doubts as well and I agree that the grade is incomplete at this point. I was thinking about this today - to this point the Red Sox still haven't made a single big dollar acquisition since Cherington came on as GM. That should be changing very soon.
Yes, transitioning from the NL to the AL can be deadly for a lot of pitchers. Dempster posted a 5.09 ERA with the Rangers after a 2.25 ERA this year with the Cubs. Oswalt's AL debut resulted in a 5.80 ERA compared to a career 3.21 mark in the NL.
Ben went as far as saying the Sox would probably have one of the largest payrolls in baseball again. That would have to be significantly more than 110 million. I think it was the Sox FO sending a clear message to the fans that they would be making major additions. Similar to what Lucchino did before the 2011 season, just before the AGon and Crawford moves.
Maybe I'm reading too much in, but I think the Sox FO knows that a vastly reduced payroll in 2013 just isn't going to fly with the fans.
Ben has already made a clear statement that the Red Sox will have a large payroll, meaning they will make some additions, and he has also stated that pitching will be a top priority.
It's a 50% raise for Kuroda. Add that to Guthrie's $25 million deal and the message is loud and clear: the price of pitching continues to have a high rate of inflation.
Cabrera has made less than $13 million in his career before this contract. Pretty hard to turn down $16 million. In the real world that's actually a fair amount of money.