Have You Seen Enough?

Life as a baseball fan can be a continual internal struggle. Let me clarify that. Life as a (statistics-loving) (Red Sox) baseball fan (during the Theo Epstein era) can be a continual internal struggle (between one's cool, sabermetric logic and one's passionate Sox-fan heart). The Sox go out and trade for Josh Beckett, giving up Hanley Ramirez and Anibal Sanchez, and there is both panic and exultation. Beckett starts the season with two improbably brilliant starts, and this is the greatest move Theo ever made. A little later on, Beckett is leading the league in home runs surrendered, Hanley is batting over .300 and stealing a base every other game, and Theo may have miscalculated (or did this trade happen during that week Theo was not officially with the Sox?) A short time after that, the Sox signed Beckett to a multi-year extension, and Red Sox nation braces itself- then Beckett pitches his best game of the year to that point, and everyone exhales. It's a high-tension, high-wire act, this business of trades, contracts, prospects, and the future.

This year has been more interesting than the last few years in Sox history from that perspective. It has been in this year that Theo and his crew have really begun to put their stamp on this team and the direction it is going. In previous years, in previous trades, Theo and the boys were very much playing with house money. In 2003 and 2004, the players they got rid of- Casey Fossum, Shea Hillenbrand, Freddy Sanchez- hell, even Nomar, were guys drafted and signed under Duquette's (or even Lou Gorman's) regimes. We gave Theo a wide berth when it came to the thought that "these aren't OUR type of player."

A few years and a few drafts into the Theo administration, we have a better chance to see what they want this team to be like. The trading deadline non-deals showed us pretty clearly what this team's philosophy is going to be. They have targeted specific players, and have decided they'd not overpay for them. They think that they know what value their own prospects have, and would only give them up in specific scenarios. The scenario is this- they seemed to be willing to trade top prospects (Jon Lester and Craig Hansen, for instance) for Roy Oswalt (via Andruw Jones) if it meant they had a chance to lock up Oswalt for three or four years, avoiding his free agency at the end of the year. Something in this trade clearly got derailed, but I think this is the right approach. I love the potential that Lester and Hansen bring, and love the fact that they're young and cheap, but when you could pencil in Roy Oswalt for 100+ starts in a Red Sox uniform, you can't turn away from that.

The big problem, and the one that was originally the point of this entry, is that you're guessing at the future. Did the Sox know that Freddy Sanchez had the potential to lead the league in hitting? Did we know that Anibal Sanchez would pitch like he has in Florida? Do we really see Josh Beckett as a future #1 starter? Is Coco Crisp worth the contract extention the Sox gave him? These are the questions that I struggle with- the head and the heart battling it out. Aside from the trades, the Sox made the previously unheard-of move of signing several guys to contract extensions in-season. This is something I hadn't expected from Theo.

Toward the end of Spring Training, the Sox gave Papi a four-year extension worth around $50 million. I can neither argue this one nor find fault- for a couple of years, Papi was literally the biggest bargain in the majors, and though he signed his contracts and didn't complain, locking him up, and paying a fair salary for his services is pretty much above doubt. He's done nothing so far to consider that anything other than a good move. The problem is, of course (as with Pedro and Varitek and other long-term deals) that it's not that the player has problem justifying the salary in the first or second year of the deal, but in the third and fourth.

The other two in-season signings did perplex me. The Sox signed both Josh Beckett and Coco Crisp to multi-year extensions- I believe three years each. About $30 million for Beckett, and I forget how much for Coco. Are these deals good or bad? Clearly, the Sox identified a number that would give them reasonable risk of collapse to weigh against the cost certainty of the budget and the production they expected from these guys. I just wish that I knew today if they were right about them. Either one of these guys could be a superstar. Either one could also fall off the face of the earth and collapse. It's really hard to judge with only a couple of months' worth of evidence with these guys in Sox uniforms. What's even harder, though, is waiting until the time when we have seen enough evidence.

Let us pray for patience on this. Lord, grant us the patience to wait a statistically-significant amount of time before we judge the contracts of Beckett and Crisp. Grant us this patience NOW!