Hell frozen solid

Unless Bryan Morris pans out — then it becomes good, right?

Hindsight, my friend. It’s not every day someone can trade a 4 WAR player for two top 100 prospects. Too bad they didn’t work out. Yet.

Manny had done mini-shutdowns before and the Red Sox managed to patch things up and press on. Presumably they would have attempted to do so again if the Bay deal had fallen through because the Pirates insisted on, oh, Jon Lester or someone like that.

The idea that the Red Sox had no leverage and HAD to deal Manny regardless of the return is not correct.

beyond the “of-course-i-know-and-everyone-could-see-it” variety. You’ve made points that Vlad has countered with links and info. I’m one of those who believes that the FO deserves a lot of criticism for how that trade turned out, but yours are the kind of bad arguments that make constructive (and intelligent) criticism hard to work on.

The last line about nothing changing the opinion probably applies to you more than anyone else… LaRoche seemed to do plenty good all of 2009, and he was pretty certainly the highest rated prospect we could have gotten back.

Last sentence(s) not gaining you any respect from me. Don’t label people. If you’d paid attention you’d know that Vlad has been very critical of the front office this year. But I guess for you to learn something you’d actually have to shut your mouth and open your mind and eyes. As for your opinions, I too think you are wrong about Laroche but I certainly understand your position. See how easy that is. I can respect your opinion without labeling you. Try it some time.
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…nobody here knows who was offered…

We know the offers that were reported in the media. We were approached by Florida, who (sensibly) didn’t want to trade Mike Stanton as part of a three-way deal with Boston. We were approached by Tampa, whose best reported offer was Niemann and Brignac, neither of whom has done anything good this year. Earlier in the year, there had been some contact with the Braves, who were offering guys like Lillibridge and Brandon Jones. None of those deals includes a future superstar.

…nobody here knows…whether those options would have been different in the offseason…

No, but we can make a fairly educated guess based on circumstance. The trade value of quality veterans tends to decrease as the amount of time they are under team control decreases, and it’s just simple economics that an increased supply of equivalent commodities tends to drive down the value of a commodity on the market. Waiting until the offseason in the hope of getting a better offer would have meant bucking both factors: Bay would have provided less value to a team trading for him (since he spent the second half of 2008 in our uniform rather than theirs), and there would have been a larger number of Bay-caliber players available, both as free agents and in trade by formerly-contending clubs who would not have been willing to move a quality bat in the middle of a pennant race.

if your point is that we could not have done better than I don’t know what to tell you….and nothing is going to change your opinion(unless of course it exconerates the FO of any responsibility for a bad trade)

It’s not about exonerating the FO. It’s about correctly determining the reasons that the trade didn’t work out for us, to avoid making a similar mistake in the future. If you incorrectly believe that our mistake was in not asking for enough perceived value in the deal, our future demands are going to be unrealistic and we’re going to have trouble making deals in the future. Whereas if you take the correct view that this was mostly an error of player evaluation (i.e. the players in the trade were valued too highly at the time we traded for them), that’s something that can potentially be corrected to our benefit by making personnel changes within the scouting department or using different analytical techniques.