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Well, so much for paying Jon Lester. So much for extending John Lackey. So much for Jonny Gomes getting a chance to break the record for most pinch hit home runs  in a Red Sox uniform, a record set by the great Ted Williams. We’re having a fire!!!! …sale. This is not what I expected less than a year removed from the Red Sox winning the World Series, but I’m working my way through the stages of grief as the Red Sox attempts to rise from the ashes of this fire sale.

When I first started writing this article, only the news items about the Jon Lester (along with Jonny Gomes) to the Oakland Athletics and John Lackey to the St. Louis Cardinals trades had broken, but that wasn’t all. Relief pitcher Andrew Miller and shortstop Stephen Drew within the division, with Miller being dealt to the 1st place Baltimore Orioles for minor and Drew going to the New York Yankees, who will be in Boston to face the Red Sox this weekend. In addition, starting pitcher Jake Peavy was dealt to the San Francisco Giants last weekend, and former starting pitcher (recently demoted to the bullpen, much to his dismay) Felix Doubront was sent to the Chicago Cubs earlier this week. That’s seven players who contributed to the team that won the World Series ten months ago, including the pitchers who earned all four World Series wins (Lester won two games, Lackey and Doubront each won one). Lackey, Lester, Gomes, Peavy, and Miller are joining teams that will be playing in October in all likelihood, and while the Yankees are having their struggles this year, Drew is joining a team that will have a vacancy at the shortstop position to fill this winter for the first time in nearly 20 years, so it’s a good place for him to be. I thought the Red Sox would be making trades this summer, but I am pleasantly surprised by the return they got on the players they traded away.

In Yoenis Cespedes, the Red Sox acquired an All-Star power hitter, who was batting cleanup on the best team in baseball this season, and who has won the Home Run Derby each of the last two years. Cespedes is part of the major surge of Cuban-born talent we have seen emerge in Major League baseball in the last few years along with Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig, Cincinnati Reds closer Aroldis Chapman, and Chicago White Sox first baseman (and likely 2014 American League Rookie of the Year) Jose Abreu. The biggest issue I had with moving on from Jon Lester (besides deciding that a guy who has proven he can perform at the highest level at Fenway Park, in October) is that the return wouldn’t be worth it. I was afraid of giving away Lester for minor league prospects that would never be successful at the Major League level. Cespedes has proven it. He’s already there. He’s 28 years old, and still hasn’t reached his ceiling. I had no idea A’s GM Billy Beane would give up his team’s biggest power hitting threat in a year when they have a reach chance to win it all, but that’s exactly what he did. For all the books and movies written about Beane over the years, he is still a general manager who has been in the same city for over a decade, yet has never won the World Series. He needs to win it to truly validate his reputation. Other teams have caught up and used the player evaluation practices he made famous in Moneyball, the Red Sox being the most successful example, but he still hasn’t broken through. Beane is hoping a two month rental of Jon Lester can outweigh what Cespedes could bring to the batter’s box in the playoffs.

Oakland can now go into October with a pitching rotation of Lester, Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir, and Jeff Samardzija (acquired last month in a trade with the Cubs), which is just about as scary as the rotation the Detroit Tigers have, now that they have acquired David Price from the Tampa Bay Rays and not have the last three American League Cy Young Award winners (Price, Max Scherzer, and Justin Verlander) on their roster. It should make for a great playoffs, even without the Red Sox.

For Lackey, the Red Sox got bespectacled right-handed starting pitcher Joe Kelly and former All-Star outfielder Allen Craig. It’s amazing to see the exchanges of talent that have taken place between the two teams who faced off in the World Series last fall. I was impressed by Kelly in the playoffs last year, and Craig was a major reason why the Cardinals had been able to let Albert Pujols, who is right up there with Stan Musial and Bob Gibson on the list of all time Cardinal greats, walk in free agency and follow his departure with a trip to the NLCS in 2012 (before falling to the eventual champion San Francisco Giants) and a trip to the World Series (before falling to the eventual champion Boston Red Sox). Kelly was off to a great start this season before getting injured, and Craig’s production had taken a dip this season, but the acquisitions of these two players help the Red Sox going forward, adding offense to an outfield that has struggled mightily at the plate this season, and adding a quality starter to a rotation that saw its top two pitchers traded away this week. In my opinion, this is a huge haul for John Lackey, who asked for a trade as soon as the trade rumors for Jon Lester, and who would be playing for only $500,000 in 2015 and if he didn’t get an extension, he might decide to retire. Now, that’s St. Louis’ problem, but their a contender again this year, and they know as well as anyone how good Lackey can be in the playoffs, since they were on the losing end a year ago.

Before the trade deadline, the narrative was one of a wealthy, but overly thrifty baseball club squeezing every dollar out of a franchise southpaw, who they did not think was worth it. I was ready to hammer them if the return was not great enough, and I fully expected it to be. The Sox had made big deals at the deadline in the past under this ownership, but when they traded away Nomar Garciaparra and Manny Ramirez, they got pennies on the dollar in return. In both cases, they were not going to bring the star player back, and in Nomar’s case, they went on to win the World Series, an we were all okay with it.

I heard Mike Felger talking on 98.5 The Sports Hub before the deadline talking about the way fans view the Red Sox compared to the Patriots, and he brought up an interesting point. Whenever the Pats cut bait with a star player (like Wes Welker or Richard Seymour, for instance) fans call into the radio station defending the move and proclaiming their trust in Bill Belichick, and saying that it’s all part of his master plan. When the Red Sox decide to part ways with a guy like Lester, the fans panic and think the team has no idea what they are doing. The thing is, the Red Sox under John Henry and the Patriots under Robert Kraft have been the most successful franchises in their respective sports since buying their teams. After decades of futility, these two 20th Century punchlines have become models for how to win in baseball and football in the 21st Century, and you could argue that the Red Sox have actually been more successful. The Patriots never finished in last place after hiring Belichick, but the Red Sox have been a playoff team more often than not in a sport where it’s much harder to make the playoffs. We’re quick to second guess the Sox because of Bobby Valentine, because of the ten years Roger Clemens pitched after leaving Boston, because the Red Sox ownership will put their team’s logo on anything to sell it, but act like they have the spending power of the Oakland A’s or the Tampa Bay Rays when one of their home grown stars approaches the open market, and because the 86 years without a title began when the Red Sox traded the greatest baseball player of all time to the New York Yankees to finance a Broadway show.

More than anything, baseball is an easier sport to second guess, because I have more hands-on experience playing it as an organized sport (eight years of organized baseball to only one year of organized football), and a lot of people are the same way. Half the fun of watching baseball is trying to play skipper from the living room couch. I didn’t like the idea of dealing away Lester, and I’m still holding out hope that he’ll be back in Boston in 2015, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed by what the Red Sox pulled off this week.