I'm not sure how i feel about this. On the one hand, you always have to be moving forward, and knowing when you've messed up and rectifying it is important.
On the other, Gonzalez is a true talent, and will realistically not be replaced. I'd much rather have avoided the absolutely unnecessary extension for Beckett, Lackey signing, and crawford signing.
Additionally, odds are poor that crawford will earn his future contract, but odds are also poor that he is as bad as these last two years. The past with crawford is already sunk, so i'm not sure moving Gonzo to get rid of crawford is that smart.
I also don't trust this management going forward. The smear job on Tito was deplorable; he won 2 world series. If managment is going to ship out players just to appease their guy in valentine, that's a recipe for disaster. It seems like they knew they had problem players, canned tito to try to change the players, players stayed the same, so the then canned the players to keep the new manager. Why didn't they just can the players in the first place?
And, they haven't been that bad this year. They are 30-38 with a +27 run differential, so they 'should' be well over .500. And with better injury luck next year, this same team would potentially be a contender.
Part of the problem is the completely irrational sense the sox seem to have that if they chop money off their payroll from the previous season, they MUST offer that much money, per year, for multiple years on a new guy...then regretting it a year later. Why do this? Why spend money just for the sake of it?
It seems like the lackey year, the sox wanted a pitcher and had a few millions less in payroll than the previous year, so they had to fill that salary slot with a multi-year deal. Same for crawford. Why not just roll that salary over until someone worthwhile came up? It sucks having this team hamstrung by completely unnecessary long term deals that seem to be signed just because the team feels they need to replace salary as soon as it comes off the books with longer deals.
Therefore, I just don't trust what they will do this offseason. I could totally see this team thinking "hey, we shaved 70 million per year off the payroll; we need to replace that with new 70 million in 2013 that will all be signed longterm, then we'll be hamstrung in 2014-2016 with non-star talent!!
I really hope this team actually adopts a long term view: get good young talent, properly rate it, fill in with short term buy-low vets, only commit long term to true legit stars, and keep the flexibility to lock their own talent up early with team-friendly/player security type contracts. In other words, become the Rays but with the money to smartly keep the true stars and add 1-2 major star FAs on top. (Imagine if the rays, as they existed, could have just bought Gonzo on the FA market?)