these are all Ben's guys, right? did they advocate hoarding prospects like Ben did?
Ben was run out because he hoarded a bit too much and signed the wrong FAs. All that said, some of his decisions look much better a year later, but that doesn't fly in Boston and we need to see what year 3 brings on Hanley, Rick.
What does "...that doesn't fly in Boston" mean? If you mean the average fan doesn't accept losing seasons, ever, well, that's irrelevant. I don't care if the average fan is too spoiled to accept that even the richest teams have to hit the reset button once in a while.
Ben Cherington's goal when he took over after Theo left was not to win immediately or every single year. His goal was to build a long term, sustainable core of players so that the team could go on a half decade run of playoff appearances, or more. He succeeded. It's a real shame that people still talk shit about him now that he's gone because the problem wasn't so much with his approach. It was with the fans and their spoiled "must win now" bullshit.
He took over a team that needed to be rebuilt. He started that rebuild in 2012 and set them on a course toward being a very good team right about when they got very good. The second half of 2012-the end of 2015 was always supposed to be a transition to the next great core of players. If things went really well, maybe they'd have been a playoff team in 2015 3 full years of breaking in young players and acquiring long term assets in trades and free agency isn't unreasonable.
Fortunately, they got lucky and cobbled together a roster full of career years and great chemistry that won a title in 2013. The unfortunate part of that title is that it convinced a big segment of the fanbase that the rebuild was over, only it wasn't. It really was still just getting underway.
The signings of Pablo and Hanley weren't permanent answers. When you are a team as rich as the Sox, you can afford to plug holes while you wait for prospects to mature by throwing $100M contracts around. I wrote a piece about this for the dot com last year, so I won't rehash the entire argument here, but the TL
R version is that
signings like that coincided with the expected ETAs of a bunch of prospects.
Did the signings all work out like 2013? Obviously no. Hanley still looks like a pretty good pick up, as far as free agent value goes. Panda has been almost entirely sunk cost so far, and I'm as inclined as anyone to write him and his contract off. You win some, you lose some. Porcello looks like a very savvy extension. Castillo was a big miss. Moncada was a big win. Eduardo was great value for a half season of Miller. Kelly was decent value in the Lackey trade, but has certainly come up short of hopes. Craig was a waste of a roster space. Overall, though, he had enough wins/good decisions to set up the 2016 club for big success. Dombrowski needed to plug in the last holes. Cherington may have been able to do that just as well, but we'll never know for sure.
No matter how you look at it, however, Bogaerts, Bradley, Betts, Swihart, Eduardo, Moncada, Shaw, Leon, Benintendi, and Porcello are all players with major league experience that Cherington had a big hand in acquiring and/or developing. And he's still got Sam Travis, Devers, Kopech, and Ockimey in the minors to hang his hat on. That's a ton of young talent for the long haul.
He made mistakes, but so does every GM. The end result, however, is undeniable. He built the core he was after. The only reason he's gone is that Dombrowski, someone with a long history with Henry, became available unexpectedly right after the team moved on from their previous president of baseball ops and Cherington chose to walk away rather than take a step back with his responsibilities. That might not have been the wisest decision, but it's certainly understandable. What we don't have here, however, is any evidence that his performance as GM "didn't fly in Boston."