The reason I'm not quick to forgive Cherington for three failures out of four is that he had the third highest payroll in the game, and that brings with it certain expectations. When you have significant monetary advantage over 90% of the other teams out there, then yes, it's reasonable to expect a winning record every year at the very least. I understand that markets have changed, and free agency isn't nearly the guaranteed difference maker it used to be, but at the end of the day, Cherington's job was to put together a winning team, and he had the third most money of any GM to work with, and he failed 75% of the time. So I think it's fair to call 2013 a fluke. Sure, you could say that 4 years is too small a sample size to make judgments on, but in that case, you can't really judge any GM's four years, and that's just silly. If your response is to say that Cherington caught some unlucky breaks, then well, that's possible in some cases. But it's also his job to anticipate and plan for those breaks (which, it should be noted, is what he drew praise for in 2013: building depth, so that there were players to step in when starters got injured). The third richest team in baseball shouldn't have to rely on lucky breaks. We're not the A's.