Your conclusion is my position.Right ... which is why I didn't take either of the two offered five year periods. It's a false choice. The best a franchise can do is to attempt to build good teams year-after-year. Which gets back to the Kimbrel trade. I don't think anyone can argue it attempts to make the 2016 Red Sox better. It may look like it hurts the Sox in the long term if those traded prospects all develop into all-stars. But that's unlikely, and it's not like the Red Sox with their financial strength may not figure out how to get other good players.
Put another way, if trades help make the Red Sox a consistently very good team and they win a world series or two along the way, it matters not if they "lose trades".
But you have to judge trades using the knowledge available when the trade was made. Logan Allan may end up being a stud, but we didn't trade Logan Allan the Stud, we traded Logan Allan the guy who has maybe a 5% chance of being a stud five years from now.
I just wanna win, and with a little luck, this team is going to be the best team in the AL and we're going to have a tremendously fun summer and fall and we haven't had that since 2013 so we're due.