Plympton91 said:
Even if they weren't, why would you judge a signing by one year? Didn't John Lackey teach us that is the wrong way to do things? Anybody who isn't ready to write off Sandoval and Ramirez and Porcello have to make the same argument, don't they? That one bad year doesn't make a bad contract?
And, I already won this debate in 2014. The whole of the argument was that the Red Sox didn't have a good enough outfield to compete, Ellsbury was the only one available to fill that spot, and that a) Jackie Bradley wasn't ready and b) even if he was ready they had no depth to cover an injury anywhere else. I was right then, and I'm right now.
The first bolded (by me) sentence and the entire second paragraph seem contradictory to me. You can't judge a signing by one year, and yet you are using the first year of Ellsbury's contract to insist that you were right. I, and I feel most others here, disagree, as the prevailing wisdom at the time was that he would not be worth the entirety of his contract and it would become quite the albatross by the end. The fact that it's already looking that way, two years into the deal, would seem to reinforce the idea that it was not a good signing.
Look, I understand your thought process on this (I think).
1) You felt that going into 2014, the Red Sox did not have the outfielders to be a competitive team and were putting all their eggs in one basket by relying on JBJ and Grady Sizemore
2) You felt that the best way to fix this problem was to sign Ellsbury
3) You believe that even if the Ellsbury signing ends up being a poor one in the long-term, the fact that it keeps them competitive on a yearly basis, and avoids the "punting" of a year as you put it, is worth it.
4) Subsequent arguments that this signing is currently and will likely continue to be an albatross are met with remarks of "well, the money they've saved by not signing Ellsbury was wasted anyway on Porcello/Sandoval/fill in the blank"
On point 1, I agree with you. On point 2 and 3 I don't, because I think you shouldn't sign contracts that you feel going in, as most of us did, are going to be pretty bad contracts by the end for the sole purpose of remaining competitive on a yearly basis, as that isn't a sustainable model for building a team. And as to point 4, just because they didn't spend their money as well as they could have doesn't really mean that the solution to that was to not spend their money as well as they could have.
Of course, it's also entirely possible that I don't understand your thought process and subsequently mischaracterized your argument. If so, my bad.