Red Sox Reboot Creates Many Questions...

First and foremost for Giants fans -- as the NYP's Joel Sherman notes below -- are the Guggenheim / Magic Johnson led Dodgers primed to become the "Yankees West"? IT'S SHOWTIME!!!

from Seamheads.com
Red Sox Reboot Creates Many Questions | Seamheads.com:


"Boston Red Sox fans have agitated for the better part of the 2012 season for the team to facilitate major change as a way to address their disappointing play since the end of last year. News reports of a completed earth shattering trade suggest that the front office has finally heeded those wishes. Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Nick Punto have been jettisoned to the Los Angeles Dodgers for a raft of A- to B+ level prospects (Rubby De La Rosa, Jerry Sands, Allen Webster, and Ivan De Jesus) and veteran first baseman James Loney, making it the most significant trade in terms of money in baseball history. The Red Sox are expected to send back only a fraction of the remaining money owed to the departing players, making it a textbook salary dump. This trade is the equivalent of the Red Sox hitting the reset button and make their immediate and distant futures complete unknowns and fraught with questions."

'via Blog this'

from the New York Post:
http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/more_sports/bosox_dodgers_blockbuster_underscores_7w6YB9H9WXnXCmZ3eBMCBP

The Red Sox and Dodgers orchestrated the most sensational August trade in baseball history, an orgy of superstars and mega-salaries in which two flagship franchises defined their current identities with all the subtlety of an MMA fight.

The recalibrating Red Sox and go-for-it Dodgers opened themselves to both instant and long-term analysis off of this nine-player blockbuster inspired by cable TV money. Boston signed Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez to their current outsized deals, in large part, to feed the beast of NESN while the Dodgers accepted those contracts in near total because of a cable deal expected to be finalized this winter that could make the Yankees’ YES arrangement look like something the bunny-eared antenna dragged in.

.......

Which is the other area in which the Mets — and their fans — are losers here. Six months ago, the Mets and Dodgers were lumped in as big-city financial disasters; the Mets because of their owners’ relationship with Bernie Madoff and the Dodgers because of their miserly owner, Frank McCourt. But in late March, the Dodgers were sold for more than any other sports franchise ever, $2.15 billion, to the Guggenheim group. At that time an NL personnel chief told me, “Watch, they want to and will become Yankees West.”

And they have. The new ownership gave Andre Ethier a five-year, $85 million extension. They signed a Cuban they had not scouted in person, Yasiel Puig, to a $42 million contract. And since late July, in trades, they have added Hanley Ramirez, Shane Victorino, Joe Blanton, Brandon League, Randy Choate and now Gonzalez, Crawford, Beckett and Nick Punto. The price tag for all of that, as Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times reported, is $432 million — or $12 million more than McCourt bought the team for in 2004.