It wasn’t an "Open For Business" sign, as his mentor Roland Hemond once hung on a table in a lobby at winter meetings long ago. But Dave Dombrowski sat in a hotel suite in Orlando, Florida, in December, pointed to a list of players in his jacket pocket, and said for all the world to hear that the Boston Red Sox were ready to make offseason deals.
“We know who we want,” Dombrowski said. “But you’re in touch with two things: the trade market and also the free-agency market. You don’t control those by yourself.”
A month later, the Red Sox still have all the same needs, namely a big hitter for the middle of the order, and the list in Dombrowski’s sport coat is getting smaller, albeit at a historically slow pace.