"Wily Mo Pena...makes sense now and for the future." - Red Sox GM Theo Epstein

"No good deed goes unpunished." - Bronson Arroyo

The city of Boston has a little less rock and soul now than it did last week. The rock disappeared when Bronson Arroyo took his guitar and headed off to Cincinnati. The soul of Red Sox management shrunk when they traded a guy who had taken a home-town discount and signed a three-year contract over the winter, rather than testing the waters of free-agency.

You could sense the red faces of Boston management after the successful bait-and-switch was completed Sunday night. Get a load of the following song and dance by Epstein at the Red Sox press conference announcing the trade. "Jed Hoyer (Assistant GM) was the one who finished the contract...with Bronson. He told Bronson at the time that signing such a contract came with no guarantees about being traded. The one thing he assured Bronson of was at the time there were no active trade discussions with Bronson...and I can assure you all that there was no handshake. There was no gentlemen's agreement...and I think all our players understand that without an express no-trade clause that we can't give them any guarantee that they won't be traded at a certain point."

I added the italics because those portions of the quote illustrate the Red Sox shell game. Arroyo signed his contract on January 19, 2006. Here's Epstein, again from his press conference: "We were talking to the Reds since the day [GM] Wayne [Krivsky] took the job." That day was February 8, 2006. From this we can now deduce the definition of a certain point - twenty days.

The point here is not to make Bronson Arroyo out to be an unwitting victim. He was represented by an agent, and presumably that agent is at fault for not insisting on a no-trade clause to go along with the money Arroyo was sacrificing by signing with the Sox. And he is still going to make in the neighborhood of $12 million over the next three years. Not a bad neighborhood, all things considered.

However, there is a right way and a wrong way to do business, and if you believe the idea of trading Arroyo came out of nowhere on February8, I've got a few bridges you might be interested in purchasing. You can say Arroyo should have known better, that this is no different than leaving a $100 bill on the front seat of your unlocked car, or a beautiful girl walking down the street alone in the worst neighborhood in the city, dressed in a miniskirt.

Yes, he probably should have known better than to take management at it's word when he was told there were no "active" trade discussions. But stealing is still stealing, rape is still rape, and unfair business practice is still unfair business practice.

Arroyo didn't actually make the statement I attributed to him at the top of this post, but he could have. This trade might come back to haunt the Boston Red Sox, and not just on the field. Management and ownership have done a marvelous job of constructing a contender, but at what cost?