Boston Red Sox can have it all
It's worth remembering, in the aftermath of last week's announcement that the Boston Red Sox were raising baseball's highest ticket prices an average of 4.8 percent in 2014, that they are not entering the offseason with their pockets turned inside out. Whatever decisions they make regarding free agents Jacoby Ellsbury, Mike Napoli and Brian McCann, to name three, will have nothing whatsoever to do with whether they can afford to pay them. Of course they can. They proved that three years ago, when they laid out just less than $300 million for two players, Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez. The whole industry is awash in cash -- there have been some estimates that revenues easily will exceed $8 billion in 2014 -- and baseball analyst Joe Sheehan notes that players received only roughly 43 percent of revenues in salary last season, less than the share given their peers in the NFL and NBA. The salaries will keep climbing. The Sox thought they could sign a 35-year-old ...