Is there a bigger place than the multiverse?

The woman at work with the Red Sox lunchbox came over to me late Friday afternoon and said: “Beckett.  Waivers.  The Dodgers.”  The news was too important for verbs.

But wait, there’s more — Gonzalez!  Crawford!  Punto!  (But wait, we like Punto.)

It couldn’t possibly happen — something was bound to go wrong.  But as I type, Boston.com is reporting that the deal has been finalized.  The Red Sox save $275 million in contract obligations and clear out three players who had either worn out their welcome with the fans or just couldn’t play in Boston.  They’re now in another league, on another coast.  Good luck to them!

Who’d we get in return?  Mostly prospects.  But that doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that Ben Cherington has somehow begun a new story, in a season where all the stories had turned ugly.  Nothing is likely to happen for the rest of this season, but at least there’s something to talk about, something to look forward to.

Here is a funny, if somewhat forced, analogy from The New Yorker.

Leaving moral and political issues aside—this isn’t about right or wrong, but about models of disintegration—and admitting that the stakes of the great Pedro versus Clemens battles were lower than those between Khrushchev and Kennedy, the Red Sox of 2012 are, in fact, quite a bit like the U.S.S.R. in 1989. They tried to keep up financially, and intellectually, with their rival for many years. Glasnost has passed; the end is here.

Makes sense, sort of.  But what makes the writer think that the stakes of the Pedro versus Clemens battles were lower than those between Khrushchev and Kennedy?   Is he from the West Coast?

Gorbachev won a Nobel prize, right? Is there a Nobel prize for baseball general managers?  If so, Cherington gets my vote.

Ben Cherington, possible Nobel laureate