This Red Sox season hasn't been great. That's been clear for quite some time, although Red Sox management hasn't quite said that so explicitly.
On Friday, after the 4 p.m. trade deadline passed, GM Ben Cherington finally acknowledged the team's struggles this season.
"I think its incumbent upon us to make real improvement between now and Opening Day," Cherington said. "It's safe to say at the end of July, we were wrong at the beginning of the season as to what this team could do. And so we’ve got to figure out, we’ve been in the process of trying to figure out why and we’ve got to fix it and we’ve got to play better baseball."