In his first days as the president of the Boston Red Sox, Dave Dombrowski met with the most influential people at Fenway Park to get a better sense of the organization he was inheriting. More than his commanding presence or savoir-faire, what struck some of the highest ranking in the organization was the bluntness with which Dombrowski asked a simple question.

How could he convince ownership to let him sign David Price?

Dombrowski believes in the power of great starting pitching, and he'd seen the magic of the 30-year-old Price first-hand after trading for him last year when running the Detroit Tigers. Tasked with retooling the Red Sox after consecutive last-place finishes in the American League East, Dombrowski cringed at a rotation in desperate need of frontline starting pitching and pegged a hard-throwing, 6-foot-6 left-hander with consummate command and even better clubhouse presence as the archetypal fit.

Convincing Red Sox ownership to pony up when it refused to go anywhere near nine figures for the homegrown, World Series-winning, cancer-surviving Jon Lester barely a year earlier would be Dombrowski's greatest task in theory. Reality, of course, gave us this truth: The Red Sox didn't hire Dombrowski to be like Andrew Friedman and bring principles like surplus value and efficiency to the Red Sox. They brought him in to make big, bold, brash maneuvers, and tightening his purse strings would go against the entire rationale behind jettisoning Ben Cherington for Dombrowski.

View photos David Price was traded from the Tigers to the Blue Jays midway through last season. (AP) More

And so in the end, when Dombrowski presented Price with the largest contract ever handed to a pitcher, and when Price agreed to it Tuesday and stayed in his AL East stomping grounds where he'd turned into a star, Dombrowski's query a couple months earlier seemed in hindsight almost like a temperature-taker instead of a genuine question seeking an answer.

How could he convince ownership to let him sign David Price? The answer, it turned out, was by being Dave Dombrowski. And this is something that comes with its benefits, as it seemed to Tuesday when Price settled on the Red Sox's seven-year, $217 million deal with an opt-out clause after the third season and no deferred money – a contract $2 million richer than Clayton Kershaw's and, at $31 million a year, tied with old teammate Miguel Cabrera for the biggest per annum. It also weds the Red Sox to a starting pitcher through his 37th birthday, which contradicts the entire fashion in which Boston owner John Henry wanted to build his team.

The culprit, in this instance, is not Dombrowski himself but what spurred his hiring: losing. The Red Sox lost badly for two straight years and three of four, and even if a World Series-winning season was the anomalous one, it wasn't enough to allay Boston's fears about its process. In truth, this idea is ridiculous, particularly for someone like Henry who built his fortune refusing to allow emotions to dictate positions in commodities.

The Dombrowski Era is a strictly emotional response to a sample that, over time, almost certainly would have evened itself out. Look at what he inherited: an up-the-middle core of Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Dustin Pedroia and Blake Swihart; a minor league system so stocked with talent that a number of evaluators believe it's the best in the game; and a payroll annually among the game's five highest. This is not a bad lot in life. The Hanley Ramirez and Rick Porcello contracts are messes, and the Pablo Sandoval one may yet join them, and yet the solution is to bring in a baseball-operations head whose specialty is trafficking in big-ticket items?

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