It was been a story line that was long ago written. Early Thursday morning, Jon Lester was traded out of Boston because of the Red Sox' inability to pay him the money his play had demanded. On this day, midway through a season that as seen the Red Sox flirt with glory but always sink back into the doldrums of baseball's standings, they have lost the only piece of their roster that would have had any chance of dragging them into contention in the last quarter of the season. Lester is gone.
Two days ago, John Farrell made the announcement that Jon Lester would be scratched from his scheduled start on Wednesday night in Toronto to give the team more freedom to trade him. The move was one completed out of respect allowing Lester to get a full rotations rest before any trade that would likely also result in a start the next day for whichever team he was dealt to. But what Farrell's polite move also did was strike down any final hopes within Red Sox nation that Lester would ever play another game for Boston.
Jon Lester will become a free agent at the end of this season and after the way that he played at the end of last season, resigning him even during Spring Training was a highly financially taxing task. So the Red Sox waited, stringing their all-star along indefinitely half hoping he would play poorly enough in 2014 to allow the team to resign him at a lesser price. That did not happen.
In 21 starts for Boston this season, Jon Lester went 10-7 losing only due to poor run support not any fault in his on the mound performance. He whipped an ERA of 2.52 in a total of 143 innings pitched solidifying his work horse qualities and providing the team with on average a 7 inning start. Jon was a true ace of aces for qualities embodied by all those statistics and those statistics were only made better by his play to start this season. To sum up, Jon Lester played perhaps the greatest season of his career and that made it seem like a deal with him in free agency this winter would be impossible. So, in order to gain the best return for such a great player, the Sox went to the trade market, dealing their longtime pitching stud to Oakland for Yoenis Cespedes. Johnny Gomes also went with Lester to Oakland clearing left field space for Cespedes to play a starting role in the position.
But today the story was not about Cespedes coming to town. It was about Lester leaving it and the media and the fans knew that very well.
After he was groomed well by Triple A Pawtuket, Lester came to the big club in 2006 where he started 15 games. He impressed in those game earning a decision 9 of those 15 games winning 7 of them. Lester seemed to have a future in Boston after his glamorous start to his career but soon realized he would have to overcome more than competition within the system to earn a spot in the MLB. After feeling ill, midway through a midsummer game of that 2006 season, Lester flew to a Boston medical facility where he was tested and diagnosed with a treatable form of Lymphatic Cancer. He would miss the rest of the season and the first half of the successive one while he underwent intensive chemotherapy but eventually returned to baseball better than ever.
Though Josh Beckett captained the team to a championship in 2007, it was Lester who started and was credited with the win in the series clenching game four of that year's World Series. When Beckett left town roughly four years later it was an underrated Lester who became the ace. Starting 33 games in 2013, Jon went 15-8, tearing it up in the second half of the year and guiding Boston to their second championship with him on the roster.
Then, as has already been profiled, Lester played complete shutdown baseball in a 2014 season that saw very few moments of glory in Boston.
All and all, the 2014 trade deadline completely revamped and reworked the Boston Red Sox in a completely unexpected way. But though the departures of John Lackey, Johnny Gomes and Stephan Drew were definitely notable, it was the end of he Jon Lester era in Boston that stole the show.
Through all these years of dominance, the Sox been a team that has won not because of big money contracts but rather an evolution of talent gained through trades and draft picks. The loss of Lester will hurt but as he leaves, Bostonians must remember that huge players left the team after the 2004 and 2007 championships and yet the team always found a way to charter through the fog and come out on top. Let us hope that the same can one day be said for 2013.
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