Spring training begins in about a month, so it may be a good time to take another look at the state of the Boston Red Sox. I’m sorry to report that it doesn’t look so good.

Yesterday the Red Sox were in talks with the Colorado Rockies on a trade that would send shortstop Marco Scutaro out west. These talks fell apart after the Red Sox realized that if they shipped out Scutaro they wouldn’t have a shortstop. Seriously. Here’s the news item from the BostonHerald.com:

No go on the Marco Scutaro trade to the Rockies. The Denver Post, which first reported it as close, said that the talks fizzled after the Rockies decided they did not want to take on Scutaro’s $6 million salary and the Red Sox realized they did not really have a suitable backup to Scutaro to play shortstop. So it’s a big “never mind” for now, but the talks likely are an indication of how the Red Sox could be looking for ways to clear some salary in order to sign a free agent starter such as Roy Oswalt.

I added the emphasis, because, well, you’d think that would have been obvious from the start. But there’s more to this little item than that “D’oh!” moment.

The Red Sox were considering trading their starting shortstop to free up money to sign a fourth of fifth starter!!!

Does that sound like the Red Sox that we’ve come to know over the past decade? No, it sounds more like the Oakland Athletics or Pittsburgh Pirates. Of course, the Sox have a huge payroll, and they’ve got some great players in Jacoby Ellsbury, Adrian Gonzalez, Dustin Pedroia and Jon Lester. They have very good players in Kevin Youkilis and Clay Buchholz. They have good players in Daniel Bard, Alfredo Aceves. They have some unknowns, who should be good in Andrew Bailey and Mark Melancon. They even have his chickenship, Josh Beckett.

So, no, the team isn’t going to be awful. They’ll compete. It’s just be that they will be competing for runner up.

Okay, I have to acknowledge that anything can happen. The Yankees might implode. Albert Pujols might suck. Yu Darvish might bomb out. The Rays starting rotation may all need Tommy John surgery. Victor Martinez might be out with a wrecked knee — oh, right, he is going to be out with a wrecked knee. Yes, all that might happen. That’s why we are fans and watch/listen/read about the games. But the point is that for the most part, Red Sox prospects for a good season rest on the hopes that the other teams will not play up to their potential. That’s what feels different this off season.

The Red Sox front office is thinking small, and we can only hope that what happened to the Red Sox in 2011 will happen to at least one or two other clubs in 2012.

So let’s take a look at what 2012 may hold for this team.

How does this team stack up to last year’s? On paper, it should not be as good.

The rotation: Jon Lester was not great in 2011, and he was not good in September. I think there is the possibility that he could be better in 2012. Josh Beckett was great throughout most of last season — until it mattered that is. He has a history of having one good year, followed by one not so good year. He also has a history of injury. He also has a rocky relationship with his new manager. I think this all adds up to Beckett not being as good this year. Clay Buchholz is an injury waiting to happen. When he’s healthy, he’s good. But to think he’ll go a whole season healthy is optimistic to say the least. So, the big three for 2012, if we’re lucky, they’ll be as good as last year, and that’s not good enough. And we haven’t even examined the fourth and fifth spots. Fortunately, the fourth and fifth spots from 2011 really, really sucked, so it won’t be difficult to do better, but so far the only options are converting Daniel Bard and/or Alfredo Aceves, and some reclamation project.

The bullpen: Andrew Bailey is the new closer, and should be more than capable, but I don’t see him being better than Jonathan Papelbon, and Bailey has a history of injury. Mark Melancon should be a good set up man, but will he be as good as Daniel Bard has been the past two years? Not likely. The rest of the bullpen is going to be mostly the same crew as last year. Good, but not as good as 2011, especially if Aceves is moved to the rotation.

The offense: The Sox offense should be good in 2012, but as good as 2011 when it wasn’t quite good enough to get them into the playoffs? I don’t think so. First of all, their two best offensive players, Adrian Gonzalez and Jacoby Ellsbury, had career years in 2011. I expect both of them to be very good, but is it reasonable to think either or both will be as good as they were last year? Then you’ve got David Ortiz, a year older and probably not as good as 2011. Dustin Pedroia should be just as good as he was, and that’s very good. Marco Scutaro is a serviceable shortstop, but he’s in the second half of his 30th decade. It is not unreasonable to imagine a slight decline. Right field remains a black hole. Catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia is probably going to match or better his numbers from last year, but that’s hardly significant. That leaves Carl Crawford and Kevin Youkilis. Whether or not the Sox offense is better this year than last will sit on these two players’ shoulders. Crawford had a horrible season for someone making the kind of money he’s making. He should be capable of being much better. And Youk needs to stay healthy for a full season. If both those things happen, the Red Sox offense should be about as potent in 2012 as it was last year.

The manager: Bobby Valentine was the choice of Larry Lucchino, who forced him down general manager Ben Cherington’s throat. That might be okay. Everyone says the choice of Valentine is a bold one, but the Red Sox only gave him a two-year contract, and they only let him hire one coach. They forced Tim Bogar on Valentine as his bench coach. Bogar is widely seen as Valentine’s successor. In short, there doesn’t really seem to be a lot of confidence, and certainly not a lot of commitment to Valentine. The players will sense this and I think it spells his failure.

The off season continues and it is very likely Ben Cherington will make additions to the team. But by all accounts, the purse is pretty tight, so I don’t think the team can make a generally decisive move. The best they can do is plug some holes in the rotation and right field with competent players.

My prediction is the Sox will be a more consistent team in 2012 — not nearly as good as they were at their best in 2011, but without the complete collapses they faced at the start and end of the season. But that will not be good enough to propel them into the playoffs. Look for them to win 87 to 89 games.

Winter hasn’t even officially started yet and baseball’s Winter Meetings is already history. If you’re a Marlins or an Angels fan, your head must be spinning. Too bad there are not many of the former. Lots of money being thrown around. My guess is that half way through all these insane contracts everyone involved (but the players and the agents) is going to be asking themselves why they thought it was a good idea in the first place. Just ask the Red Sox (Lackey, Dice-K, Lugo, Renteria, Drew, maybe Crawford).

Anyway, it’s a good time for a quick and meaningless evaluation of the state of the Red Sox:

1. The Ben Cherington era is certainly getting off to a major yawn. Here it is, the week of the winter meetings and the biggest piece of drama with this club remains the compensation from the Cubs for Theo Epstien.

2. If there is one thing we can say unequivocally about the Cherington era is that it has been marked by extreme cautiousness. It took two full months to replace Terry Francona with Bobby Valentine, and even then they could only muster enough nerve to give him a two-year contract.

3. Speaking of which, I believe that this half-hearted commitment to Valentine will ensure his failure. Players pay attention to things like this. If you have noticed, length of contract is almost always the biggest issue in free agent signings. Long contracts mean commitment; commitment means respect. That most of the important Red Sox players have longer contracts than Valentine signals to the bad apples… Beckett… that they can just ride out the Valentine years. In fact, the poorer they play, the quicker he is gone. It’s no coincidence that Terry Francona lost the respect of the team in the final year of his contract, when the front office balked at picking up his option. They say the hiring of Valentine was a “bold” move, but why did they have to do it so timidly?

4. I’m sorry that David Ortiz is coming back. Yes, he’s been a great player, but he is going to make over $14 million next year. That’s a lot of money for a DH who can’t play any other position and will probably be hit for against left handed pitching. It could buy a good-hitting right fielder AND some strong arms for the bullpen, pieces the Red Sox need more than DH, which could be handled by a platoon of Gonzalez, Youkilis, and Lavarnway, that would help keep the first two fresher during the long season. I just hope they don’t negotiate a two-year deal, because that will simply lead to Big Papi coming into spring training with a big gut, and nothing to play for.

5. Ben claims there’s little chance of the Sox getting in on the Yu Darvish sweepstakes. I’m glad about this, but I have this nagging gut feeling that if the Sox pass on Darvish, he’ll end up pitching like Pedro Martinez.

But what disturbs me about the hiring of Valentine is the process. Clearly, Valentine with the top choice of Larry Lucchino from the start. Why on earth did he let his new general manager, Ben Cherington, go through the charade of interviewing a slate of non-Valentines, even to the point that Ben and his baseball people presented a choice, Dale Svuem, to ownership. This only makes Ben look weak, inept and impotent. What was the point?

This just strikes me as either bad management, or a deliberate beat-down so Ben (and everyone else) will know who is boss.

Lets see how the Winter meetings progress next week. I can see Scott Boras negotiating with Ben now. “Great. Did you run this by Larry yet?”

Each week it seems that we get more evidence that the Boston Red Sox are being run by clowns. Larry Lucchino, John Henry and company have fired the manager, half the coaching staff, the medical staff, the conditioning staff, and let the general manager go to another organization. They still have been unable to negotiate compensation for that move. Now they’ve thrown their new general manager under a bus, letting him begin the process of hiring a new manager to replace Terry Francona with one set of criteria, then rejecting the list of candidates from that search only to focus in on a completely different type of candidate in Bobby Valentine. How could they have not known what they wanted in a manager in the first place? How can you interview a bunch of candidates with little or no experience managing in the big leagues, only to turn around and decide that management experience is important? This is like walking into a restaurant and asking the waiter to describe each of the vegetarian offerings, then ordering a big, juicy porterhouse steak.

“We never closed it [the list of managerial candidates] down,’’ Lucchino said. “It’s not a process where everybody moves in lockstep. You have different reasons to move people along, or other people have schedules they need to keep.

“You try to respond to people individually. We’re going to make sure we get the right guy.’’

If you are wondering just what the fuck that means, let me translate: When Lucchino says, “We never closed it down,” he means he never approved of the list in the first place. When he says, “We’re going to make sure we get the right guy,” what he means is, he’s the person who determines who the right guy is, not the general manager.

I predict that Ben Cherington is going to get fed up by Larry Lucchino’s meddling very quickly. He’ll resign by January. At that point, Lucchino will claim that the process of hiring a new general manager never closed down. Giving Ben the title of GM didn’t actually make him the GM.

Well, good luck. It’s going to be a while before the Red Sox are serious contenders again.

2. Henry claims he didn’t want Theo Epstein to leave, acting as if it was out of his hands:

“I’d love to have Theo back. I would have loved for Theo to have been our general manager to be our general manager for the next 20 years. That was my hope. That would have been my hope. But you don’t always get what you want,” Henry said. “I did everything I could, personally —and so did Tom [Werner] and Larry [Lucchino] — to make that happen. But the fact that is, and I think people don’t understand this, the fact is that being the general manager in Boston or being the manager in Boston is a terrifically tough job.”

Henry wants us to believe he had no control over whether or not Theo remained GM? He once again deflects the blame at the media and/or the fans. Does this man accept responsibility for anything?

3. Theo Epstein is taking a big personal risk going to the Cubs. If he fails to get the team to the World Series, he risks proving that Buck Showalter was right about him, that he’s only as good as the money he has at his disposal.

4. The Red Sox have to dump John Lackey. This man can not be part of a winning club house. Not in Boston. They also need to bring in a real ace, not pretenders like Beckett and Lester. If I were Ben Cherington, I’d pick up the phone and see if I could pry Felix Hernandez from the Mariners for Lester and Buchholz.

5. If on September 1 you had asked 100 baseball pundits to name the best organizations in the game, all 100 would surely have mentioned the Red Sox, if not putting them at the top spot. Today, just a month and a half later, the team is a laughing stock, loaded with derelict millionaires and a front office run by morons and assholes like Larry Lucchino. Fans should boycott the first home game of the season to break the so-called “sell-out” streak and demonstrate that we are not sheep.

Anyway, it will be an interesting winter. Good luck to Ben Cherington. He’s going to need it.

Even though this “facing of the press” was as safe for Henry as he could make it, he still managed to reveal his true colors (and they include a big yellow stripe):

Henry was asked if it was a fair statement for Francona to describe the divorce from the Red Sox as “a mutual decision.”

“We really didn’t get a chance to make it mutual,” Henry said. “But thinking about it, would we have ended up at the same place he ended up? Based on the things that we heard and things that we saw, there’s a strong likelihood that we would have, so you could say it was mutual but the way it took place in my mind wasn’t really mutual the way it took place.”

So Henry didn’t pick up Francona’s option, which left this two-time-World-Series-Champion manager dangling in the wind all season. Then, when Francona decided he’d had enough of that disrespect and made the decision himself to move on, Henry feels safe in saying the “divorce” was NOT mutual, thus avoiding any, you know, responsibility for anything.

Perhaps Henry is just upset that his ambivalence prevented him from being able to actually fire Francona.

It’s official. The Red Sox have fired Terry Francona.* I now have nothing but contempt for John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Luchino, the Red Sox so-called brain trust. Making Francona the scapegoat for the colossal collapse is pathetic and cowardly. Worse still, it isn’t even going to fix anything.

According to the official press release, the problem is that Terry lost the respect of some of the players in the club house. And you fix this by caving in to the bad-seeds in the locker room? You want to fix the problem of respect, pick up Terry’s option and trade the rotten apples for a couple of bags of balls. On the karmic front, however, John Henry injured himself on his yacht today and had to be brought to the hospital. It’s hard to navigate a slippery deck with your head up your ass.

Terry Francona is a classy guy, and a terrific manager. He deserves way better than he got from the losers in his locker room. He deserves better than he got from the Red Sox management. He’ll land on his feet with a new team, and I hope he beats the pants off the Red Sox whenever he gets the chance.

*Of course, it isn’t technically a firing, as his contract has expired. They just decided not to pick up the two-year options. Same thing as firing though.

You may have heard. The Boston Red Sox finished off an historic collapse by losing game 162 when they had to get just one more out to take the victory and at worst force a playoff game with the Tampa Bay Rays. That didn’t happen. Jonathan Papelbon, for the second time in the past three years, ended the Sox season with a meltdown, thus giving the Red Sox a record of seven wins and 21 losses in September, and allowing the scrappy Rays to make up ten games in the standings to earn the AL wildcard birth.

What went wrong? Well, let me begin by saying I saw this coming… sort of.* The problem — one of them — was simply that this team was never as good as they or anyone else thought they were. Mostly it was the pitching that was suspect. Jon Lester is routinely called an ace by baseball pundits. But I haven’t really seen it. He’s a solid pitcher. A terrific number two. But ace? Uh, uh. And that was evident by his horrible performance this month. Imagine Pedro Martinez in the same situation, or Curt Schilling. Then there’s Josh Beckett — terrific when he’s healthy, but he can’t seem to get through the season without significant physical problems. Of course, John Lackey was horrible. No need to bash that loser any more. Dice-K. Right! Losing Clay Buchholz was probably the biggest blow to the team. If he’d been healthy, this is a different post, and I’d be previewing the post season. As it was, the starting pitching could not deliver any quality starts beyond the sixth inning all season long.

The bullpen over-achieved most of the season, but having to pick up three or four innings (or more) ever single game finally took its toll and the relief just wasn’t there when it was needed most.

But the position players also bear some of the blame. Again, when it mattered, they made stupid base-running blunders and fielding errors. The clutch hitting disappeared (if September call-up Ryan Lavarnway didn’t have two home runs in game 161, the season is over then). The absence of Kevin Youkilis? Probably part of it. But fatigue played a lot bigger part. This team was out of shape, old and just plain worn out. And part of that is due to having David Ortiz in the lineup — a man who can’t substitute in the field.

Okay. Enough moaning. Let’s look at the few positives:

1. Jacoby Ellsbury was great all season and was one of the few bright spots in September.
2. Alfredo Aceves was a fighter out of the bullpen all season, the only arm that seemed to still have any life in it even though he was used continually for multiple innings down the stretch.
3. There is no three, I’m afraid…

As bad as this season was, it could get worse. The Sox payroll is massive and while they will be shedding some of it this winter, they still owe John Lackey, Carl Crawford and Dice-K about $180 million (if my mind math is correct). Can they really afford to sign any high-priced free agents in the off season? Dare they, given the miserable track record they have?

Here’s what I’d like to see them do:

Cut ties with David Ortiz, Tim Wakefield, and Jason Varitek. These guys have been great Red Sox, but it is time for them to move on, retire, get into coaching. The Red Sox need to get younger.

Trade John Lester and Clay Buchholz for Felix Hernandez. The Sox need an ace, a real one. A stopper. A guy who can pitch into the eighth or ninth every game.

Dump John Lackey and eat the remaining contract.

Prep Will Middlebrooks to take Kevin Youkilis’ spot at third, maybe as early as May.

Get Ryan Kalish ready to take over right field.

Keep Ryan Lavarnway as backup catcher and DH. Youk can play DH and spot AG at first.

Get a good defensive short stop.

Fire Curt Young and get a real pitching coach, one who knows how to develop pitchers who can give you seven or eight quality innings a game instead of six mediocre innings, as we got this year.

Sign Heath Bell to replace Papelbon as closer.

Don’t expect to win 100 games.

Keep Terry Francona as manager. He’s a good manager who was let down by the players he trusted to play up to their contracts.

Of course, none of this will happen. The Sox will fire Terry Francona. Theo Epstein will once again squander John Henry’s money on bloated contracts for over-valued, under-achieving free agents. This team is the New York mets from five years ago.

*Granted, I didn’t expect them to puke up a nine game lead with a month to play.

I’ve reached the point where I’m rooting against the Red Sox this season. This is a bad team that does not deserve to make the playoffs. And, in my opinion, there is a silver lining — at least a potential one — if this $170 million payroll goes home in October: It should make the front office re-examine its reliance on signing over-priced, over-valued free agents.

Name the last free agent the Red Sox signed who was fun to watch play the game. (Adrian Gonzalez, Curt Schilling, Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell don’t count because they arrived via trade.) Here are some of your choices:

• Dice-K
• John Lackey
• Carl Crawford*
• Matt Clement
• Bobby Jenks
• Julio Lugo
• Edgar Renteria
• Mike Cameron
• J. D. Drew

That crew of under-achievers cost the Red Sox over $400 million in salary and posting fees (if my mind math is accurate). Think about that! The last free agent signing by Theo Epstein who was worth what he was paid was Keith Foulke. And before him David Ortiz. (I’m excepting smaller contracts like Marco Scutaro.) That’s a long dry-spell for a boy wonder. Actually, it is abysmal performance for a front office that prides itself on talent evaluation and do-diligence. In fact, it is beginning to remind me of the bad-old Dan Duquette days.

So, a re-evaluation of the proper philosophy for building a team is in order and maybe missing the playoffs is just the kind of wake-up call that is needed.

Of course, if the Sox do limp into the playoffs, I’ll be rooting for them all the way. But it would surprise me if they won more than one post-season game, not with the pitching staff they’re putting out on the field day in and day out.

*For the record, I’m not ready to write off Carl Crawford after one season. He’ll never live up to that stupid, insane contract. But I think he will be better in the years to come than he was this year.