Sorry, I'm hopping on a bus to Thanksgiving dinner here in a second, so I'm not going to be able to defend this right up front.
However, what I think is that the Sox are actually less of a mess than I thought them to be a day ago, and the reason for that is they didn't sign Torii Hunter. That's just too big a contract for a team that finished 72-90 and has this many holes. It's going to take a few years to right this ship if we want to do it the right way, and though we should have gone into rebuilding with a better agenda, all I can ask is to not give out contracts that will tie our hands down the road 3-5 years from now when we're competitive. Hunter will probably be playing past his prime in 4-5 years - his history has marked him as a bit fragile in my mind, and we didn't want to pay for that.
The Sox should be on a 2 to 3-year plan. If we're going to be competitive before then, it's going to have to be cobbled together no matter what. Signing Torii Hunter was going to make us better, but not good enough. Thank God Kenny didn't overpay chasing a really foolish dream of some kind of miracle turnaround, even if he wanted to. He's now got a chance to change this organization with some sort of actual plan. Obviously Hunter wasn't impressed enough with the current plan to sign, although if we really got outbid $20M it may not have mattered.
The Cabrera signing still makes sense to me in light of the failed Hunter signing; it does make us a bit more competitive this year as well as freeing up some money. Still a pretty darn good trade in my mind, considering we weren't going to be resigning Jon at his likely price.
In my mind, it's a Thanksiving miracle. Go enjoy your turkey and pumpkin pie, and be thankful that we aren't, as of right now, launching off on some half-baked "reloading" plan.