Theo admits, "Lyford was right - I panicked!"

Three years ago, I took a lot of abuse for my contention that the Red Sox made a panic move when they traded Cla Meredith, Josh Bard, a PTBNL and cash to San Diego for Doug Mirabelli.

The Red Sox re-acquired catcher Doug Mirabelli from the San Diego Padres for Josh Bard, minor league reliever Cla Meredith, a player-to-be-named-later AND cash...I hate this [trade]...If the Red Sox had scored 6 runs in each of Wakefield's last 3 starts, he'd be 4-1, and the move yesterday wouldn't have been made. Which makes it the very definition of a panic move.

Well, from the Boston Globe, we see Theo Epstein admit that...I was right.

"I think the closer you get to certain situations, the more often you fail," Epstein said yesterday about the trade that sent Cla Meredith and Josh Bard to San Diego for Doug Mirabelli. “I firmly believe that had I not gone on the road trip with the team and been exposed to that panic or been sucked into it, we wouldn’t have made the trade. I got too close to it, so we over-prioritized the rest of the season, we over-prioritized the next start [by Tim Wakefield], and made a bad trade."

It's nice to see Theo own up to what was actually obvious at the time...