Co-incidence?

Sox Co-GMs Caught By Surprise

The Great Unknown

Red Sox co-GM's Jed Hoyer and Ben Cherington spoke to the media Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. via conference call, just a few hours before the news of Damon's departure broke.

Where are you guys at with Johnny? Waiting to hear from him?

-- Jed Hoyer: “As far as where the ball is on the court right now, I’d say we never really talk about how that process is going. I think it is a negotiation. It’s ongoing. But I think that obviously now with him rejecting arbitration that puts a bit of a deadline on it. So, there is a deadline to the negotiation but I think that things are still progressing well. We’re still having a lot of conversations with Scott and at least from our vantage point, those are very productive."

-- "The dialogue… we’ve had a lot of dialogue with Scott. I think that I would expect that dialogue will probably pick up a little bit as we get closer to the deadline… there are more teams that have traded for or signed center fielders, so the market in some ways is clearer. There are more knowns now than unknowns. As far as the actual negotiation, I still think that something that’s sort of between the Red Sox and Scott and Johnny so I would hesitate to talk about how that impacts the negotiation but sure obviously the further we go down this road the more things become known and the fewer things are unknown."

-- "Our absolute priority is to bring Johnny back and have him in center field next year but it would be irresponsible if we just sat back and didn’t explore alternatives in case we cannot make that happen, so yeah we’re always working on both fronts and there’s no question that as the winter goes on some of these fronts go away. It is a very delicate balance, it’s something we face in some way, shape, or form every offseason."