Will the payroll decrease significantly?
The Red Sox unloaded $270 million in contracts to the Dodgers by trading away Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Nick Punto. That theoretically frees up that money to be used on other players. Will the Sox sign a big-time free agent like Josh Hamilton? Given what happened with Gonzalez and particularly Crawford, probably not. There aren't one or two players that would be worth that money, nor would the Red Sox want to go down that road again. You're likely to see the Red Sox sign players like Ross and add pieces of the caliber of Cleveland's Shin Shoo Choo, but a megastar is not walking through that door.