Quickly? Hendry has been here since 94, and GM for 5 years. Right, but the green light to get the big pricey FA names seemingly only showed up in the last year or so. An organization this hapless suddenly deciding to spend big isn't the situation where I expect to see much being done that's thought out right away. What a bunch of nonsense. Hendry was given more than enough resources to field a great team every season he's been at the helm. Hendry did not have the green light to spend that huge on those types of FA's. Either way, stop painting it like I'm defending Hendry...my point is that Henry showed he was incompetent on the relatively smaller spending scale, why would he suddenly be competent spending on the Soriano-scale? It IS all about history...the sloppiness and shortsightedness of the Soriano deal makes total sense when it comes down to who was wrangling it and for what team. This team has shown that again and again its front office focus is on marketing and making money, not fielding a team. This begat crappy GM after GM, a crappy farm system, crappy scouts, crappy managers, crappy coaches...you name it. I don't see how the history of the team, especially under the Tribune, can just be discounted like it doesn't matter. It's a complete history of failure, and it's mapped out by a chain of events that have us where we're at today. None of this just happened out of nowhere. The failures of one year lead to asinine and halfassed attempts to tweek things or repair them the next, further bogging the team down in mediocrity and expanding its flaws. None of it happens in a vacuum...they just keep compounding the probems or making new ones in their sloppy attempts to fix what's already wrong. Henry was given the resources before Soriano to field a decent team, but with the history of no accountability or real interest in doing so from anyone aove him, why was that going to happen? All they've done is open up the money bin, but dumped it all on the same crappy management/scouting system they've maintained variations of for 20 years now.