Epstein gets handsomely paid to make those kind of decisions and he may well be right. That approach was fundamentally the argument that temporarily drove him into early retirement in a philosophical difference with club president Larry Lucchino, who, being two decades older than Epstein, believes living for today is the way to go.

This will all work out fine as long as:

• the Sox don’t miss the playoffs because the Yankees got stronger and lived for the moment while the Sox stood pat with a losing hand,
• the kids don’t turn into busts in the next few years while Sox fans look back on another Yankee pennant or, egads, World Series victory in 2006 in the Summer of Our Non-Event in Boston, or
• the Yankees win the pennant AND the kids with the big arms don’t become what Epstein is telling management they will be in a year or two.

The third is the worst case scenario for young Theo, who is a talented fellow but arrogant in the way youth can be when it believes it has all the answers and you have none. Life has a way of balancing those scales and the process is usually not pleasant. Epstein may yet learn that lesson, as everyone who has preceded him on Earth eventually does, but he chose July 31 to stick to his young guns even as his older but still contending team was unraveling. If, say Abreu comes to Fenway Park two weekends hence and helps speed up that process it might be wise for Theo not to be sitting in the very public box above home plate he demanded of ownership as part of his ransom to return to the team because it will be tough to see the game with hot dogs and pop bottles bouncing off the glass.

What the Sox would have had to give up to land some outside help before the trading deadline was a young pitcher or two like Jon Lester, Craig Hansen or Manny Delcarmen. Epstein sees them, along with Beckett, as the future of the Sox — and hopefully he's right. Epstein certainly isn’t blind to the flaws of his present team and looked throughout Major League Baseball for help. He looked for arms like Oswalt’s and even Roger Clemens.

He looked for bats. He looked for anything and at everyone. But the cost, he decided, was just too high and convinced the people above him — Lucchino and owner John Henry — to stick with his plan.

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“Our approach as an organization to the Yankees is to respect them, to assume they are going to win around 100 games and then forget about them until October,” Epstein said at a press conference after the trade deadline passed without him making a move.

Young Theo's best hope is that he hasn’t put his team in a position to have to forget them until next April. There’s no more laying the blame off on an underling or on Lucchino. Epstein is now the captain of the ship. If it reaches port safely he gets the credit. If it runs aground, he gets the blame. All the blame.

That is the business he chose and the way he insisted on playing it.

No more shared responsibility. No more sound of many voices emanating from the front offices. When he came back to the Red Sox he came with a plan. His plan. And on July 31 he made a decision to stick with it and not worry about either the Yankees or finding short-term solutions at the expense of long-term ones. He stuck to his young guns on July 31.

Two days later those guns were trained on him when the newly-reinforced Yankees passed the Sox in the standings and moved into first place. From here on out is when it gets interesting. And, like the August weather around Fenway, potentially very, very, very hot.