The past four seasons of the Boston Red Sox have been quite interesting.

The Bobby Valentine experiment in 2012 made us wish that Terry Francona had been a little harder on a few of his beer-drinking, chicken-eating players so he could've kept his job as skipper. Valentine seemed to be a nice guy, but perhaps past his prime in dealing with players. At least we didn't have to experience a September swoon; the season was over in early August.

The championship team of 2013 was pretty miraculous, considering what went down the year before. Who knew that Koji Uehara, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Jonny Gomes, Mike Carp, Daniel Nava and Will Middlebrooks would have perhaps the best years of their careers? Dumping Valentine and bringing in former Sox pitching coach John Farrell to right the ship helped. Third flag since 2004. Yeah!

It was deja vu all over again in 2014 as the Sox returned to the basement of the American League East. Their top three starting pitchers won a total of 29 games and the unpopular John Lackey won 11 of those. Jacoby Ellsbury was now earning a "gazillion" dollars as a Yankee and "Salty" wasn't appreciated and became a Miami Marlin. Gomes, Carp, Nava and Middlebrooks came back to reality, Shane Victorino spent most of his days in the injured list and Mike Napoli began his slide into retirement age. It was a hard year to watch after the surprise of 2013. And the team's best pitcher since Pedro Martinez, Jon Lester, bid Beantown goodbye, getting traded to the Oakland Athletics.

Expectations were not too high for this summer's edition of the Red Sox. Lester got a good deal from the Chicago Cubs, and his friend, Theo Epstein, after the Sox brass weren't willing to pay him a top flight pitcher's salary. The starting rotation was far from dazzling and the aging bullpen staff had a lot of questions. Would Napoli rebound? No. Would Buchholz get injured again? Yes. Did we really think that Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval were the answers? No.

So the season of 2015 has been a work in progress. General Manager Ben Cherington opted to leave when the Sox brass hired Dave Dombrowski to run baseball operations after the team floundered from April to August. We saw enough of Napoli's decline and he was shipped to Texas. The young stars, Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts, Rusney Castillo, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Eduardo Rodriguez, are having good to great years but it will be interesting to see what Dombrowski has in mind for them. What is the future for Ramirez and Sandoval? Buchholz? Koji?

We might find out what Dombrowski has in mind by Christmas. The Hot Stove League for the Red Sox begins Oct. 5 shortly after Terry Francona, wearing his two World Series rings won in Boston, waves goodbye to the Sox after the 2015 season ends in Cleveland on October 4.