Bedard will be a nice signing to a performance contract. He is worth a lot of money if he holds up physically.
There will be no one bidding against the Red Sox for Wakefield's services. He is the consummate insurance policy. If you get to the point in a season where it is better to have a below average pitcher than no pitcher, then Wakefield is your man, and with the fragility of major league pitching, that happens often. The year before last, at the start of the season, people were saying "What are the Red Sox going to do with eight starting pitchrrs?" but three months later, they had to call up someone named Tazawa or Tawaza to pitch in the fifth spot.
I've been a big Wakefield booster for a long time, but there are a lot of costs associated with keeping him on your roster. For one thing, he dictates who your back-up catcher is. For another, when he is in the rotation, he dictates what off-day your starting catcher has, and quite often, that is inconvenient because the manager likes to be free to use the back-up in a day game following a night game, for example, but if Wakefield is scheduled for the game after that, then the backup catches two games in a row. Also, the Red Sox often have to incur the cost of having one or two knuckleballers pitching in the minors just so they can have a minor league backup knuckleball catcher available.
Why can't they find a Starting catcher that can catch a knuckleball ?