Helton, who is in town with the Rockies tonight for a three-game series at Fenway, will have a chance to showcase his hitting prowess in a ballpark that might suit him as much as Coors Field, where he's a career .368 hitter.
While we will never know exactly what the final pieces of the blockbuster trade would have been, there were three names coming out of Colorado: Lowell, Julian Tavarez, and Manny Delcarmen.
Word was that the Sox were insistent on keeping Delcarmen but would part with a lesser prospect; the more money the Rockies assumed on Helton's contract, the better the prospect. But the money never got high enough for the Sox.
Helton, a career .333 hitter with a .431 on-base percentage, would have played first base and Kevin Youkilis would have gone back to third. If Tavarez had been dealt, the Sox would have gone with Kyle Snyder, Kason Gabbard, Devern Hansack, or even dipped into free agency for a fifth starter.
The Rockies wanted to unload Helton's large contract and were willing to pay some of the freight. But according to Red Sox sources, the portion of the remaining $90.1 million (through 2011) they were willing to pick up was never as much as the 50 percent that had been thrown about in media reports.
The deal was first discussed at the general managers' meetings in November and then revived at the winter meetings in December but died swiftly.
The Rockies, to the best of our knowledge, never tried to revisit it after telling Helton he would not be traded. While there have been reports of the Yankees and Angels going after him, nothing substantive has surfaced. Helton, who has a no-trade clause, has said he will not play in New York. To this point, Boston is the only team he would have approved a deal for.
"I realize something was there," Helton told the Rocky Mountain News. "It's still like I never wanted to leave Colorado, but if I was going to go, [Boston] is the place I said I'd be willing to go."
In the end, the fact that there was no deal was fine with Lowell and Red Sox Nation.
Lowell had fretted about the possibility of leaving Boston after one very good season -- .284, 20 homers, 80 RBIs, 47 doubles -- that resurrected his career after his worst year, with Florida in 2005.
