As we suspected, Major League Baseball lowered the boom on the Red Sox today—banning them from signing international players for a year and declaring five of their Latin prospects to be free agents. These penalties come in the wake of an MLB investigation into Boston's signing practices in Venezuela. Reportedly, the Red Sox signed players in 'clusters' from the same training organizations—a violation of MLB rules. Of course, everybody else in baseball does the same thing—but the Red Sox are apparently being singled out as an example by Commissioner Rob Manfred. This clearly hurts the team's overall development program—and cripples their international efforts going forward through 2017.