The San Francisco Giants are about to test the notion that one team's misalignment is another team's salvation. In fact, they have already done it even though the Shiny New Toy In Question hasn't even been unwrapped yet, let alone aligned.
In moving four certified mammals to the Boston Red Sox for designated hitter and apparent pain in the ass Rafael Devers, the Giants finally achieved the big get they hadn't managed since they outbid themselves by $40 million for Barry Zito in 2006. That one was an analytic misstep, unless you count Zito’s two postseason starts in 2012, in which he won Game 5 of the NL Championship Series (with the Giants down 3-1 to the St. Louis Cardinals) and then Game 1 of the World Series. Those two starts made the deal a barg . . . well, okay, not a bargain. But at least some value for the money. Also he could play guitar.
Since then, the Giants’ foremost achievement in the free agent marketplace has been establishing themselves as the unrivaled best-in-class stalking horse for agents. It’s a simple process, and one that Blue Jays fans might also find familiar, and it goes like this: get the Giants involved, get your client signed somewhere else for a touch more than the Giants offered, and then tell the Giants they finished second. This happened with Bryce Harper, who had no intention of signing in San Francisco, and then with Aaron Judge, who had even less intention of doing so, and finally with Shohei Ohtani, who barely took notice that the Giants exist. The biggest in-season trade the Giants have made in the last couple decades, in 2011, was for Carlos Beltran, who played great and hated San Francisco so much that he signed with St. Louis after the season ended.
We recognize that the Giants committed $151 million and seven years to their current third baseman, Matt Chapman, in March of 2024, which is both a biggish deal and not remotely the jaw-dropping signing that the money and term might have suggested a decade earlier. Chapman is a sufficiently fine player who is absolutely not in the Harper/Judge/Ohtani tier of franchise-reorienting superstars. More to the point, Chapman’s excellent first season with the team did not prevent former baseball jefe Farhan Zaidi from getting fired at last season's end. Zaidi was part handy scapegoat, part failed ballnerd, and he spent six years taking a 77-85 team to 80-82; part of the criticism he received, and earned, was that the team had become steadfastly uninteresting in the process, as proven by the 500,000 fans they drew in 2018 that didn’t show up in 2024. Zaidi’s Giants were pilloried for being half-hearted and money-conscious while the Dodgers and Padres were spending like they had unlimited dying parents, and they were particularly crushed for having no marquee players with which to suck in the tourists.
All this spurred the team to hire the hyper-popular team legend Buster Posey as Zaidi's replacement, and give him the green light to begin slyly repudiating Zaidi’s perceived over-reliance on numbers; his big offseason move was paying shortstop Willy Adames a Chapman-esque $182 million over seven years. This move, both in terms of what it costs and what it signals, is bigger. It’s too early to say how well the new approach is or isn’t working, but Posey already has a blockbuster under his belt. He got the Devers deal done by 1) answering Red Sox Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow's call, 2) listening to Breslow whine about Devers and misalignment, and 3) convincing team owner Charlie Johnson and his on-site son Greg that a $254 million commitment that includes deferred money until 2043 is just the cost o' doin' bidness. And just like that, the Giants finally got their big-name guy, and Posey got to make a rival exec look like Nico Harrison.
That is how the nation sees the Devers deal, anyway—as another example of the Red Sox going cheap and chesty at the same time after giving up first on Mookie Betts and then on Chris Sale. Add to that the Bruins' trading Brad Marchand and a potential Stanley Cup to the Florida Panthers, and you've got some flinty New Englanders working overtime to suppress their emotions.
But in the Bay Area, where the Giants are fighting for market share with the Valkyries down the street and the cricket-playing Unicorns across the pond, the Devers trade shows the fan base that the Giants are finally willing to do the thing that pleases fans the most—throw some money into a kiln and sort through the ash later. Those fans fetishized the three World Series they won with allegedly low payrolls even though they ranked ninth, eighth, and fifth in that CEO-porn statistic; they were particularly snippy that their only winning year in the Zaidi era was with a team of average players all having career years simultaneously. Now, for the first time in a long time, they have a lineup stocked with players who actually get selected in fantasy baseball drafts. Well, three of them, anyway.
This, then, is Weirdo Christmas for Giants fans, because the next best thing to winning a championship is spending like the Ecuadorian navy on leave to get one player. It isn't so much that Devers represents a parade as much as he represents a willingness by the home side to spend with the big kids; it helps, surely, that the guy overseeing the spending is a club icon. It is early enough that fans can blithely dismiss the notion that Devers might get cranky about not displacing Chapman at third base—that’s not an option for obvious reasons, the most obvious of which is the Gold Glove that Chapman won just last year—the way he snipped about being moved off third base by Alex Bregman in Boston. That's just a chance they are willing to let Posey take.
That last part, the Buster Posey apect, should never be dismissed in the sub-category of cheap thrills, even if it is only due to the reflected abuse being showered upon the Red Sox. The fact is, Rafael Devers and all his skills will take side stage to the bigger story in San Francisco, which is that Buster Posey Got A Guy And He Costs A Crapload. Until the new star gives fans something to cheer for, they’ll be happy to cheer for the one they’ve cheered for before.
