It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when transactions became more important than games, but it is indisputably true that fans love the movement of players and money from locale to locale for the same reason we love gambling—because it is busy, and because it is another chance to display our ignorance.
Until baseball's trade deadline brings July's annual Month of Bargains to a close later today, we can all imagine what our favorite team is going to do in lieu of delivering any actual work product; this will keep us both frothily engaged and emotionally and fiscally tied to the teams that otherwise drag us down. We love when our team is buying and hate when they are selling, because one implies belief and the other despair. Buying rocks, selling sucks.
And then there are the Boston Red Sox making morons of us all.
On June 15, the Red Sox traded their shiniest star, Rafael Devers, for being a persistent recalcitrant about where he would play in the field, if at all. The entire unpleasant phlegm-off ended with Devers being traded to San Francisco for three pitchers and a first baseman, or in real terms for totally ordinary reliever Jordan Hicks and three guys who haven't played for Boston yet. Many folks agreed that the Red Sox had erred by giving up so much for so little and essentially punting on the season, as they were that most contemptible of things, sellers who sold without much thought about the immediate return. The Giants, conversely, were hailed for a rare bold in-season move to stay involved in the hyperkinetic NL West, and new kid on the block Buster Posey was saluted as a potential Executroid of the Year. Even today, it remains the splashiest trade of the season, if only because new Padres closer Mason Miller, acquired in the deadline’s first proper blockbuster, is 1) a closer and 2) still trailing some residual A’s stink.
But the Devers trade happened 45 days ago, when the world was ... OK, still a boiling, decomposing mess, but different. The Red Sox have the third-best record in baseball during that stretch—after Toronto and Milwaukee, the dream World Series—and are actively looking to buy pitching and a first baseman who can hit. The Giants, on the other hand, have the worst record in baseball over the same six and a half weeks and are looking to sell—just make them an offer and they'll be what the Red Sox were back in June. And Devers has been everything the Red Sox hoped he would be when they traded him, which is to say an absolute out machine.
Other than a couple of properly Deversian series against the tedious West Sacramentans and injury-savaged Atlantas, Devers is hitting .169 as a Giant as part of career-worsts in every useful metric. He neither homers (four) nor drives in runs (15) despite playing every day, and just went 0-for-the-Pirates, as did his teammates. The prosecution rests.
While it is unfair, dishonest, and wrong to say that Devers is the reason the Giants have turned bad and the Red Sox good, that requires a level of nuanced analysis we are frankly too lazy to employ. This isn't really about Devers anyway. It's about how every once in a while the seller makes out like a bandit and the buyer looks like a total charlie, and in this case almost instantaneously. The Sawx are now a postseason team, and if the Mew Jays (it's an in-joke, and you can ask Comrade Anantharaman if you're that desperate to learn it) calm down, they could actually swipe the division from them and the Judge-less Yankees. The Giants are desperately trying to fall below the equally for-sale Diamondbacks, and if there weren't four demonstrably more ghastly teams at the bottom of the National League, they'd be among them.
Devers may in time find his happy place in the underforgiving confines of Oracle Park; recent evidence notwithstanding, he has not forgotten how to hit. But that's not how it plays today. He is still the biggest trade piece of 2025, but now for the team that moved him rather than the team that got him. In short, while today is a hoot for the buyers, as it always is, today becomes tomorrow and next week and next month in a hurry, and stupid things can and often do happen despite our best snap judgments.
