When the Red Sox closed out their three-game series at home against the Yankees on Sunday afternoon, spirits were high. The win made for a sweep of their division rivals and put the Red Sox half a game back of a wild card spot. A middling rotation haunted Boston for much of the season and especially in early June, but now they’d won on the strength of their pitching, which held Yankees bats to four total runs all weekend.
At the start of the week, Roman Anthony, the top prospect in baseball, joined Kristian Campbell and Marcelo Mayer in the big leagues to complete the arrival of the team’s long-awaited "Big Three" prospect trio. If these young, promising lads weren’t exactly contributing “hits” as they adjusted to MLB pitching, they still kept the vibes all nice and hopeful. It doesn't get much better than this, some fathers and their children celebrating at Fenway may have thought, as they watched Rafael Devers clobber an insurance solo homer onto the ledge of the Green Monster.
Correct! This would also be Devers’s last hit in a Red Sox uniform. Hours after the sweep, the team traded their star slugger to the Giants less than two years into the 10-year, $313 million extension he signed before the 2023 season—a stunning mid-season resolution to some drama unfolding in public for a while.
Devers’s relationship with the front office had been on the rocks since February. On the eve of spring training, the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman in a splashy move. While there was some chatter at the time that Bregman might play second to keep Devers at his long-time position at third, the team eventually did move the poorer defender Devers to DH, a move he met with refusal and then grudging acceptance. When first baseman Triston Casas tore something in his knee trying to beat out a ground ball in early May, “chief baseball officer” Craig Breslow asked Devers if he could play first, a suggestion Devers met with no acceptance at all.
Devers told reporters he felt yanked around by the team: “I know I'm a ballplayer, but at the same time, they can't expect me to play every single position out there. In spring training, they talked to me and basically told me to put away my glove, that I wasn't going to play any other position but DH.” Some team envoys, including Breslow and owner John Henry, flew to Kansas City to mend things with Devers the following day, but until Sunday’s trade, he’d kept DHing.
The trade says that Breslow didn’t feel obligated to keep promises made by the old regime. His predecessor, Chaim Bloom, signed Devers to an extension that many people read as a concession after the Mookie Betts trade and Xander Bogaerts’s departure in free agency. An ESPN story about the Devers extension notes that “sentiment had grown in the front office, according to multiple sources, that the team needed to make a move 'for the fans' after that backlash.” ESPN’s Jeff Passan said that while no team’s model particularly liked the Devers contract, the trade “has executives across baseball confounded.”
The Red Sox giving a homegrown star the boot naturally brings to mind the Betts trade. That might be an imperfect comparison here; Betts is something like the opposite of a DH. But where the Betts trade was rationalized as getting something for an “expiring deal,” the Red Sox are likely trading away multiple good offensive seasons from Devers, who is one of the best hitters in baseball, the best hitter in the Red Sox lineup, and only 28. The trade gives the team financial flexibility and freedom from a deal the new front office may not have ever liked. It also makes the Red Sox offense unambiguously worse.
Which is a weird thing for a team very much in the wild card race to do right now! The Red Sox are getting Cy Young-caliber pitching from Garrett Crochet and—before he went on the IL with a quad injury—a superstar season from Bregman. He will most likely opt out at the end of the year, making this one of the more complicated and consequential one-year deals a team has ever signed. The return for Devers—Jordan Hicks, a pair of younger pitching prospects, and a 22-year-old hitting prospect whose FanGraphs prospect report projects him to be a platoon outfielder—does not seem so great that that this trade could not have waited until winter. Why punt now?
The Giants, for their part, have landed the kind of power bat that tends to elude them in free agency. No Giant has hit 30 home runs in a season since Barry Bonds in 2004. If the Boston homers still count toward his total, Devers is halfway there. Jon Heyman reports that Devers is “happy” with the trade. His reluctance to move to DH was hopefully more about the principle of the thing than any real desire to play third base. The hot corner in San Francisco has been accounted for since Matt Chapman signed his six-year extension last fall.
