Forget Mookie Betts. Rafael Devers is an organization failure to trump them all.
Losing Rafael Devers via trade, in this fashion, is an issue with fault up and down the Red Sox organization.
COMMENTARY
More Red Sox
Three hours. You got three hours to enjoy it.
The Red Sox finished their weekend sweep of the Yankees a shade after 4 p.m. on a sunny Sunday at Fenway Park. Five wins in a row, five of six against what had been the AL’s second-best team, all in remarkable fashion. (And not just because it came in the greens, then the yellows, then the whites.)
Friday night walkoff from Carlos Narváez, picked straight from the rivals, to make that all-world Aaron Judge/Garrett Crochet moment something we all could enjoy. Saturday magic from Hunter Dobbins, whose story these last two weekends alone is hard to believe. (Ironic, that!) Sunday, Brayan Bello over Max Fried? By shutout? Three more Judge strikeouts, to cap a 1-for-12 from a guy who was hitting .392 with jackhammer power when he got here?
“The team is getting into a rhythm,” Bello told reporters via translator.
“It sucks losing to the Red Sox. We never like that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters. “They were a little bit better than us this weekend.”
“It was loud, it was fun. People showed up early, and they were into every pitch,” Sox manager Alex Cora told reporters. “They even stood up with two strikes. I haven’t seen that in a while here.”
May not have been since 2021. Or 2018. Or 1620. What is time, anyway, when three of those feel by this Monday morning like they happened late in the Eisenhower administration?
Time’s the thing that had ticked off three hours when it stopped. When “The San Francisco Giants are acquiring All-Star slugger Rafael Devers from the Boston Red Sox” reached the world.
I read it at 7:01. Maybe you were locked in on the US Open and got a few extra minutes. I spent most of those assuming I was somehow looking at the stats for the wrong Jordan Hicks.
We can dispense with trade analysis beyond one number: $254 million, the full remaining weight of the 2023 Devers extension the Red Sox just freed themselves of. That they got four living baseball players — two low-minors lotto tickets, plus Hicks (whom they tried to sign in the 2023-24 offseason) and 23-year-old lefty Kyle Harrison (whom they optioned to Worcester on Sunday night) — feels the same this second as if they got four shrunken A’s hats and a half-eaten Ghirardelli square.
The odds are long any of them will provide the value that Rafael Devers did consistently the past eight seasons, and figured to the next few at least. They certainly won’t in 2025, when the struggles were supposed to stop, and where it appeared the Red Sox were scratching toward what passes for contention in Rob Manfred’s MLB — i.e. having nominally more substance than four hats and a chocolate.
Of course, all this is not inexplicable. Sunday is quite explicable, even amid the shock. It was Craig Breslow’s predecessor Chaim Bloom who signed Devers to that massive extension in January 2023. An extension that came in the froth after Xander Bogaerts was shown the door, which was to be a further drag on a franchise whose NESN ratings had already cratered 35 percent, whose attendance had already dropped to pre-John Henry levels, whose owner (who also owns Boston Globe Media Partners, including Boston.com) got booed at the Winter Classic.
“It’s a wonderful thing to retain a homegrown player who loves Boston and who Boston and Red Sox Nation loves back,” Bloom said back then, right before he folded up his notes and gave us that awesome soliloquy.
We knew then some of what we know now: Devers in the 2030s won’t be the prettiest sight. Some of us, I suspect, also knew that he wasn’t going to be the best fit — or even a good fit — for a locker-room leader and face of the franchise, but that his production would make that palatable.
None of us knew the 2025 story. Alex Bregman, “third base is my position,” 0 for 21 giving way to dominance as a first-year DH, Triston Casas’s knee, “I think they should do their job,” the owner goes to Kansas City, the stud prospects show more willingness to be flexible than the player awarded the largest contract in franchise history.
Feel about it how you feel; I’m not in the lecture business. Same with the idea of payroll flexibility or resource reallocation or whatever cornucopia of syllables we get out of the spin room on Monday.
Even the most lopsided, short-sighted, crotch-kick trade can be a good one if the shrapnel can get repurposed right. That’s a skill issue and a luck issue, but at its core, it’s a trust issue.
That Breslow didn’t attempt to earn Devers’s, that he didn’t communicate with his highest-paid player about pursuing a Gold Glover who would displace him from his position, is as black a mark as any Chris Sale for Vaughn Grissom trade.
Rafael Devers was a lot of things for the Red Sox since he broke in at 20 in the summer of 2017. A malcontent wasn’t one of them until this season, in a city and an organization where superstars get slimed if they’re gone the length of a coffee run.
He called out Breslow, produced without parallel for another sloppy team with ill-fitting pieces, got called “hard-headed” in May, and got called a cab in June hours after his 500th Red Sox extra-base hit. (No player in team history ever did it younger.)
It is nothing less than an organizational failure, in a way that even trumps the Mookie Betts transaction that the whole world has been referencing since 7 p.m. on Sunday. It is an organizational failure with many fathers across mastheads and spreadsheets, Devers among them, but one that makes clear even in the good times, how they view all this will never be how you view all this.
Usually, that’s a good thing. Reactionary fanaticism is not the best foundation for longterm sustainability.
Neither is an office address in the Fenway these days. For something that’s supposedly their north star, it makes you wonder whether they’ve been staring into the wrong end of the telescope the last seven years.
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com