We’ve had this date since the beginning.
I got into a friend’s car at 6:55 tonight and we started chatting about our lives, the way you do when you’re in a car with a friend, and I silenced my phone so we could do so, because it’s polite and, frankly, my friend is more important than my screen. By the time we were at his house and had talked through enough of our lives that it was safe enough to take a peek, I saw that I had missed many Slack messages and an ESPN notification, but that’s not entirely uncommon, given the ravenous appetite of the engagement economy, so I didn’t think much of it. It was only when I looked again that I saw Rafael Devers had been traded to the San Francisco Giants for a bunch of guys who may or may not end up being relevant to the Red Sox now or in the future, but this deal wasn’t about them and never will be. This trade — like this decade — was about Devers, John Henry, Chaim Bloom and the disastrous set of circumstances set in motion by the Mookie Betts trade, which has finally run its entire course in the inevitable trade of the player who was supposed to salvage the reputation of everyone involved in that idiotic, deliberate, previous debacle. If this is another disaster, so be it, but it’s not surprising, even if it was shocking. This was always going to be how it ended, and now it has. The piper has been paid, and the Sox aren’t even sending money this time.
There will be inevitable comparisons to the Mookie trade and they will be wrong, because this isn’t an in-kind move as much as it is a narrative capstone to that particularly world-historical stupid piece of business. The 2020 Red Sox were less than two years removed from being one of the greatest baseball teams of all time, one without any serious non-financial issues with which to contend, when Henry, Bloom and co decided to aim metaphorical guns at their metaphorical dicks and pull the triggers. There was no reason for it, and outside of the miracle run to the 2021 ALCS, the Karmic payback has been brutally effective and not subtle whatsoever. They let Xander Bogaerts walk in what was a depressing but ultimately thematically coherent commitment to the “financial responsibility” bit, only to desperately sign Devers to a lifetime extension after Henry got booed at a hockey game at Fenway Park. The subsequent economy of stories about how the Sox “pulled off” what was a garden-variety superstar contract signing were as embarrassing as the predicament the team had gotten into, the very same one that made the deal necessary, and laid the groundwork for today’s move.
To be crystal clear, it was obvious at the time of the extension that the Red Sox didn’t actually want to offer it and that Devers, presented with the chance to be showered with cash, was left in no position to turn it down. It was a high-society marriage of convenience, and it has gone as you’d expect. He’s continued to put on a pretty face — he’s still a goddamn beast at the plate — but his relationship with the ruling family has been deteriorating in real time since he put pen to paper. It didn’t help that, like as is the case so many ruling families, he got treated like garbage by inbred aristocrats, nor did it help that he balked at the extremely convenient suggestion that he learn first base in the wake of Triston Casas’s season-ending injury. It’s entirely unsurprising that early reporting on the trade suggests Devers wanted out before the season even began, because it informs his unwillingness to make the plainly obvious move across the diamond. He was already checked out, at least on the field, having departed once his glove was taken away from him.
To Devers’s credit, he didn’t let the position switch and a world-historic early season slump affect him at the plate; he’s currently in the top 10 in FanGraphs WAR in hitting for position players in the American League. Contra to what some Devers-disparaging clowns have said in my distinguished-enough group chat, and many in the mainstream press are sure to say in the next 72 hours, there’s no reason to think his bat will slow down in the next few years. Yes, he’s a hefty boy, but he’s far better than he is heavy, and projecting anyone out a decade is a fool’s errand and not particularly relevant to any front office discussion, especially when the leaders of said front offices change with reckless abandon. Especially given how fantastic he’s been this year, there’s no reason to think Devers will be anything other than a good-to-great hitter before the 2028 presidential election, assuming there is such a thing, and the Giants should be better off for it.
Are the Red Sox better off as a team today than they were yesterday? Of course not. Are they better off as an organization? Almost certainly not, but there’s a chance. But unlike the Mookie trade, they had this date from the beginning. There wasn’t a single player in the organization who had lived through as much bullshit as Devers in recent years, and while we’d like mismanagement to just roll off the back of employees, it simply doesn’t work that way. Devers was rightfully fed up, and now he has the chance to reinvent himself in San Francisco as an archnemesis of Betts’s mighty Dodgers and antagonist of Bogey’s forever-upstart Padres. The Red Sox will get what they always wanted: A team full of cost-controlled players (minus the hiccups of Trevor Story and Masa Yoshida) plus Garrett Crochet, ready to compete if and when they gel as we desperately hope they do. Make no mistake, though: Devers, like Bogaerts, was gone as soon as Mookie was, and at least now we can finally stop arranging deck chairs on a luxury liner that’s long since departed. As sad as it is to see him go — and it is sad — there’s just one thing left to do: Bring us that horizon.