Regarding Raffy

For one fleeting, iridescent spark of a moment, the Red Sox were back. And then they traded Rafael Devers.

That’s at least how it felt yesterday when, mere hours after sweeping the Yankees out of Fenway Park, Boston dealt its franchise cornerstone to San Francisco in a trade that sent shockwaves through the baseball universe and threatened to ruin Father’s Day for dads across New England.

I can say with total earnestness and a complete lack of irony and that Sunday, June 15th 2025 is one of the most shameful days in Red Sox history. Here’s the official list, in no particular order:

• January 5, 1920:The Red Sox sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000
• April 1945: The Red Sox hold a tryout for Jackie Robinson and other Negro Leaguers, but ultimately do not sign him in large part due to then-owner Tom Yawkey’s refusal to sign black players. They would repeat this cycle again in 1949 with Willie Mays. The Red Sox would ultimately be the the last Major League Baseball team to integrate, in 1959.¹
• February 4, 2020: Mookie Betts is traded to the Dodgers (along with David Price in a salary dump) for Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs, and Connor Wong.
• June 15th, 2025: Boston sends Rafael Devers to the Giants for pitchers Jordan Hicks and Kyle Harrison, plus outfield prospect James Tibbs and rookie-ball pitching prospect Jose Bello.² If that return seems underwhelming to you, maybe it’s because the Red Sox reportedly didn’t shop Devers much, if at all, before trading him. As if that makes any sense whatsoever.³

There have been plenty of poor trades in Red Sox history. Those happen to every team. But those four moves (or, in the case of Robinson/Mays, non-moves due to disgusting prejudice) go a step beyond a chess opening gone awry. And while there is precedence in 21st century Red Sox history for dealing a disgruntled superstar (see how Nomar Garciaparra and Manny Ramirez’s tenures ended in Boston for more), the Devers trade still managed to be shocking to the point of embarrassing.

Here’s the unofficial timeline of events, as far as I can see it:

• The Red Sox trade Mookie Betts in February 2020.
• After a rocky 2020 season, surprising ALCS run in 2021, and mediocre 2022 (capped by franchise shortstop Xander Bogaerts departing in free agency in December), John Henry and Red Sox ownership are booed at the team’s Winter Weekend event. This shames him enough open the wallet for Rafael Devers, to the tune of a franchise-record 10-year, $313.5 million contract extension.
• After another uneven season in 2024, one where FSG promised to go “full throttle”⁴ to improve the team in the offseason, the Red Sox sign star third baseman Alex Bregman. As it turns out, the plan is not for Bregman to play second base, but third base. Rafael Devers, who is nominally a third baseman and was promised by former Chief of Baseball Operations Chaim Bloom the right to play that position, is unhappy with this but reluctantly accepts that he will be the team’s DH in 2025.
• In May, first baseman Triston Casas suffered a season-ending knee injury. Current President of Baseball Operations Craig Breslow asked Devers to play first base. Devers, very publicly, declined. This spawned thinkpieces galore. Was Devers right that the front office was jerking around and disrespecting their star player? Should star players do whatever is best for the team? Would Devers (again, a notoriously poor fielder) playing a new position even be what was best for the team? What did his teammates make of all this?⁵
• It seemed like the story had finally started to blow over. John Henry allegedly met with Devers, and Raffy raked. The Red Sox struggled in May, though how much blame can be laid at the feet of Devers, who has hit .292/.417/.532 since April 2nd and has generally been Boston’s best hitter this year, is debatable. The Sox took 2 of 3 from the Yankees in the Bronx last weekend, then swept them this weekend to push above .500 (and into a tie for the last Wild Card spot) for the first time since May 24th. Devers homered in the 5th inning in the series finale Sunday afternoon, an opposite-field laser off Yankees ace Max Fried that just eked over the Monster.⁶ He was a Giant⁷ before the sun set.

I was disappointed that Devers refused to play first base after Casas’ injury, while also kind of agreeing with him. Breslow and the front office were stringing him along a bit, and while I (along with any other fan) would hope their team’s franchise player would do what is “best” for the team, I could see why Raffy reacted the way he did.

The fact of the matter is that regardless on where you land on the Devers situation, trading him in what is effectively a salary dump because of that disconnect is a fucking joke. It’s a joke that Breslow, Cora, and company let the relationship between player and organization fracture to the point that it did. It’s a joke that the Red Sox, a supposedly big market franchise, are scared to pay one of the best hitters in the American League $30 million a year until he’s 36 years old. Not 38. Not 40. 36.⁸ It’s a joke that John Henry and FSG, 18 months removed from “full throttle”, have traded away the team’s best bat and the only remaining player from the 2018 World Series champs. They shipped off Betts in 2020 to, in their words, be able to pay the other guys. That didn’t happen, and I don’t know how they can reasonably expect fans to take them at their word ever again.

I mentioned Manny and Nomar earlier, and this trade probably fits in best with those two mid-season moves. All three situations featured disgruntled star players at odds with management, but only Devers got dealt in his prime and under a long term commitment. Nomar was 30, in the last year of his contract and starting to slip; in 2004 he was a far cry from the elite hitter he was from 1998-2000,⁹ and he was becoming injury prone and a defensive liability. Manny was in the final year of his deal as well and even older, though still an elite hitter. Devers is 28 and having perhaps his best season at the plate yet. He’s a Yankee Killer, an indispensable attribute for stars in Boston. He’s also under contract for the next 8.5 years. Good luck convincing other stars to come here and stay here if this is how the team treats players they’ve “committed” to.¹⁰ For the Red Sox to not find some common ground and sort this out is a massive organizational failure.

After Xander Bogaerts signed with the Padres in December 2022,¹¹ I wrote about how the infamous Curse of the Bambino wasn’t really a curse at all. It was decades of organizational incompetence that left the Sox always a piece short of what they needed to achieve their ultimate goal. Selling Babe Ruth was the first domino to fall, but he crucially wasn’t the only player that the Red Sox shipped off. That was a nuclear apocalypse-level mistake, but the franchise compounded that error over and over again in the years that followed.

Trading a generational player like Mookie Betts? That’s catastrophic for any team, but especially a team that has no excuse not to keep him like the Red Sox. Trading Rafael Devers because your head of baseball operations got his feelings hurt and your ownership group is scared to commit to the team? That’s how curses are born. The Red Sox are making their bed. Let’s hope we don’t have to lie in it until 2104.

1. Ok I lied, the first two are still pretty far ahead of the other two (Ruth for being reprehensible on a sports level, and Robinson/Mays for being reprehnsible on a moral level) ↩︎
2. Please do not look up anyone’s statistics mentioned in this trade. Especially not Jordan Hick’s 6.57 ERA. And don’t look up Tibbs’ position and handedness, unless you’re as curious as I am just how many lefty outfielders the Red Sox can stuff in their system. ↩︎
3. I fear we’ve been Nico’d. ↩︎
4. Whatever you consider “full throttle” to be, I promise the 2024 offseason was not it. ↩︎
5. I can only imagine what Stephen A. Smith’s First Take histrionics about this situation would have been like if baseball was still a national sport. ↩︎
6. His 31st against the Yankees, more than any other active player. Good thing we got rid of this guy! ↩︎
7. The Red Sox play a three game series against the Giants in San Francisco starting Friday. I hope Raffy goes 12/12 with 12 bombs. ↩︎
8. For the record, Vlad Guerrero Jr. will be making $29.4 million at age 40, and Juan Soto could be be making $55 million at age 40. So yeah, Devers’ contract ending at 36 is a pretty solid deal. ↩︎
9. Nomar from 1998-2000: 150 wRC+. Nomar from 2001-04: 123 wRC+. ↩︎
10. They’ve already pretty much destroyed their reputation in the Japanese market with how they’ve exiled Masataka Yoshida to the void. Although, maybe this trade means he’ll be rescued for the second half of the year. Your guess is as good as mine. ↩︎
11. In hindsight, this seems like a bullet dodged. Bogaerts hasn’t been good for San Diego and his contract is undeniably the sports biggest albatross. Still, it’s the principle of the thing dammit! ↩︎