The Red Sox Trade Rafael Devers

And ruin Father's Day

I spent the weekend at my parent’s house, to celebrate Father’s Day and to watch the last two games of the Red Sox-Yankees series. After the pulse pounding win on Saturday, I was feeling brazen on Sunday morning and donned my Rafael Devers shirt. Not out of cockiness after a guaranteed series win against New York, but as much to tweak the Old Man just a little bit. I am an unabashed Raffy defender and Dad loves to needle me about “my man’s” momentary offensive limitations.

Moments after finding out that Devers had been traded. The shirt reads “They pay me good, I play baseball and I hit homers.” Which was a quote from Devers before he ever became the highest paid player in team history. (Photo Credit: The Sterling Collection.")

Regardless, on Father’s day, against one of the best pitchers in the American League, left hander Max Fried, Devers homered and led the Sox to a series sweep of the Yankees. And life was sweet for a few hours. Upon arriving back at home, I decided to mow the lawn and even opted not to change out of my Devers’ paraphernalia. I was feeling that good, I wanted to soak in the sweep as long as I could. I listened to Country Gold whilst I cut the grass, the sun was setting over the hill, you could smell the lilacs out front wherever I mowed and life couldn’t get much sweeter.

However, when I jumped off the mower to grab the weed whacker, I made the mistake of checking my phone. On it was 15 texts that all said variations of the same thing: we traded Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants.

This is indefensible on every level, from every angle and look, I know very little about the cacophony of players that we got back from the Giants but sort of like having two quarterbacks, if you’re trading one player for 4 or 5, the chances of you getting the better of the deal are decidedly low. In that regard, it feels like the Mookie Betts deal all over again, which was probably less defensible, because in that case we not only lost Betts, but we were also sentenced to watching Alex Verdugo play right field for the following 4-years.

In the immediate, the Red Sox just got way worse and didn’t fix the roster issues that they have. On Thursday’s episode of the Section 10 podcast, they discussed how the Red Sox biggest problem is that they have too many guys. So instead of condensing, or packaging a couple of players and trading them elsewhere, we took on more guys! The Red Sox positional logjam is in the outfield, so we trade the DH to make room in the everyday lineup for……..Connor Wong? Masataka Yoshida? Gold Glover Wilyer Abreu? Nick Sogard?

Reports are that “The team’s feeling was that a $313.5 million contract comes with responsibilities to do what is right for the team and Devers did not live up to those responsibilities.” Translated: “We paid you a lot of money, you do what we say or else.” That’s a great message to send to the rest of the roster. It’s been evident since they systematically dismantled the 2018-best-team-in-franchise-history, that they wanted to go with another youth movement. And that the contract extension they signed Devers’ to before the 2023 season was an empty gesture. They did it to assuage the fan base’s notion that ownership doesn’t care and now they’ve traded the only core, home grown player from 2018 that they “made an effort to retain” but sent him packing because he “wasn’t a company man.”

They will now build around Marcelo Mayer, Roman Anthony and Kristian Campbell. They got Campbell to sign one of those Scottie Pippen extensions early, but after this glaring example to Mayer and Anthony that this is first and foremost a business, I don’t expect that they’ll be overly eager to do the same.

Part of what has me so angry with this move is that it was all so avoidable. If they had communicated to Devers this winter that they were going to pursue Alex Bregman and he might move to DH, I feel like we would have avoided these hard feelings. Then Casas gets hurt, they want him to now place 1^st base, but both sides are dug in and both sides have hurt feelings. So then Bregman goes down too, and the horse it out of the barn on Devers want to play in the field, he doesn’t want to return. (I think Devers wasn’t aware of what DHing was until he tried it and realized it was all he ever wanted in life.)

The Red Sox couldn’t have handled this situation any worse. There is a lot of blame to go around for how poorly this was handled, from ownership, to GM (whatever his title is) Craig Breslow to Alex Cora. I blame Henry for finding a way to get out of paying a top of the market deal. Breslow for trading away a personnel move that he handled poorly. And for Cora for letting Breslow bury himself alive just to prove that he can handle a shovel.

The timing is so bizarre. If the Red Sox were a 4^th place team, wildly underachieving and sitting in 4^th place 10 games out of 1^st place, I could understand them becoming sellers. (Dealing a Chapman or Buehler or Giolito.) But after winning 7 out of 8 this week, all against teams ahead of you in the division and taking 5 out of 6 vs the first place Yankees (ahem, Devers hit 3 home runs in those 6 games) and just as you have some modicum of success and positive momentum surrounding the team, you trade the face of the franchise? (Who also happened to be a certifiable YANKEE KILLER! Yankees fans are happier than Giants fans about this trade. How tickled is Gerrit Cole right now? I think I’m going to be sick again.)

Going into the season, the heart of the order was supposed to be Devers, Bregman and Casas. On Monday night, none of them will be in your lineup and only one of them will wear the uniform of the Boston Red Sox again this season. Meanwhile, Raffy joins Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts and Don Orsillo in the National League West.

Am I overreacting? You’re underreacting! This is a tick below Mookie Betts and Babe Ruth. This is at the very least on par with the stupidity of letting Fisk, Lynn and Burleson walk out the door in 1981 and probably worse! I so badly want to cancel my NESN 360 subscription, and save $30 bucks a month and not watch a lineup with as much thump the stock end of a pound of bologna rolling off the slicer and onto the floor. But I can’t, I’m an addict and they know it. I’ll never quit this team, but there isn’t much to get high on anymore. For 3 hours today we were a team going in the right direction.

Now we’re rebuilding the bridge to nowhere.