Hot Stove Takes: Rafael Devers Will Help Giants, but Let’s Not Get Carried Away

This piece is part of our Hot Stove Takes series, where staff members give quick reactions to the latest notable MLB transactions.

Tom Verducci: The Red Sox traded Rafael Devers under duress and paid down none of his contract, which limited his value. So why trade him? When you sign someone to a 10-year, $313.5 million contract, that’s the kind of commitment to consider the player “the face of the franchise.” And your face of the franchise should set a culture that young players can emulate.

Not playing first base or third base when starters go down at those positions—positions in the spectrum of your defensive prowess, not moving from infield to outfield or corner to middle—is certainly Devers’s right. But it’s also the club's right to expect more. Taking pregame grounders at shortstop last week was just another layer of weirdness to what became a parlor game of guessing Raffy’s mindset.

The Red Sox are not faultless. Owner John Henry, GM Craig Breslow and manager Alex Cora failed to get out in front of potential problems when it came to communicating. But nothing they did changed the fact that the team was in transition to a new, young core and Devers's intransigence was an obstacle. He should be happier in San Francisco after losing faith in the Boston front office.

The Giants are the winners of this deal today because they added an impact hitter in his prime without disrupting the major league team. Their pitching depth made Jordan Hicks and Kyle Harrison superfluous. The Giants have not had a left-handed hitter hit 30 home runs since Barry Bonds in 2004, and none other than Bonds since Will Clark 38 years ago. They must pay Devers, a full-time DH when Matt Chapman gets off the IL, $250 million over eight and a half years. That’s a worry for another day. His contract already doesn’t look so bad after the money paid to Juan Soto and Vlad Guerrero Jr.

Will Laws: This deal is being widely compared to the Red Sox’s disastrous trade of Mookie Betts in 2020. But I’d be shocked if this deal ages nearly as poorly as that one has. Yes, that’s setting a low bar. But Devers has never been the sort of player Betts is and his contract very well could’ve turned into an albatross long before it expires in 2033.

Devers has been a top-15 player this season in terms of offensive value, according to FanGraphs. But he’s 35th in terms of fWAR largely due to his poor baserunning and lack of defensive value. Devers has never finished in the top 10 of American League MVP voting. Betts has seven top-10 MVP placements. Betts likewise has seven seasons where he’s been more valuable by bWAR than Devers was in his best season—and that was back in 2019, the year of the juiced ball. And let’s not forget that while Devers refused to pick his glove back up in his team’s time of need after being slated as Boston’s full-time designated hitter before this season—which he was well within his rights to do—Betts has not only been willing to play multiple positions for the Dodgers over the last several years but has excelled at doing so.

Devers is a fearsome slugger, and the Red Sox are now worse than they were Sunday morning. This should also be an excellent deal for the Giants, who have long needed an infusion of power into their lineup. But Boston boasts a wealth of hitting talent and a pitching staff in need of some reinforcements, and now has the opportunity to spend the $245 million or so it still owed Devers elsewhere.

Former Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom was forced by team ownership to trade Betts and never did enough to improve the roster to fill the void left by the former MVP’s departure. He was fired after the 2023 season as a result.

Bloom’s successor, Craig Breslow, just acquired the Giants’ former top prospect, 23-year-old pitcher Kyle Harrison, as part of the return for Devers, as well as pitcher Jordan Hicks and San Francisco’s No. 2 prospect in outfielder James Tibbs III. It’s not enough to make up for the loss of Devers, but it’s a start. Let’s see if Breslow uses some of his newfound payroll space to further upgrade Boston’s pitching staff this season before prematurely sentencing him to the same fate as Bloom.