When Garrett Whitlock struck out Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Volpe to get the final outs of the Red Sox’ weekend sweep over the Yankees, the 2025 Boston baseball season was at its high-water mark.
They’d won five straight and seven of eight, all against good teams. Their starters were pitching better and they were a half game out of the wild card.
It finally felt safe to at least start feeling enthusiastic about the Red Sox. They were still flawed, but the sun was breaking through the clouds.
Now?
It’s hard to know what to feel, other than shock, after the Red Sox traded Rafael Devers to the Giants on Sunday.
It feels like a massive overreaction.
The Red Sox are in a playoff race. They traded their best player for a questionable return that makes them worse in the present. They’d need a lot to go right for it to make them better in the future.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Red Sox went from being a smart, shrewd organization to one prone to wild pendulum swings, changing leaders and plans.
Nobody emerged from the third-base-DH-first-base slap-fight looking good. The Red Sox came off as dysfunctional. They couldn’t get on the same page with their franchise player and let the whole thing become public. They embarrassed themselves and their best player.
Devers came off looking petulant and not committed to winning.
But as bad as it was, there was no line in the sand. Everybody could have come back from this and saved face.
But the first reaction should have been letting it cool off. Even if that took the rest of the year. In a perfect world, Devers would have become a functional first baseman for the Red Sox. But since that didn’t happen, the next best option was him being an All-Star-caliber designated hitter, drilling balls off and over the Green Monster, instead of him knocking them into McCovey Cove.
Yes, Devers’ maturity too often seemed to match his baby face. But he could always hit. He tormented the Yankees, crushed good fastballs and never seemed intimidated by a big moment.
MassLive’s Chris Cotillo reported that Devers did not demand a trade despite being frustrated with Boston’s leadership. He was simply OK with the possibility of one.
The Red Sox had leverage, but instead acted like a team making a move before the deadline to avoid losing a pending free agent for nothing. Devers was signed for eight more seasons. The two sides could have patched things up and found something else to be mad about four more times before there was any real risk of him leaving. They had time to let everyone settle down and get over it.
Plus, despite whatever anger Devers was feeling, he was still hitting. Devers belted a solo home run off of Max Fried, one of the best pitchers in baseball, on Sunday.
“I feel good. I feel like I’ve adapted really well and now I’m just playing baseball,” he said. “We’re playing good baseball and even more when the young kids are here and learning how to play winning baseball. That’s very good for us.”
That doesn’t sound like a guy who was checked out.
The Red Sox didn’t wait until the July 31 trade deadline — or the winter — to move on from Devers. Kyle Harrison and James Tibbs III might have a chance to be good players, but both have had setbacks that call their ceilings into question. Hicks is at best a bullpen arm and Bello is a long way from the big leagues.
Devers was a proven star. He might not be in great shape, but he was durable and reliable. The Red Sox could pencil him in for 145 games and around 30 homers a year.
This ratchets up the pressure on the prized rookies to deliver now because they don’t have Devers or any other accomplished slugger to protect them in the lineup.
Whatever goodwill the front office got by committing to Devers, acquiring and extending Garrett Crochet and signing Alex Bregman feels fraudulent now that they’re no longer on the hook for the $250 million they still owed Devers before Sunday.
So once again, a star player’s tenure with the Red Sox has ended badly. The reasons are different, but the result is the same. Devers joins Betts, Bogaerts, Mo Vaughn, Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Adrian Gonzalez, Johnny Damon, Curt Schilling, David Price and so many others to leave with a bad taste in their mouth.
The deal leaves countless questions unanswered:
Do the Red Sox owners see this team as a playoff contender? That’s an awfully hard sell with this lineup.
If so, are they lining up a trade for an impact bat?
Will they reinvest the feed-up Devers money into another star?
If not, are they getting ready to deal Bregman, Walker Buehler, Aroldis Chapman and others?
The next few weeks should be telling, and they could be ugly.
