#35 The Red Sox just love to trade their best hitter

Rafael Devers reactions. Plus: Seeking to understand the Tigers

Well then, guess we have to talk about that trade.

Hey, it’s Zach. First: Hannah and I quickly react to the surprise Sunday night deal in which the Red Sox sent Rafael Devers to the Giants. Next, I try to make sense of the Detroit Tigers. Then we’re all going to take some deep breaths because, sure, Shohei Ohtani is returning to the mound as a pitcher tonight against the Padres. Onward.

ZC: If the Red Sox have one organizational philosophy over the past half decade or so, it’s a willingness to stick it to their fans to spite their face of the franchise.

Trading Rafael Devers is not nearly the travesty that trading Mookie Betts was, but it’s another case of John Henry’s ownership group (and their revolving door front office) running into an obstacle with a crucial star player and saying, essentially, “Ah, screw it.”

This obstacle, to be fair, was not one the team created on its own. The Devers positional saga was ridiculous, and a poor reflection on him — to sum it up, he didn’t want to move off third base when they acquired a better defensive third baseman, then refused to step up and help the team by playing first base when starter Triston Casas got hurt, all despite his massive guaranteed contract. Something was going to have to give there, if he was to maintain any credibility in Boston. This … is not what I thought would give.

Boston’s hasty decision to offload Devers (and the remainder of his $313.5 million deal) like this marks another immediate surrender when management is asked to do anything uncomfortable to put the best team on the field. Even though his best position at this point is designated hitter, Devers is still just 28 years old. By park-adjusted wRC+, he’s a top 20 hitter in MLB this year, and a top 20 hitter MLB over the past five years. 

There are two separate Dumb Things about this from Boston’s perspective.

1. No matter how the calculus of the Devers contract looks long term, he is not a bat you can just plan to replace on the fly while claiming to have postseason ambitions, even with a calvary of top prospects arriving. 

2. If you’ve decided you’re going to do it anyway because of the circumstances — because the baseball player said mean things about you, because he’s a pain and there’s an upcoming roster jam, because of all that plus worries about the contract, whatever — you have to actually create a bidding war to make it worth your while. 

What Craig Breslow, the chief baseball officer, got back from the Giants — fledgling starting pitcher Kyle Harrison and should-be reliever Jordan Hicks, plus two prospects — doesn’t add up for a surefire upper echelon hitter, and it certainly doesn’t add up on June 15 for a team that supposedly wants to be in the hunt. 

Which is exactly why the Giants, surprise contenders in the NL West despite a lack of pop, leapt at the chance to finally, finally land their slugger. They’ve spent the past four years trying to sign a star hitter to a contract that may or may not end up underwater. They’ll rightly take that risk to make a splash.

HK: Frankly, Devers’ public behavior in the positional drama saga was so overtly Bad Teammate that it reflects just how little goodwill the Red Sox front office has accrued in the past six years that this move looks like part of a pattern. And I say it looks like that because it is part of a pattern. It’s impossible to react to this trade without considering how incredible Mookie Betts has been since he was shipped to the Dodgers and how Not Even Still On The Team his return (largely) is. 

Obviously there’s been a regime change between that trade and this one, but there’s something rotten in a front office (or, perhaps, ownership suite) that takes the core of a championship club and not only squanders the contention window they represent, but fails to parlay that talent into a clear, meaningful path forward. 

Either Breslow failed at the first major hurdle of his chief baseball officer career — that is, integrating Alex Bregman in a way that didn’t send the face of your franchise down a path of refusing to step up in the event of serious injury elsewhere — or he never liked the Devers contract that he inherited to begin with and was eager to make the situation so untenable that dumping the salary made sense. I don’t do trade analysis because I’m not enough of a prospect knower but I doubt this will go down as the Kyle Harrison Trade. 

Meanwhile, Buster Posey is not even four years removed from an All-Star caliber season behind the dish and he has already become one of the most effective — in the sense that he is literally having an effect on the landscape — heads of baseball operations. This is a half-baked (at best) take so far but: I like how definitively former-player the moves he’s made feel so far. I often think about people saying that Chris Young (the pitcher-turned-Rangers GM who led the team to a World Series) is more competitive than executives who didn’t come from playing careers. When the Giants agreed to the Devers deal, they were just one game back of the Dodgers. If it works out, it’s an argument in favor of being decisive. 

My actual first reaction to this trade, though, when I first saw the news: Is this how NBA fans feel all the time? 

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Eye of the beholder of the Tigers

By Zach Crizer

So, the Detroit Tigers have the best record in baseball. We’re on a four-month streak, going back to last season, of the Tigers being awesome. Yet my experience of watching them surge to the top of the league has been a little like the few weeks every five years or so when I try to get into English soccer.

There are names I know, but I’m never 100% sure where to look for them when the broadcast flashes the lineup. There are other names that seem important today, but also fleeting, recently arrived from somewhere in the Netherlands, soon to depart for somewhere in Spain.

Clearly, something is working really well. But most days, it feels like you can’t quite figure out where to look to grasp the source of their excellence.