Rafael Devers is now a San Francisco Giant...
- Om Brown
- Jun 17
- 5 min read
I’ll keep this as short as possible. The Boston Red Sox are an utterly incompetent team. A total joke of a franchise. It really is sad to see. On June 15th, they sent the last member of the 2018 World Championship team to the San Francisco Giants, a team they play in just three days. This player is the best DH in the AL, a 3-time All-Star, and 2-time Silver Slugger, all at just 28 years old. Rafael Devers is gone.
To the owner of the Red Sox, John Henry:
Please sell the team. Since the last World Series win in 2018, you have not been focused on the team. The lack of spending and urgency in 2023 and 2024 lost many fans, and despite efforts made this past offseason, you are a coward. You did not want to pay Mookie Betts (I’ll get to this later), you did not want to pay Xander Bogaerts, and now you won’t pay the approximately $250 million left on Devers' deal. It's embarrassing. As much as I and all of Red Sox Nation hate the Yankees, at least their owner, Hal Steinbrenner, cares. Please sell the team. You don’t deserve the power anymore, dipsh*t.
To the GM of the Red Sox, Craig Breslow:
Yes, you unload around $250 million. However, it's not a guarantee that you'll be able to bring in good players, let alone someone to replace a Top-5 or Top-10 bat in the league. I understand the Mookie Betts trade now. He was a free agent at the end of the 2020 season. Devers was set to be in Boston for life. These trades are not the same. You’d better hope that Roman Anthony and Marcelo Meyer are the next coming of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, because this trade makes you even worse than Chaim Bloom, the GM who traded Betts. Bloom drafted and developed the farm system (which includes Anthony, Meyer, Kristian Campbell and others), into a top tier unit in the whole league. Craig, you traded away Chris Sale for a bag of rocks and he went out and won the Cy Young. You mishandled this whole Raffy situation.
There was a lack of communication with Devers and the front office all offseason when Alex Bregman was brought in. I’m sure the best course of action was not trading away the team’s best hitter, especially after sweeping the Yankees and taking 5 games out of 6 from them in a 10-day period. Great job, my friend. Please get out of Boston ASAP. I don’t care that you won the 2013 World Series, or that you went to Yale (looks like a waste of that degree, huh). Even my dog knows not to trade Devers, or at the very least keep him informed on offseason activities.
Lastly, to the World Champ, Rafael Devers:
Thank you. Since you came up at 20 years old, all you’ve done is mash baseballs. You played a huge part in getting us a ring in 2018, and from 2019-2025, you were the team's best hitter. I genuinely hope you destroy the Red Sox when they come out to San Fran. You always had a smile on your face no matter what. Adios, Carita. Go be great. The Giants will love you.
Red Sox Career Stats:
.279 AVG, 215 HR, 696 RBI, 1136 H, 500 XBH, 3x All-Star (2021, 2022, 2024), 2x Silver Slugger (2021, 2023), 1x WS (2018)
My Honest, Unfiltered Thoughts:
This is the Luka Dončić trade. Yeah, you can probably talk yourself into a what-if scenario, but you know it is total bullsh*t and will likely never happen. The Red Sox lost this trade. RHP Jordan Hicks is washed, and the lefty Kyle Harrison got optioned to the minors. The other prospects aren’t much (a rookie league righty and a 22-year-old Single-A OF). In the middle of a lost season, right as the team was finding momentum, Breslow does this shit. Off-the-field issues be damned, you cannot trade your best hitter, especially with Bregman on the shelf.
There is no making this up to the fans. The Red Sox are a braindead franchise that thinks they can win with analytics and player development like the Rays or the Moneyball A’s. Well, wake the hell up, Boston. Those teams never won, and likely never will win. Be who you are, for God’s sake. You’re the Boston f*cking Red Sox. A top market in the whole league. The 4-time champs in the 21st century. It is clear how unserious and stupid they are.
Yes, there is a world in which the money freed up gives the Sox room to make some great moves, but considering the team’s track record since 2020, who really believes that? Trading away your best player for hypotheticals is never a good idea. This team has no momentum, is shell-shocked from the trade, and likely will not make the postseason for the 4th year in a row. Remember, Bregman’s 3-year, $120 million deal has opt-outs after the first two seasons. He very well could see the sorry state of the team and just leave after this season for a better chance at a ring. The 2025 Boston Red Sox are already more disappointing than the 2023 San Diego Padres, and summer's barely even started. The Sox are acting like a small market team again.
The franchise continually decides to dump the faces or key cogs of the team for nothing in return. They traded Mookie and they let Xander walk, but this is a new kind of incompetence.
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The ugly breakup of Boston and Devers will serve as a cautionary tale for the other 29 teams. It is obvious now that Breslow and manager Alex Cora were not transparent with Raffy, and he had every right to be pissed off at the team. What many sensible teams do is not trade their best player, let alone for a bag of peanuts right after the biggest and most successful run of the season to date. I guarantee that the Boston Red Sox will not succeed this season, and likely won’t for a while. The hole in the lineup that Devers’ absence creates is extremely hard to fill, no matter how much money he frees up.
The peculiar thing about this situation is that Devers didn’t ask for a trade. He wasn’t against it, but he didn’t ask for it. All year, the team wanted him to do new things, and he was destroying the ball at DH, albeit unhappy, but he never formally asked out. This is a braindead move from Breslow and Henry, when the situation could have still been salvaged. Trading the best player on the squad before he formally requests a trade is always a bad thing to do, especially if he has been doing his new job extremely well.
Here's the Red Sox Recap for the month of June; the team is utterly cooked. There isn’t much else to say. It is cool that the “Big Three” of prospects (Anthony, Campbell, Meyer), are all up, and that C Carlos Narvaez has been raking his way to Atlanta for the All-Star game, but that's it. Boston has somehow taken a massive leap back in the dumbest way possible.
I always try to be as professionally as I possibly can, but for this piece, I simply couldn’t be. I’ve already seen how the AJ Brown to the Eagles trade wrecked my favorite football team - I don't want to see this destroy my favorite baseball club. Thank you for reading, and make sure to check out my work coming out this summer. I have some cool things planned for the upcoming months.
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