Martinez Tribune The website of the Martinez Tribune.
BY J.A SCHWARTZ
The San Francisco Giants have been looking for an elite hitter for the better part of a decade. They’ve failed to secure such an asset via free agency over the past several off-seasons, missing out on the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Carlos Correa (due to medical concerns) and Bryce Harper, each of whom chose to sign elsewhere.
Rafael Devers connects for his first home run as a Giant against his former team Saturday afternoon.
The franchise hasn’t had a slugger reach 30 home runs in a season since Barry Bonds did it in 2004, while every other major league franchise has had at least one such player since 2019. The lack of a hulking power hitter has not compromised San Francisco’s on field success since Bonds retired, given that the franchise has won three World Series championships since 2010. The fact remains that the Giants have struggled to secure the services of true power hitters since Bonds left. That all changed when they acquired 28-year-old Rafael Devers in a blockbuster trade with Boston on June 15th, 2025. The club finally has the middle-of-the-order run producer that they’ve coveted for the past ten years.
The actual trade saw the Giants trade Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison, and minor leaguers James Tibbs III and Jose Bello to acquire Devers. The Giants are assuming the remaining eight years on Devers contract, worth approximately $250 million through 2033. The luxury tax valuation of his contract is $29.152 million, making him the highest earning player on the roster by that measure.
Buster Posey, arguably the best hitter the franchise has had since Bonds, now sits atop the organization as President of Baseball Operations, a title he ascended to this past offseason. Posey has made his mark with bold decisions, adding free agent shortstop Willy Adames on a record breaking seven-year, $182 million contract, the largest the club has ever given to a free agent (breaking the record contract he himself signed in 2013-nine years, $167 million).
Posey also helped sway Matt Chapman’s thinking about staying with San Francisco, keeping the Gold Glove third baseman on a contract extension (six-years, $151 million) before he was due to hit the market after 2024. Given the past failures the organization had seen with their forays into the deep end of the free agent pool, Posey’s successes seemed to signal a new willingness by the organization to go the extra mile to secure top talent. The Devers deal certainly reinforces that conclusion.
By agreeing to take on the entire value of Devers’ contract moving forward, Posey was able to mitigate the actual talent cost to the team, allowing the roster to add Devers bat without subtracting much-if any-current 2025 on-field value from the club. Hicks was on the IL with a toe injury, and his inclusion in the trade had more to do with offloading his salary (to help balance out the huge addition of Devers deal). The Red Sox are responsible for the roughly six million owed to Hicks in 2025, and an additional $24 million through the 2027 season for the right-hander, but given that they are no longer responsible for the long term commitment to Devers, taking Hicks back was the cost of doing business.
Harrison was a top pitching prospect coming into the 2024 season, and was rated as the best lefty in the minor leagues at that time. His brief career with the Giants (9-9, 4.48 ERA, 182 IP) never saw him live up to that pedigree, but pitching prospects are notoriously slow to fully develop, and Boston is likely counting on his talent to emerge with their organization, possibly becoming a low-cost solution to their quest to find high end starting pitching.
Rafael Devers collected MVP votes in five of his last eight seasons with the Red Sox, with three 30 home run – 100 RBI seasons.
Tibbs was the Giants first round pick in the 2024 draft who was hitting well in A ball at the time of the deal, and Bello is a 20-year old pitcher in rookie ball. None of the players Boston acquired will play in the majors immediately, though both Hicks and Harrison are expected to appear for the team in 2025. The fact remains that the Red Sox, who were tied for the final Wild Card slot at the time of the trade, significantly compromised the chances that their 2025 club would make the playoffs.
Even if Hicks and Harrison are promoted to the majors and pitch well, it is hard to imagine that their contributions will outweigh what Devers was likely to do as a hitter for the team. He was worth 2.1 wins above replacement (WAR), hitting .272/.401/.504 with 15 HR and 58 RBI on the season in Boston at the time of the deal.
Why would Boston agree to make this trade, given that they were a playoff team at the time they made it, and they are receiving much less on-field value back from the Giants in the transaction? It’s complicated.
The Boston faithful would say that the deal was primarily motivated by ownership’s desire to cut payroll and sneak beneath the luxury tax in 2025 (post trade, their luxury tax figure is $238 million, with the first luxury tax threshold being $241 million), a goal they accomplished with this transaction despite taking on Hicks’ salary. The team hasn’t exceeded that threshold since 2022, something that the very vocal and passionate Fenway denizens are quick to highlight as being inconsistent with their large market status (and insanely high ticket prices).
Unsubstantiated reports note that the Red Sox turned down an offer from a different team that would have netted them more major league talent for Devers, primarily because that transaction required Boston to subsidize a part of the money owed to Devers in the future. That report claims that Boston owner John Henry himself nixed that trade. The financial aspect of the trade certainly factored into the calculus needed to justify the deal.
The Red Sox front office would say that they needed to remove Devers from the clubhouse because they didn’t believe he was living up to being the face of the franchise (something his contract status thrust upon him), and wasn’t being a player who put the needs of the team above his own. This stems from a few different conflagrations between Devers and the front office that started when the team signed free agent Alex Bregman.
Despite having been promised that he would be the third baseman in Boston (by Chaim Bloom, the former Boston GM who signed Devers to the long-term contract in January of 2023), the team informed Devers that Bregman would have the position full-time, and that he’d need to accept being the DH as a result of the signing. The communication between the front office and the player was certainly mishandled, and Devers was left feeling misled and disrespected. Nonetheless, despite a horrific start to the season, Devers was having an excellent year at the plate as a DH, and had not played the field in any game when fellow teammate Triston Casas tore his patellar tendon on May 2nd, leaving the team without a first baseman.
In the wake of the injury, the club asked Devers to consider playing first, but he declined, noting that the club told him to “put away his glove” in spring training. A week later, Boston owner John Henry flew to Kansas City with Chief Baseball Officer Craig Breslow and CEO Sam Kennedy to sit down with Devers to assuage the rift, and to encourage him to reconsider his stance about learning to play first. While publicly noting that the meeting was “an honest conversation about what we value as an organization,” Breslow and his fellow executives failed to convince Devers to take the field.
“They told me that I was going to be playing this position, DH, and now they’re going back on that. So I just don’t think they stayed true to their word,” Devers was quoted as saying during the disagreement. A little more than a month later, he was traded, and his unwillingness to do what the organization felt was in the best interests of the franchise must have played a role in their decision. Upon arriving in San Francisco, and having conversations with Posey, Devers was quoted as saying “I am here to help the team with whatever is necessary,” and referenced that he’s willing to play first for the team.
Rafael Devers is greeted at home plate by Andrew Knizner after his first home run as a Giant.
The final piece of the equation may have been that the organization perceived that Devers wasn’t willing to be the personification of the paradigm that they wanted to be synonymous with the Red Sox – that the needs of the team should always outweigh all other considerations. That Devers wasn’t the exemplar of the type of leadership the team desired was made clear by their decision, and may have been influenced by the fact that the team has a very talented collection of young stars bubbling to the majors.
Position players Ceddanne Rafaela, Kristian Campbell, Marcelo Mayer, Wilyer Abreu and Roman Anthony are all 25 or younger, and Rafaela and Campbell have already signed long term extensions to be part of the nucleus of the club going forward. Mayer and Anthony are both top 10 overall prospects in baseball, and both were on the roster when Devers was traded to San Francisco. It’s hard to imagine that Henry, Breslow and Kennedy concluded that the culture of the clubhouse and the young stars within it was a vital part of the future success of the team, and they felt that the incalcitrant Devers would be unlikely to be the role model they felt was required of a club with championship aspirations.
In 2018, the Red Sox set a franchise record by going 108-54, winning the American League East and cruising through the playoffs (going 11-3 in the process) to win the World Series over the Dodgers. That title was the fourth for the franchise this century, more than any other team. Their young, largely homegrown roster featured a collection of star players that included Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Andrew Benintendi, Jackie Bradley Jr., and Mookie Betts, all developed by their farm system, and each under the age of 28. It was supposed to be the core of a club that would win multiple titles, and the future was bright for the fans in New England.
Seven years is an eternity in baseball, and after the Devers trade, none of those players remains in Boston.
Bogaerts was allowed to leave as a free agent after the 2022 season after turning down a below market extension offer by the club in spring training that year. He signed in San Diego.
Benintendi was traded to Kansas City before the 2021 season following a poor offensive 2020 campaign wrecked by injury.
Jackie Bradley Jr. left Boston as a free agent for Milwaukee before the 2021 season.
Mookie Betts was traded to the Dodgers before the 2020 season after refusing to sign a contract extension to stay in Boston. Due to be a free agent, Betts told the Red Sox their offer wasn’t enough to get him to stay, and that he’d enter free agency following that 2020 campaign. Instead of losing their star player without any return, Boston traded Betts and David Price to the Dodgers for three players, only one of whom (Connor Wong) is still with the club. Betts has won two World Series titles in Los Angeles.
Boston fans have lost the joy of seeing their homegrown stars flourish with the team over a long period of time, and in the case of Betts, Devers and Bogaerts, money was at least part of the reason those iconic figures left Fenway Park. The Devers trade (and the discord that led to it) is certainly an indictment of the current organization leadership, whose inability to properly communicate with its most important player forced the decision to trade him away for a return that is not close to commensurate with his value.
Time will tell if Hicks, Harrison, Tibbs and Bello emerge to play key roles on the next Red Sox playoff team. At the moment, however, Buster Posey and his loyal legion of San Francisco fans are left to celebrate the good fortune that led to Boston’s decision to unload their best player, filling a giant hole in their lineup for years to come.
