Buster Olney
For months, as the standoff between Rafael Devers and the Boston Red Sox played out publicly, Boston fans never really booed their designated hitter. This probably would’ve come as a surprise to others who’ve lived through that charming experience, including Hall of Famer Ted Williams, who once spat at a hostile Fenway Park crowd, and Roger Clemens (even before he pitched for their rival).
Rather, Red Sox fans almost uniformly cheered Devers, all the way to the ignominious end of his time in Boston on Sunday. Hours after hitting another home run against the New York Yankees, he was summoned from the club’s traveling party and told he’d been dealt to the opposite coast. That fans never fully aimed animus at Devers despite his refusal to do what generations of stars have done — embrace change for the larger good of the team; in this case, changing positions from third base to first — says much more about their distrust of Red Sox leadership than about Devers or Red Sox Nation going soft.
That skepticism spilled out in talk radio, tweets and texts in the hours following the Devers trade, the reaction angry and cynical. “They’re not even a real organization anymore,” one longtime New Englander and Red Sox fan wrote to me. “Here we go again,” another texted. “First Mookie. Then Xander. Now Raffy.”
These kinds of responses will grow exponentially if Boston flounders over the next few weeks. The Red Sox had won eight of their past 10 games when the deal went down — including five of six against the first-place Yankees — and just when the dysfunctional team actually began functioning on the field, they traded their best hitter.
But this is an uproar five-plus years in the making. The 2020 trade of Mookie Betts, a homegrown star, has become the prism through which every Red Sox decision is seen. John Henry has been the most successful owner in baseball over the past quarter century, winning four championships, and yet he is viewed by much of the team’s fan base as a cheap and uninterested proprietor who uses the Red Sox cash machine to fund his other sports hobbies.
Craig Breslow, the head of baseball operations for the Red Sox, defended the trade when he spoke with reporters Monday, saying, “This is in no way signifying a waving of the white flag on 2025. We are as committed as we were six months ago to putting a winning team on the field, to competing for the division and making a deep postseason run.”
Breslow spoke as if the effort to win would continue. But a lot of Boston fans believe the leadership stopped prioritizing on-field success after the 2018 championship, with the failed effort to retain Betts a turning point. When Red Sox ownership interviewed candidates to replace former head of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski in 2019, it was made clear to Chaim Bloom (who eventually got the job) and others that he would be expected to trade Betts. After Betts was dealt to the Los Angeles Dodgers for Alex Verdugo, Connor Wong and Jeter Downs, the Red Sox have largely abdicated their place as a baseball power. And Betts’ new team has more World Series titles (two) than the Red Sox have winning seasons (one) since the trade.
The fans’ protest of the Devers deal largely diverged from the industry view. A lot of rival officials thought that the Red Sox did well in ridding themselves of a one-dimensional star with an expensive contract who refused layers of requests to change, receiving four players from the San Francisco Giants in return, including talented lefty Kyle Harrison. “WTF were the Giants doing taking on that whole contract?” one executive asked rhetorically, via text. “Oh my god. That deal will not end well.”
Another executive said that he thought that on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being terrible, management’s handling of the Devers situation was a six. “They made mistakes,” he said. “Devers’ handling of this was a 10 out of 10 in how bad it was.”
Regardless of Devers’ handling of the situation, it’s clear that the Red Sox have some work to do in filling the role he leaves.
“[The Red Sox] did well in this trade, for the long term,” one exec said. “But they are going to miss him. You’re not going to replace a hitter like Devers.”
What matters now for the Red Sox is what they do next. After trading Betts, they largely shifted into a mode of rebuilding uncommon for a big-market team, a choice which drove the fan base into its current cynicism. At trade deadlines in recent years, the Red Sox have either retreated or failed to add. The onus is on Breslow and Henry to add, even if that means taking on payroll and expending resources. The fans don’t believe leadership actually cares about winning, and the only way the Red Sox can change that is to win.
In order to do that, the Red Sox organization needs to take the lessons that can be learned from how this situation played out and apply them moving forward. And Devers himself should do the same.
His frustration and unwillingness to work with the team had been clear since the Red Sox signed All-Star Alex Bregman in February, with Devers saying he was promised third base when he agreed to his $313.5 million deal in January of 2023, a claim rival evaluators view dubiously.
“Who could ever promise something like that?” one executive said. “Things change so fast — injuries, players coming and going. You don’t get deeded a position for life.”
Even when it became clear that a move to first would help the Red Sox incorporate young players such as Roman Anthony, Devers declined. As he gets settled with the Giants, he has an opportunity to be more open-minded, to work with his new team, rather than at the expense of others.
As for Breslow, he needs to hear the feedback that is coming from all corners of the franchise: His interpersonal skills are poor. In his 1½ years with the Red Sox, Breslow has failed to build a relationship with the team’s most important player. He has to talk more with others, connect more — because when he doesn’t build those relationships, what festers in the vacuum of conversation is the sort of communication decline that developed with Devers.
And it’s not only Devers: What others in the organization say is that Breslow’s presence is wooden and ineffective, a problem highlighted by an incident on a Zoom call with staffers last month. According to sources, a longtime scout, Carl Moesche, assumed that his voice could not be heard on the call and said out loud, “Thanks, Bres, you f—ing stiff.” Moesche was subsequently fired, but Breslow needs to recognize that Moesche’s view reflects that of other Red Sox employees, and that’s an enormous problem.
Red Sox manager Alex Cora needs to recognize that in the Devers drama, he was ineffective. He has a longstanding relationship of care and respect with Devers, but as rival executives note, what good was that relationship to the organization, really, when Cora couldn’t get Devers to do what he, Breslow and Henry needed him to do? Only Cora and Devers know what was said between them, but whether Cora chose to play good cop to Breslow’s bad cop or he felt it best to support Devers rather than take him on, it didn’t work.
And as much as anything, Henry must do some self-reflection: He must recognize that it was his original sin that put Boston in this situation. He chose not to pay his best and most dynamic player what he was worth, subjecting the franchise to the Betts tax that it continues to pay over and over. Because they didn’t sign Betts, the Red Sox gave into the pressure from frustrated fans in their negotiations with Devers, agreeing to a deal that concerned some in the franchise given doubts about Devers’ ability to lead and whether he was destined to become an overpaid designated hitter.
Henry needs to do what he did not do with Betts and Jon Lester and Xander Bogaerts and Chris Sale and others: keep the best stars. Pay to keep the next Yaz, the next Ortiz. Maybe that’s Roman Anthony, maybe it’s Marcelo Mayer, maybe it’s Jarren Duran. As Philadelphia Phillies owner John Middleton said last year, fans don’t care about an owner’s bottom line. They care about winning. Henry needs to demonstrate, once and for all, that’s his priority, as well.
