‘Win-now move:’ Inside the Giants’ shocking Rafael Devers trade

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LOS ANGELES — Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey and Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow had discussed the framework of a trade for weeks. A deal of this magnitude, centered around a player of Rafael Devers’ pedigree, requires general managers and assistant general managers to be involved. It certainly requires managing up to the ownership level. 

Everyone kept the situation quiet. Zero Dark Thirty silence. 

The Devers blockbuster trade materialized so suddenly that Kyle Harrison — the biggest prize sent to Boston — was warming up in the bullpen before his scheduled start in Dodger Stadium when he found out. Sean Hjelle, the reliever tasked with replacing Harrison, brushed shoulders with the young lefty as he was walking into the clubhouse to say his goodbyes. The Giants even needed to insert a reliever into the game before they announced he joined the roster. 

If Saturday night’s blowout loss to the Dodgers was weird, Sunday’s 5-4 defeat was frenzied. But if the trade is as watershed a move as it appears, the chaos will quickly become the tiniest of footnotes. 

“I know it was a crazy last few hours, but we got a really, really, really talented ballplayer,” said first baseman Dom Smith, who played with Devers in Boston last year. “Young, right in his prime. Can’t wait to see how many balls he hits into the Cove.” 

Some of the biggest trades in sports come out of nowhere. No one anticipated the Lakers’ Luka Dončić trade coming in February (like the Mavericks, the Red Sox reportedly didn’t shop their face of the franchise around the league, either). 

Now Devers, 28, is the highest-paid Giant in franchise history and their most accomplished left-handed hitter since Barry Bonds. He’s the head of a prime position-player core of Willy Adames, Jung Hoo Lee, Matt Chapman, and Heliot Ramos, who are all under team control for several years. At some point over the next eight years, he’s bound to become the first Giant to hit 30 home runs in a season since Bonds in 2004. 

“Probably a top-10 hitter in baseball every single year,” Logan Webb said. 

“This fits us perfectly,” manager Bob Melvin said. “It’s a power left-handed bat, a guy that can go the other way and hit for power in our ballpark. It’s tailor-made for us.” 

“You see the numbers every year that he always puts up in Boston, we need somebody like him in this lineup,” Adames said. 

Chapman and Adames learned of the news from Melvin about 20 minutes before the game. Word then quickly spread through the clubhouse. 

Adames described it as a mix of emotions as Harrison and veteran Jordan Hicks had their lives redirected. 

It was a particularly stunning day for Harrison, the Bay Area native who was drafted by the Giants as a teenager out of De La Salle in 2020. He was gearing up for one of the biggest starts of his life — a rubber match in Dodger Stadium with a share of first place at stake. Instead, he had a heart-to-heart with his close friend Webb, who told him to go become a star in Boston. 

“I think there was a shock factor to it,” Webb said of Harrison. “Grew up in the Bay Area. It sucks, you know, he was with the team for your entire career, close to family, you’re getting ready to face the best lineup in baseball and you get pulled off the mound right before. Probably tough.” 

In Boston, Harrison will reunite with former Giants pitching coach Andrew Bailey, who surely has insight into how to unlock the southpaw’s prodigious talent in a way the Giants haven’t been able to. 

Boston is also the team that has helped create a monster in the National League West. 

The Red Sox traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers before the 2020 season because they were in a penny-pinching mood and worried they couldn’t pay up to keep him long-term. Betts has won two World Series with Los Angeles and has been a perennial MVP candidate. 

For trading Betts, the Red Sox received Connor Wong, Alex Verdugo and Jeter Downs — a whole lot of nothing. 

Three years later, the Red Sox let shortstop Xander Bogaerts leave in free agency. He signed with the Padres, which hasn’t panned out well for San Diego. 

Bogaerts’ departure ostensibly let Boston pay Devers. A fan-favorite and one of the best sluggers in the game, Devers signed a 10-year, $313.5 million extension with the team. But then the Red Sox added Alex Bregman this offseason and moved Devers off the position, causing internal strife. When first baseman Triston Casas went down with a season-ending injury, Devers refused to step in at first base — even after owner John Henry flew to meet the team on the road and chat with him. 

Now Devers is a Giant. And because of how his season was derailing in Boston, the Giants were able to steal him without giving up top prospects Bryce Eldridge, Hayden Birdsong, or Carson Whisenhunt. 

Just a couple weeks after Posey declared it was “go time” for the Giants, he put those words into action.

“It’s really hard to acquire this type of talent in this point of his career,” Posey said. “We’re obviously taking on a lot of money, we’re giving up some pitching, we’re giving up our first-round pick from last year. So it didn’t come without a cost. But it felt like this was a chance to take a shot.” 

Devers’ immediate future, like in Boston, is likely still at designated hitter. He’s only 28 years old and signed through 2033. A designated hitter at roughly $28 million average annual value is hefty, but the Giants have learned through the past several years that they need to pay a premium if they want to acquire the best sluggers.

Devers is just that. 

“People that don’t know Buster, you should realize that the only thing he wants to do is win,” Webb said. “Plain and simple. A guy like [Devers] is a win-now move.” 

Since 2018, Devers’ 205 home runs ranks 10th in MLB. A three-time All-Star, two-time Silver Slugger, and World Series champion, Devers has perennially been one of the most feared left-handed hitters in the sport. He has owned aces such as Gerrit Cole and elevated his game in the postseason. Only he, Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, and Aaron Judge have posted an OPS of at least .850 in each of the past five seasons. 

The Giants made the trade official during the bottom of the fifth inning, right before Andy Pages tagged Ryan Walker for a go-ahead, three-run home run. Walker’s hanging slider ended up being the difference of a 5-4 loss. 

The Giants were in the game despite losing Casey Schmitt to an ankle contusion and having Hjelle take the ball out in an emergency. Southpaw journeyman Joey Lucchesi, who was selected from the taxi squad without an official announcement, pitched parts of the fourth and fifth innings and was charged with the loss. 

The minutiae of the series finale doesn’t matter in the greater context of a franchise-altering move. 

Rafael Devers is officially a San Francisco Giant, and he joins a club that is officially going for it.