The Sunday evening headlines were all about Rafael Devers.
This stunning story goes all the way back to Mookie Betts.
Two homegrown franchise players sent packing to the West Coast — the first tearing apart the foundation of a championship roster, the second closing the book on one of the worst decisions in franchise history.
From Betts to Devers, with the departure of Xander Bogaerts in between, the Red Sox are completely divorced from their last World Series winning roster, cutting ties with the only one of those three superstars they deemed worthy of a long-term extension. If it was obvious then that Devers’ 11-year, $331 million megadeal in 2023 was the only acceptable move after letting so many stars walk away, it’s just as obvious now that the Red Sox suffered some buyer’s remorse, all but admitting they backed the wrong horse.
It all goes back to Betts.
The Red Sox traded their transcendent, multi-talented star to the Dodgers in February 2020, so convinced that the ongoing inability to reach an agreement on a long-term contract would leave them with nothing in return for a soon-to-be free agent that they took next-to-nothing — Alex Verdugo, Jeter Downs — in exchange for him instead. It was a franchise-altering move, one from which the Red Sox have yet to fully recover.
The returns were immediately and predictably lopsided. Betts took his monster bat, his nifty glove, and his respected gravitas to Los Angeles, inked that elusive long-term deal within a few months (12 years, $365 million), and promptly helped the Dodgers to World Series wins in 2020 and again last season.
The trade was universally recognized as a steal for LA, but worse, as a surrender by the Sox. The front office was ill-prepared for the ensuing backlash, with well-informed fans not buying their payroll flexibility plan as a way of ensuring a better future. The decision-makers were lambasted, and when continued parsimony led to the free agent departure of another franchise cornerstone and World Series winner in Bogaerts, the chorus of hometown boos turned even events like feel good Fan Fests into referendums of anger.
The Sox had no choice but to do something to restore some fan confidence. It turned out that something was Devers, but there was always an undercurrent of square peg in the round hole, owing to his comparatively subpar defense and his relative silence as a clubhouse leader.
When that boiled over during this season’s kerfuffle over Devers’ position, it seems the die was cast. Still, Sunday’s headline is a shocker.
Sending Devers to the Giants on the heels of a series-sweeping win over the Yankees, seeing him pulled from the team charter to Seattle so he could cab it back to Fenway to clean out his locker, comes just as the Sox are unlocking their potential for this year. And with another underwhelming return of players (Kyle Harrison, Jordan Hicks, James Tibbs III, and Jose Bello), the answer has to lie in the Giants’ willingness to pay the entire remainder of Devers’ contract.
Payroll flexibility. It’s the new Red Sox way, even if it means losing players like Devers, barely out of his teens when he helped the Sox win the Series in 2018 and who counts three 30-home run seasons among his eight full years in Boston. Or players like Betts, the seismic move that started it all.
Shortly after Betts inked the contract extension in LA that the sides could not complete in Boston, Red Sox chairman Tom Werner offered a short lecture to his new city.
“When people are partying in Los Angeles, I just want to remind Los Angeles — because you know I come from Los Angeles and I spend the winters there — that in the last 20 years, Los Angeles has won zero World Series and the Red Sox have won four,“ he said on WEEI radio. “So I’ve got nothing to be complaining about regarding our past. We think we made the right decision at the time.”
Three months later, Betts’s Dodgers won their first World Series since 1988. They won another last fall, and have used their commitment to Betts to springboard their roster with additional high-profile acquisitions — Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman. Meanwhile, the Sox have been to the playoffs only once, losing in the ALCS in 2021, with three last-place finishes among the five seasons since the trade.
The Betts trade. The one that started it all.
Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at tara.sullivan@globe.com. Follow her @Globe_Tara.
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