One of the most hated rivals — both player and team — of the New York Yankees has had quite the turbulent last few months.
Boston Red Sox slugger Rafael Devers seems to be seeing his relationship with the only big league team he has ever known souring more and more by the day.
It all started a few weeks before the season when the Red Sox signed former Houston Astros star Alex Bregman to a lucrative deal which is set to pay him $40 million for each season he chooses to stay in Boston.
Though the original plan was to move Bregman to second base and keep Devers at third, cooler heads prevailed when the Red Sox realized how foolish that idea was. Devers has always been a defensive liability at third and Bregman was fresh off his first Gold Glove award along with providing solid defense throughout his career at the hot corner.
Though moving Devers to designated hitter in favor of Bregman made perfect sense to quite literally everyone except Devers himself, the 28-year-old made it a story in the media, defiantly saying third base is his job.
Eventually, manager Alex Cora was clearly able to work things out behind the scenes and Devers willingly made the move to the DH spot, though there were clearly some feelings hurt.
He didn’t help himself when he got off to a historically awful start at the plate to begin the year, which to his credit he has rebounded nicely from.
However, things took another twist last week when Red Sox first baseman Triston Casas suffered a freak knee injury which has him lost for the rest of the season, leaving Boston with a massive gap in the lineup and on the field.
Of course, the most logical solution is to have Devers get back into the field and play first, largely leaving the lineup unchanged.
Unfortunately for the Red Sox, their $300 million franchise player has seemingly decided he does not wish to return to the field and play a new position even though it would get them out of a bind and give them a better chance to win.
“I know I’m a ballplayer, but at the same time, they can’t expect me to play every single position out there,” Devers told the media, relaying the fact that he is frustrated to even be asked. “In spring training, they talked to me and basically told me to put away my glove, that I wasn’t going to be playing any other position but DH. So right now, I feel like it’s not an appropriate decision by them to ask me to play another position.”
Perhaps someone should clarify to Devers they aren’t exactly asking him to head to center field here, nor are they asking him to put the catcher’s gear on.
Boston is asking Devers to do something that he is more than physically capable of doing and something that would solve a major problem for a team that hopes to contend this season.
Quite simply, this just would not fly in the Bronx.
Red Sox fans will counter and point to the situation between Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez after the trade where Jeter did not move off shortstop, but that’s flawed in a couple of ways.
For one, Jeter was a four-time World Series champion and the captain of the team, he had earned the right to keep his position.
Should he have ceded shortstop to Rodriguez? Probably so, but the situations are not remotely the same.
Perhaps things would have been different if teams had the kind of advanced defensive metrics used today, the metrics that have shown for his entire career that Devers has simply never been even a just average third baseman, instead always a burden there.
Devers is making $331 million on his contract, the largest deal by a wide, nine-figure margin in the history of an organization that has been around for almost a century and a half.
Frankly, if the team tells him to jump, he should be saying ‘how high?’
Instead, he would rather rot on the bench and hurt his team rather than do something he is slightly uncomfortable with which could be the difference in them making and missing the postseason.
Devers is not only alienating himself to his own teammates and fan base, he’s damaging his reputation across the league, something which could be pretty relevant if things get to a breaking point here with Boston.
Not everyone is made to be a superstar though, and undoubtedly, not everyone is built to play in New York.
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