The Team Owes the Player Owes the Team.

Raffy Devers and the circle game

Thank you for reading The Dope.

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There once was a manager who said to a key player some words that the player desperately needed to hear. This was about a year ago, as Boston’s wonderful hitter, Rafael Devers, was struggling to play credible MLB defense at third base.

That bar is set high, as you know. Major League defenders are just savages with their gloves, their footwork, their throwing arms. And to be clear, Devers is so good offensively that even with his below-average defense factored, he is a solidly positive WAR player, year after year. (WAR, for those who don’t love baseball’s acronym fixation, stands for Wins Above Replacement, and it’s a handy way of expressing how much better someone like Devers is than whoever you might bring up from Triple-A to replace him.)

In fact, the Red Sox locked up Devers in 2023 with a 10-year, $313 million contract extension. They think he’s pretty valuable. Still, he was going through it at third base as the 2024 season got into full swing.

That’s when his manager, Alex Cora, took him aside. “As long as I’m here, I want you to be my third baseman,” Cora told Devers. “I don’t want that talk of moving to another position.”

Thus reassured, Devers went on to — well, he didn’t really improve defensively, but at least he knew where he was playing every day, and his offense once again soared high above league averages. The Red Sox were only a .500 team, but they would’ve sunk to the bottom of Boston Harbor without Devers’ bat.

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I mention all this because the Red Sox and Devers are currently in a state of open hostility, a weird place to be for a franchise trying to get or stay on a winning track.

Here’s the back-story: Despite what Cora said a year ago (note: one baseball season equals roughly three human years), Boston went hard after Alex Bregman in the off-season. Bregman plays third base. Cora publicly suggested that Bregman could play second instead, clearly an effort to placate Devers, but that wasn’t going to happen. Cora and the Red Sox’s front office thus pushed a very unhappy and very prideful Devers to accept a role as the team’s DH.

And that’s how it goes, right? Devers is under contract at a huge number. He became the DH and went right back to hitting, his 2025 stats again well above league average. Bregman, meanwhile, has been the team’s best player and has anchored the defense at third.

Fast forward now to this week. The Red Sox lose their first baseman, Triston Casas, to a gruesome knee injury. Casas is done for the season. Raffy Devers is kind of just hanging out at DH. He’s never played first base in his eight years in MLB, not even once, not even on a dare — but sure, the Red Sox decided to ask Devers anyway.

Hey, they already jacked him up! What’s one more request?

Here was Devers’ tart response, delivered through a translator:

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"I know I'm a ballplayer, but at the same time, they can't expect me to play every single position out there. In spring training, they talked to me and basically told me to put away my glove. I wasn't going to play another position other than DH. Right now, I don't think it would be an appropriate decision by them to ask me to play another position."

You spoke with Boston’s GM, the longtime former MLB pitcher Craig Breslow?

"He [Breslow] played ball. I would like to think that he knows that changing positions isn't easy. They put me in this situation. They told me they didn't want me to play any other positions. Now they should do their jobs and hit the market and look for another player.”

I mean — are you sure?

"They told me that I'm a little hard-headed, but they already asked me to change [positions] once. This time, I don't think I can be as flexible. I don't feel they stayed true to their word. They told me I was going to play this position, DH. Now they're going back on that."

All righty then!

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You may have projected by now that Rafael Devers, when it’s all said and done, is going to trot down there with a first baseman’s mitt and see what happens for $330 million. I’m with you. It’s the most likely outcome.

The Red Sox want to be sure of that, though, so they made a massive show of force on Friday, flying Breslow, principal owner John Henry and CEO Sam Kennedy to Kansas City, where Boston is playing the Royals. Henry himself led the conversation with Devers.

“It’s probably wise for some of these matters to stay between John and Raffy, but my understanding is that it was productive dialogue,” Breslow told the Boston reporters there. “There was honest exchange* by both sides. I think we’re gonna walk out of this in a much better place.”

(* ”We told Raffy to get his ass to 1B.”)

Devers is a big target here, and of course he’s been getting trashed from one side of New England to the other as a selfish pro. But I will tell you that, utterly independent of money, there is no Major League player who wants to be made to look like an incompetent, especially by own team. That is exactly what I hear in Devers’ comments. He loved playing third and never wanted to be pushed off, but it happened, so he switched up, embarrassing as that demotion was for him. Now he should go get barbecued by trying to learn a position while playing it at the MLB level?

I don’t blame Devers for thinking he’s getting jerked around. He is. The problem for him is that this is being done in service of the team, not for yuks or spite.

He has a leg to stand on. But only one.

The Red Sox screwed this up six ways to Sunday, especially allowing Cora to both privately and publicly assure Devers that the franchise had his back. They paid him the kind of money that says, “You’re our guy,” and proceeded to treat him like a can of WD-40. But teams do what they have to do, even if it does get ugly. Players roll with it, because they honestly have no acceptable alternative. And the Red Sox probably need all the WD-40 they can get. It’s an expensive can, this one.