Who cares what position a guy plays when he can sock some dingers?

Abbott and Costello did their routine before the DH. Lucky them.

Ryan Walker gave up the game-winning 3-run homer on Sunday evening, and it wasn’t fun to watch, but that does mean the Giants have a problem to solve. So who wants to read about bullpen management? Huh? Who’s, uh…who’s interested in…

No one? Okay, then let’s talk about something else.

Rafael Devers! The Giants traded for Rafael Devers!

In addition to losing the game on Sunday night, you may have heard that the Giants made a trade on Sunday, sending Kyle Harrison, Jordan Hicks, James Tibbs III, and Joe Bello to Boston in exchange for Devers. The Red Sox wanted to do this deal because Devers had refused to learn and play first base during the season and had therefore worn out his welcome; the Giants wanted to do this deal because holy shit, do you know how good of a hitter Rafael Devers is? Let’s get one of those!

I don’t want to pretend that some frustration with Devers on the part of the Boston Red Sox wasn’t warranted. They wanted him to learn a new position and he told them to shove off. Beat it. Hit the road. Scram. That’s a little annoying.

From Devers’s perspective, the previous front office told him when he signed his $300 million deal that he was a third baseman and that they weren’t going to have him play another position. Then these new guys came in and found One Simple Trick to getting around that promise: they ignored it. That was someone else’s promise and they didn’t feel obligated to live up to it, so they didn’t bother. They signed Alex Bregman to a 3-year deal with a couple of opt-outs — so, essentially, a 1-year deal unless he was bad — and made Devers a DH. But they had some prospects coming up who were also likely to do well at DH, so when their first baseman got hurt, the natural solution at first seemed to be Rafael Devers, who did not know how to play the position, and the relationship crumbled from there.

From the Giants’ perspective, holy shit, do you know how good of a hitter Rafael Devers is? Let’s get one of those!

Devers is the kind of offensive talent that the Giants have been failing to sign to a long-term deal since the ink was dry on Buster Posey’s contract, and the kind of outside offensive talent that they haven’t added to the organization since the ink was dry on Barry Bonds’s contract. They didn’t get Bryce Harper or Giancarlo Stanton or Aaron Judge because all of them could choose not to come. Yes, they signed Matt Chapman and Willy Adames in free agency, but neither of them is known for having the kind of pure bat that Devers does. Devers is a star solely because he mashes the ball, and this Giants team sorely needs someone to mash the ball.

How good a hitter is Rafael Devers? Well, I’m glad you asked. Since 2021, he has an OPS+ of 137 and has hit 141 homers. He’s had 30 homer seasons twice in that timespan, and he currently has the highest OBP of his career, at .401, and the highest OPS+ of his career, at 152. He is a definite, long-term middle of the order bat, and he’ll be around until 2033. The Giants have got themselves a shiny new franchise player, the exact kind of franchise player they’ve desperately sought for the last decade.

And all it cost them was Kyle Harrison, James Tibbs III, and a lottery ticket. I don’t mean that to be disrespectful to Jordan Hicks, but in terms of value to the organization, he had clearly fallen from starter to reliever, and he wasn’t ever going to get back to where he’d been in the first half of 2024. He also wasn’t ever going to hold this kind of deal up. The only thing to really worry about would be the potential of the prospects you send over, and in this case, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the other three players who went over to Boston either, it wasn’t a tough call.

Kyle Harrison had been one of the top prospects in baseball just a few years ago, and while he hasn’t turned into a bad player, and his story certainly can’t be written just yet, some of that luster has come off. When he was in the minors, every report about him was stuffed with praise for his overpowering fastball; in the majors, that fastball has been fine, and the off-speed stuff isn't there yet either. There’s a leap that you want to see in young players that hasn’t happened yet, and that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen, but boy, he sure wouldn’t have been available if it had.

Tibbs was last year’s first round pick, and he was doing a nice job in Eugene, hitting .246/.379/.478, with about a 1:1 strikeout to walk ratio. But scouts never saw him as a future star, with Fangraphs saying, “Tibbs looks like a good platoon outfielder with medium physical tools.” You don’t give a player like that up for nothing, but as part of a deal for a Devers-type player, including Tibbs isn’t remotely a hard call.

Jose Bello is a pitcher in the Complex league, and when you acquire a guy like that, you get what you get. This is his third year in professional baseball, and his numbers are extremely impressive, but there are a lot of levels between him and the majors.

Even with the issue of Devers’s position probably being DH over the long term, this deal right now looks like a win for the Giants. What they got, in terms of major league All-Star level talent, is more than worth what they gave up. And possibly more importantly than that, they also acquired some extremely strong vibes.

Because Farhan Zaidi never made the bold move when he was with the Giants. He tried to sign some stars to splashy contracts, and it would have been great if that had worked, but he never found a new centerpiece of the team. He never made a creative deal to bolster a dispiriting lineup. Maybe Buster Posey got lucky that a Devers-type player was available, or maybe Zaidi tried to put something together but always had to give up more than he was comfortable with. It’s possible Posey is luckier than Zaidi; it’s also possible that Zaidi wasn’t comfortable with the prospect risk in a deal like this, and so he never made one.

But Posey did make this deal. He did it to make the team better, and he also did it to show the team that he believes in them. He did it because the team needed that middle-of-the-order bat, and he also did it because they might have been able to compete through September without Devers, so it’s even more vital for them to have him. Most of all, he did it because when it comes down to the decision to make the team better or to preserve hypothetical value and flexibility for some distant future, it’s more important to him to make the team better.

And that’s a lot of fun. Sure, if you do it too often, you get Dave Dombrowski farm systems, but you also get Dave Dombrowski major league teams, who win divisions and go to World Series and whatnot. The Dodgers model of having a Death Star farm system that produces a star every year is really hard to do — even the Dodgers haven’t been too successful with it since promoting Will Smith to the majors — and it won’t necessarily work. The Giants teams that won Posey his World Series rings absolutely traded prospects for veterans, and were much better for it. Zaidi’s vision was great, but probably unrealistic. Posey’s has a track record, but doesn’t have the upside.

All of that has led us here. Rafael Devers will do a press conference this afternoon, then play in his first game as a Giant this evening. It’s remarkable that the Giants, for once, were the team that managed to snag the great hitter. We’ve all been crying out for something like this for years, and it’s almost shocking that it actually happened. The Giants broke from tradition on this one, and you can’t say it’s not exciting.

And also, man, it’s nice that for once the Red Sox didn’t trade a star to the Dodgers for nothing. It’s our turn. It’s been our turn, and it’s great to finally get to play.