Giants Acquire Rafael Devers in Unexpected Blockbuster

Look, I’ll just get right to it:

The San Francisco Giants are acquiring Rafael Devers from the Boston Red Sox for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison and more, according to sources familiar with the deal.

— Robert Murray (@ByRobertMurray) June 15, 2025

That’s the kind of blockbuster you don’t see every day. Rafael Devers is the best healthy Red Sox hitter. The Sox are above .500 and in the thick of the AL playoff hunt. They’re desperate for offense – though they came into the year with more hitters than spots, injuries to Alex Bregman, Triston Casas, Wilyer Abreu, and Masataka Yoshida have left them scrambling for depth. Abraham Toro has been batting high in the order of late. Romy Gonzalez is their backup DH. And they just traded their starting DH – hitting .271/.400/494, good for 14 home runs and a 145 wRC+ – for salary relief? We’re going to need a deeper dive.

Let’s start with the return. The Sox sent Devers and his entire contract – 10 years and $313.5 million at time of signing, with about $250 million and 8.5 years left on it today – to the Giants. In exchange, they got a wide mixture of players. There’s a major leaguer, Jordan Hicks. There’s a recently graduated prospect, Kyle Harrison. There’s a well-regarded hitting prospect, James Tibbs III. There’s another, further away prospect, pitcher Jose Bello. Finally, there’s that sweet, sweet financial flexibility, something the Sox are no stranger to.

If you look at baseball completely in the abstract, with bean-counting surplus value as your only guiding light for evaluating a trade, this one looks reasonable enough. Devers is under contract for a lot of years at a lot of dollars per year, and projection systems consistently think that he’ll generate low WAR totals for his salary in the back half of his deal. Harrison was a top 25 prospect not so long ago. Tibbs was a first round draft pick last year. Bello is an interesting lottery ticket. Hicks – okay, Hicks might have been a salary offset. But the point is, it’s likely that if all you care about is WAR accrued per dollar spent, the Sox come out ahead on this deal for most reasonable models of surplus value.

I don’t think those models make a ton of sense here, though. The Red Sox are trying to make the playoffs. You know what their team could use more than a 22-year-old in High-A and a former top pitching prospect with a 4.50 career ERA? They could use a slugging DH with the perfect swing for Fenway. If their wildest dreams came true, maybe he’d be 28 and under team control for a long time so that they didn’t have to try desperately to find a replacement soon.

Guys like Devers don’t grow on trees. Want an example of what I mean? There are no players on either the Red Sox or Giants projected for a better batting line the rest of the season. In 2024? You guessed it: No player on either the Red Sox or Giants produced a higher wRC+ than Devers. There are better hitters than Devers, but there aren’t many. Building a baseball team is a game of marshaling scarce resources, and one of the scarcest of all is a truly impactful hitter.

It’s possible that Tibbs, who for my money is the best player the Sox got back in this deal, will end up being an impactful hitter, though obviously he doesn’t project to turn out as well as Devers has. A 2024 first round pick out of Florida State, Tibbs struggled in his brief pro debut but looks at home this year. He’s evaluated as a 45-FV prospect, displaying an impressive command of the strike zone and hitting the ball hard. Here’s a more detailed scouting report courtesy of Eric Longenhagen:

Tibbs was a consistent three-year performer at Florida State, where he hit .338/.462/.685 throughout his career. He had a power leap as a junior, doubling his career home run total with 28 draft-year bombs; he also improved his K-to-BB ratio, with 58 walks and 37 strikeouts in 320 PA. He had one of the 2024 draft’s higher floors as a lefty bat with a stable blend of contact and power. A really putrid post-draft summer cast a pall upon his profile until Tibbs was able to right the ship in 2025; he was sent back to Eugene and was hitting .245/.377/.480 with 12 homers in 56 games prior to the Rafael Devers trade.

Tibbs’ lightning quick hands allow him to snatch inner-half pitches to his pull side and generate oppo contact on pitches that travel deeper in the zone. For how compact he is, Tibbs is quite strong and uses the ground well to help him generate power. He is of medium build at a relatively maxed-out 6-feet tall and doesn’t produce monster peak exit velos (his max exits are roughly average), but he consistently hits the ball hard and in the air, which speaks to the verve in his hitting hands. He crushes in the middle of the plate, but looks much less comfortable facing lefties, and has had some trouble covering the up-and-away portion of the zone because his hips tend to bail toward first base as he unwinds.

He also needs to improve on defense. Some of this might be that the turf in Eugene creates a fast track of sorts for batted balls, but Tibbs has played some routine singles into triples this year because the baseball gets behind him, and he sometimes looks uncomfortable at the catch point on fly balls. He has a good arm and should be developed in right field, but he has some work to do out there if he’s going to be an average defender. Tibbs is a good hitter and prospect whose reasonable outcomes are that of a righty-mashing platoon outfielder who may need to be subbed out against lefties or for a defensive replacement. If he can improve in even one of those areas, then he’ll project more like an everyday player. He’s tracking to debut sometimes in late 2027 or 2028.

Next on my personal list of impact likelihood would be Harrison, who debuted in 2023 as San Francisco’s top prospect and has been bouncing between the big leagues, Triple-A, and the IL ever since. He hasn’t locked down a spot because he hasn’t landed on a successful second pitch to pair with his solid fastball. He throws the fastball a ton, a slurvy breaking ball next-most, and mixes in an inconsistent but interestingly-shaped changeup. He looked electric as a reliever but hasn’t clicked yet as a starter.

Boston seems to agree that Harrison isn’t immediately ready for the majors; he was in the San Francisco rotation at the time of the trade (slated to start Sunday’s game!), but the Red Sox optioned him to Triple-A after acquiring him. That means the only player who will join Boston’s playoff-hopeful roster is Hicks, whose conversion from reliever to starter hasn’t really taken. As a reliever, he lived in triple digits and snapped off a hellacious slider underneath the heat. As a starter, his fastball played down and he didn’t quite have enough secondaries to balance it out. I expect the Sox to plug him into the back of the bullpen when he returns from the IL, where he’s been since June 1 thanks to an inflamed toe. In truth, the biggest reason Hicks is in this deal is probably salary; he’s due $32 million through 2027. He could still be a true asset in the bullpen, though; at his peak, he was absolutely dominant.

The Sox shopped in quantity more so than quality here; they also got Bello, a 2023 international signee who looked sharp in the DSL last year. Here’s Longenhagen on Bello:

Bello had a dominant second DSL season in 2024 and was pitching in the Giants’ Complex League rotation in Arizona for the first part of 2025 when he was traded to Boston as part of the package for Devers. He has an east/west starter’s mix with very advanced command and three potentially average pitches. The best of these is Bello’s upper-70s slider, which he uses most of all, often as a way to get ahead of hitters. His fastball lives in the 88-92 mph range most of the time and has sink/tail action that is vulnerable to damage when Bello doesn’t locate it. Mostly, he does though. For his age, he’s a fairly precise craftsman who knows how to start his sinker above the zone and drop it in the top for looking strikes. Bello repeats his release and is a coordinated athlete, but he’s not really an explosive one. He isn’t all that athletically projectable and isn’t a lock to throw harder as he matures. He’s going to command his stuff (and maybe add a cutter) en route to a backend starter role, which is still years away.

And if, like me, you’re a visual learner, here he is pitching in 2025:

As you can see from the timelines of the players we’re talking about here, none of these guys are likely to make a huge impact on the 2025 Red Sox. That’s what I don’t get about this trade. We’re talking about a team that, at least on the surface, is trying to compete both now and in the future. They have one of the best farm systems in baseball, with both top-end talent and depth. They consolidated some of that value over the offseason by trading for Garrett Crochet, but they still entered the season with a lot of prospects but not enough locked-in contributors. Would Trevor Story rebound? Lucas Giolito? Casas?

Now, the Red Sox still have a great farm system. They replenished some of their depth from this trade. They also have financial flexibility, that vaunted commodity that led them to trade Mookie Betts before the 2020 season. Last time, they used that money to sign… well, to sign Rafael Devers. If they’re lucky, perhaps one of their mega-prospects (Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, and Kristian Campbell) will be as good as Devers in the final accounting. But even then, for how long? Campbell is locked up through 2034, but the other two aren’t, and if they end up as good as Devers, they’ll command big contracts too.

I’m being harsh here, because the dollars do matter – Devers’ deal is long enough, and his defensive value is shaky enough, that the last few years of it will probably sting. Look at trades and free agent contracts in recent years, though, and you can see that a dry “X WAR for Y dollars” accounting of the situation doesn’t correctly capture teams’ behavior and incentives. Teams overpay the model for superstars, because you can’t build a team out of surplus value. It’s great to have 26 2-WAR players making the league minimum, but that’s not a playoff team even if it’s a best-financial-value world-beater. In fact, you can think of those cost-controlled players as allowing teams to splurge on stars. If you’re filling out most of your roster in a cost-effective manner, you can go all out with dollars to squeeze as much WAR as possible into the superstar spots. The good news is, every team gets to draft or sign amateurs, so the cost-controlled surplus value spigot is self-replenishing. The superstar spigot, on the other hand, flows only rarely.

That’s the thinking in San Francisco. They spent the 2022-23 and 2023-24 offseasons trying to shoot the moon; they reportedly offered Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani roughly equivalent contracts to the ones they signed with their current teams. When those two spurned their advances, they made some secondary signings, Matt Chapman, Willy Adames, Jung Hoo Lee, and Justin Verlander prominent among them. They didn’t succeed in assembling a dominant offense, though, and they also had payroll room – after all, they cleared a ton of money that they didn’t spend. They came into the year with the 14th-largest payroll in baseball, less than a team of their stature should be spending in my opinion. Now they’ve added another locked-in roster spot, a star of the game who elevates their lineup.

Specifically, Devers is going to elevate their lineup by replacing the biggest black hole on the roster, first base. Giants first basemen have an aggregate 82 wRC+ this year, 25th in baseball. Now, Devers famously isn’t going to play first base this year (more on that below) and third base is occupied, but I think he’ll likely consider a position change in the offseason, and in the immediate future, the Giants can simply shift DH Wilmer Flores (112 wRC+, much better) to first.

Dan Szymborski produced two ZiPS projections for me. First, Devers in San Francisco as a first baseman:

Second, as a full-time DH:

There are marginal differences around positional adjustments and the DH hitting penalty, but the gist is that ZiPS – and common sense – expect Devers to be one of the better hitters in the game for the next four to five years, gradually trending downwards as he ages. The last four years of his deal make it so that – as Jeff Passan put it – “every model in baseball has (the contract) as underwater.” The front half of it, on the other hand? Clearly a good deal.

There are two big questions about this deal, and they’re very different ones. The first concerns the off-field drama that took place between Devers and the front office earlier this year. When the Sox signed Bregman, they asked Devers to play DH instead of his long-time position of third base. He hemmed and hawed and complained about it before eventually complying. Then, when Casas went down with a season-ending injury, GM Craig Breslow asked Devers to learn first base to ease the positional logjam. Devers declined, setting off another wave of consternation.

I wasn’t in the room for these discussions. I don’t know who was unreasonable and who got misrepresented in public. But I’ll say this: When you somehow turn a complete nothing – our so-so defender needs to move to a less demanding defensive position – into a conflict big enough that it leads to you trading your franchise cornerstone, in the midst of a playoff chase, for future considerations, you’ve clearly done a poor job in communication and crisis management. I still don’t understand how the Red Sox keep getting themselves in positions where they look at their best players and decide they need to get rid of them, but if someone tries to convince you that the 2025 Red Sox got better with this trade, I think laughing is an appropriate response. That’s not what’s going on here. Regardless of who was right, regardless of whether Devers was being stubborn or Breslow unreasonable, the front office already failed. They failed when they let some sideshow, the difference between Devers at first base and Devers at DH, end in trading him. The goal of baseball is to build a great team and win the World Series. You don’t have to point blame to one or the other to say that things went off the rails when what started as a positional tiff ends with you trading one of your best players for salary relief.

The second big question is one I’ve been answering in parts throughout this article: Should you look to dollars-per-WAR calculations and surplus value and say that this trade is a home run for the Red Sox, or should you look at each team’s playoff odds in 2025 and say the Giants fleeced them? I land somewhere in the middle, but closer to the second viewpoint. Yes, Devers’ deal will be “underwater” from a surplus value standpoint when it’s all said and done. No, that doesn’t change how good he’s likely to be in the next few years. No, signing a big contract doesn’t preclude teams from signing other players or putting a winning club on the field. People have been alternately calling the contracts of Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and Mookie Betts “overpays” off and on for nearly a decade now, and their teams just continue to be excellent. Those teams also continue to be extremely happy to employ their stars – the Padres even gave Machado another “overpay” of an extension.

Apply some premium to the difference between a good player and a star, and I think this trade ends up right around value neutral, maybe a small win for the Red Sox. But that ignores the position that each team is in. The Giants will get a ton of value from Devers in 2025 alone; they’re in playoff position but need more offense to feel good about their chances. Meanwhile, the Red Sox are half a game out of the last Wild Card spot. I like their odds quite a bit less now that they’re replacing Devers’ bat with that of Romy Gonzalez or David Hamilton.

It’s all well and good to build a nice farm system and always prioritize flexibility, the bottom line, a self-sustaining machine that will devour the baseball world and spit out championship teams on league-minimum salaries. But what about this year? Jarren Duran is 29 and getting more expensive. Bregman is already 31, and he can opt out of his deal after this year if he wants – and depending on how the injury shakes out, I expect he will, given his stellar start. The Sox swung a blockbuster for Crochet this offseason, and he’s currently healthy, never a guarantee with pitchers in general and Crochet in particular. One sixth of the team control years of Anthony and Mayer will come this year (or perhaps slightly less, depending on Super 2 status). This is a strange season to be punting; the Sox have a ton of good players who might not be around all that long, and they just traded their best current hitter away instead of sticking with the current team.

I hated it when the Red Sox made a similar move in trading away Betts. I hate when the Orioles hedge instead of adding, playing for the future as the present slips away. I hate that the Red Sox seem not to care about making the playoffs – they haven’t been since 2021, and yet they’re not showing much urgency to get back. That’s what really bothers me about this trade. It’s not the silly back and forth between Devers and the front office. It’s not the chorus of number crunchers asserting that Devers is a bad value. It’s not the commodification of baseball contracts and players – though to be fair, it’s partially that. My main complaint is that teams are too willing to ignore the present even when it makes very little sense to do so. So good work, Giants, for finding a superstar who fits with your team’s current window and will immediately improve your outlook for the next handful of years. And bad work, Red Sox, for twisting yourself into a position where you trade a franchise cornerstone while you’re above .500 and scrambling for playoff relevance. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

The description of Kyle Harrison in this story has been updated to correct a previous oversight.