The Red Sox Have Finally Extended Rafael Devers

“Extend Devers!” they shouted from the streets and the rooftops and the churches and the public houses and the decks of fishing boats and the parking lot of the local Dunkin’ Donuts. “Extend Devers!” they cried for years, as Mookie Betts and Christian Vázquez were traded and Xander Bogaerts, Eduardo Rodriguez, Nathan Eovaldi, and J.D. Martinez left in free agency.

Surely this last stalwart of Boston baseball would not be allowed, encouraged even, to complete his career elsewhere. Rafael Devers is coming off the best offensive season of his career. He’s one of the best hitters in baseball; he’d be the best homegrown player the Red Sox had produced in a generation, had the Red Sox not also produced Betts.

And he’s staying put. News broke Wednesday night that the Red Sox and Devers have agreed to an 11-year, $331 million contract extension that will keep the color of his socks unchanged through the 2033 season. This deal supersedes the one-year, $17.5 million arbitration-avoiding settlement announced the day before. Your pleas have been heard, your prayers answered, your supplications fulfilled. Devers has been extended. Hallelujah.

Why should Red Sox fans be so excited? Well, Devers is an uncommonly skilled hitter, you see. He debuted with the Sox in 2017 at age 20, and while his 10-homer, 58-game rookie season was noisy, he didn’t really hit his stride until 2019. That year, he hit .311/.361/.555 with 32 home runs, scored 129 runs, and led the American League in doubles and total bases. Since then, he’s been one of the most productive hitters in baseball:

Of the 15 qualified hitters with a better wRC+ than Devers in the past two seasons, only Yordan Alvarez, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Austin Riley, and Kyle Tucker are younger than Devers. Of those 15 hitters, only Soto, Shohei Ohtani, and Pete Alonso are slated to be available in free agency before 2025-26.

The thing about Devers isn’t that he’s top-five at any one thing — it’s that he’s top-20 or thereabouts in almost every aspect of the game except walks and strikeouts, and he’s not a liability in either of those respects. In fact, Devers’ K% has dropped each of the past two seasons, and came to rest at 18.6% in 2022. That wouldn’t have been half bad for a singles hitter. Devers’ combination of bat-to-ball skill and power makes his offensive game particularly adaptable to a changing offensive environment.

There’s another reason to be optimistic about Devers’ future on an 11-year contract. Because he was barely post-natal when the Red Sox called him up, he’s still only 26. And not “in his age-26 season” like one of those guys whose birthday is right after the age cutoff. (Manny Machado, born July 6, is the king of age-related searches, for instance.) Devers turned 26 in late October. If the Red Sox make the playoffs in 2033, he will have just turned 37 when this contract ends.

ZiPS, as you might expect, sees Devers as a high-average, 30-homer hitter for the next four seasons, followed by a gradual decline in his 30s:

But even 11 years out, Devers doesn’t drop below replacement level, or a wRC+ of 100. That’s quite a feat for a player who’s not only played at a corner since he was a teenager, but has had “future first baseman” on his scouting report basically his entire career.

The 11-year run of this contract does seem to place it with the megabucks free agency deals we’ve seen earlier this winter, but Devers is so much younger than most of his contemporaries the Red Sox actually avoid eating too much of the gloopy end of his aging curve. Here’s how Devers’ deal stacks up with every free agent contract of $250 million or more given to a position player either in free agency or within 12 months of his reaching free agency in the past five years:

Machado’s deal includes an opt-out. Arenado declined to use his opt-out but he did negotiate an extra year on the end of his contract, which is not listed here.

Let’s be blunt: As effusive as I’ve been about Devers so far, most of the other $300 million men in baseball history are better players than he is. At least they’ve proven that they have a higher peak level of production. Devers is the first player in major league history who has a contract worth $300 million but doesn’t have a top-10 MVP finish — and that includes Gerrit Cole, who plays a position lots of voters treat as de facto ineligible for MVP. Every position player except Turner and Bogaerts has a top-three finish, and both of those have been in the top five.

So are the Red Sox paying too much for Devers, by those standards? No, for four reasons.

First, many of those contracts were signed in the free agency dead period that came a few years before the lockout. Not only has top-end free agent spending skyrocketed since the pandemic, and even more so since the lockout, inflation and rising interest rates have reduced the cost of these contracts to teams in real-world dollars. $31 million for Devers in 2023 just doesn’t mean the same thing as it would have in 2019, and it’ll mean even less in 2027 or 2033.

Second, the free agent market was crowded this year, with the top-end shortstops, Judge, Justin Verlander, and Jacob deGrom. This will not be the case next year, particularly if Machado and Max Scherzer don’t opt out. It’s Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Julio Urías, Aaron Nola, Matt Chapman, and we’re already well outside the quality of the top five free agents from 2022-23.

While some teams that signed big-name free agents will probably sit next year’s festivities out, there will be plenty of suitors for these few stars available. (Well, maybe only one real star — Ohtani.) The Dodgers tanked their entire offseason to get under the tax threshold, so they’ll be loaded for bear when Ohtani hits the market. The Giants are falling behind the Dodgers and Padres, they just got embarrassed in the Carlos Correa fiasco, and now have the Diamondbacks growing larger in their mirrors. If the Angels lose Ohtani, they’ll be desperate to replace him. And then there are the Mets. Steve Cohen spent his holiday season calling the 29 other owners and Rob Manfred, setting a whoopee cushion off into the phone, and telling them how broke they all are. If you think Devers couldn’t have snagged $30.9 million a year in next offseason’s market, you’re fooling yourself.

Third, you can get more production for your $30-odd million a year by signing one star than you can by signing two $15 million players. That’s one of the impacts of these super long-term deals. Let’s say Turner’s too rich for your blood; if you wanted a first-division shortstop in this market, the cheapest option was Dansby Swanson, who only cost $2 million a year less and would still be under contract through his age-36 season. And then you wouldn’t have a shortstop who isn’t nearly as good as Turner.

You can try to get clever in the second tier of the free agent market and salary dump trades, but that’s risky. The Red Sox have had mixed results here. Enrique Hernández and Michael Wacha: Good. Trading for Kyle Schwarber and Hunter Renfroe as short-term options: Very good. Martín Pérez and Garrett Richards: Meh. The jury’s still out on Trevor Story, who was a first-tier free agent at the time but came at a second-tier price by today’s standards. Certainly shopping in this aisle has failed to produce a player of Devers’ caliber for Boston under Chaim Bloom, and it requires repeating the process every year or two.

Plus, maximizing this strategy would probably involve trading Devers. Judging by the Betts deal, that was not an experience the Sox wanted to repeat. Better to just sign the guy who’s really good and is there already.

Which brings up point four. Since Dave Dombrowski was fired in 2019, the Red Sox have let so many big-name players walk while failing to replace them internally, fallen so far behind the competition in terms of spending, record, and fan morale, that they simply could not afford to let Devers walk. After Betts and Bogaerts, he was the last tentpole player the Red Sox had left. If he too had been allowed to saunter off to California for nothing, people would thrown rotten fruit at the team bus.

There’s a credible argument that 11 years and $331 million is a trifle too much for a player like Devers. I’d disagree with such an argument given the contemporary financial and competitive climate, but it’s not the kind of thing only a raving crank would say. However the Red Sox, in particular, could not afford to let Devers, in particular, walk. Keeping Devers costs a lot, but letting him go would cost more.