Winners and Losers of Rafael Devers Trade to Giants, Hicks and Harrison to Red Sox

Father's Day delivered one mother of a blockbuster trade in Major League Baseball, with the Boston Red Sox sending DH Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants in exchange for LHP Kyle Harrison, RHP Jordan Hicks, Single-A OF James Tibbs and Rookie ball RHP Jose Bello, as first reported by FanSided's Robert Murray.

The relationship between Devers and Red Sox decision makers had evidently passed the point of no return and they decided to sever ties completely. San Francisco is reportedly absorbing everything left on Devers' contract, which runs through 2033.

Will the Red Sox reinvest those "savings" via long-term extensions for their highly touted rookie class of Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer and Kristian Campbell?

Or did Boston just become the heavy favorite to go give Kyle Tucker a $500M contract this offseason?

Those are questions for another day.

For now, we're proclaiming a few winners and losers of this rare mid-June seismic swap.

Winner: San Francisco Giants

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This winner kind of goes without saying, right?

The Giants have been desperately searching for a legitimate slugger for the past two decades, last producing a 30 homer season via Barry Bonds in 2004.

They almost landed "Arson" Judge a few years ago, before regrettably investing in Mitch Haniger and Michael Conforto once that fell through. The Jorge Soler signing from two offseasons ago didn't work out as well as they hoped, nor has this past winter's massive investment in Willy Adames—though he has at least delivered a few moonshots in the past week.

But they finally got someone who can legitimately mash baseballs.

It should be noted that Oracle Park isn't exactly the best possible home venue for Devers' left-handed power. He has 215 career home runs, but StatCast puts his "Expected Home Runs by Park" count in San Francisco at just 200—compared to 273 if all of those balls had instead been hit at Cincinnati's Great American Ballpark.

It should also be noted, however, that his expected home run count at Fenway Park was merely 202. Thus, his numbers should translate almost perfectly to life in San Francisco, where he instantly becomes their premier hitter with a 2025 OPS at least 70 points greater than any of his new teammates.

Fire up the ol' Splash Counter.

Devers should be depositing balls into McCovey Cove very soon.

Loser: Boston Red Sox Fans

Maddie Malhotra/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images

In addition to being the best hitter on the roster, Rafael Devers was not so long ago a symbol to Red Sox fans of the franchise's new-found commitment to winning.

One year after winning AL MVP and leading them to the 2018 World Series, they traded away Mookie Betts for a pupu platter and some David Price salary relief. Jersey Street is still reeling from that one some seven years later.

A few years after that, Boston completely botched Xander Bogaerts' impending free agency—though, in hindsight, that sure has panned out nicely for them, with Bogaerts rapidly approaching "worst contract in baseball" in San Diego while Boston took Kristian Campbell with the compensatory draft pick that it got for losing Bogaerts.

Between those two wildly mishandled situations involving fan favorites and those annual offseason reports that Boston is repeatedly ranking near the bottom of the league in terms of percentage of revenue spent on payroll, the frustration with ownership of an indefensibly mediocre team was reaching a boiling point.

But giving Devers $313.5M during the 2022-23 offseason and making him the face of the franchise for the next decade felt like a turning point back toward those 1998-2018 heights of contending for a World Series on a pretty annual basis.

Less than 30 months later, though, the Red Sox decision makers are trying to gaslight that turning point, acting like his attitude left them no choice but to trade him away for pennies on the dollar, even though we all watched them go out of their way to infuriate him with their offseason pursuits of Nolan Arenado and Alex Bregman, as well as their handling of the first base situation that arose when Triston Casas went down for the count.

At this point, the face of this franchise is some combination of crying and screaming emojis.

Thoughts and prayers to any days out there who may have gotten a Devers Red Sox jersey for Father's Day. Hope your kids kept the receipt.

Winner: The Innocent Victims of Boston's Logjam

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Boston's Marcelo Mayer

One silver lining of this trade as far as the Boston faithful are concerned is it has created a little more room at the proverbial inn of Red Sox hitters.

Even with Alex Bregman, Wilyer Abreu, Triston Casas and Masataka Yoshida all presently on the IL, both Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer—AKA two of the best prospects in all of baseball heading into this season—were merely used as pinch hitters in Sunday's series finale against the Yankees.

Mayer also pinch hit on Friday, as did Anthony on Saturday, and there were already mounting questions of what Boston would do with its next generation of stars once Bregman and Abreu make their way back to the field in the next few weeks.

At least now they have options, with the man who had started at DH in each of their first 73 games no longer contributing to that lineup logjam.

That isn't to say it's a blessing in disguise for Boston as a whole. There were plenty of other "not franchise cornerstone" players they could have traded away to free up space in the lineup. And making the trade when they did—right after getting back above .500 for the first time in nearly a month with all those aforementioned IL bats still unavailable—was incredibly strange.

But there are a handful of individual hitters in Boston who benefit from this trade, perhaps most notably Yoshida, who could reprise his role as the primary DH instead of worrying about that outfield rehab.

Loser: Los Angeles Dodgers

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Los Angeles' Max Muncy

Let's start with the obvious part of this one: The 2025 San Francisco Giants—who are two games behind the Dodgers in the NL West after Sunday's 5-4 loss—just became a substantially more serious threat to win the division.

The Giants have had arguably the best bullpen in baseball, and the arms they gave up to acquire Devers did nothing to change that. They will almost certainly need to add at least one starting pitcher ahead of the trade deadline, though that was already the case for a club with big question marks in its rotation beyond Logan Webb and Robbie Ray.

What San Francisco needed in order to be taken a little more seriously as a threat to the Dodgers was more offense, as the Giants entered Sunday having scored 89 fewer runs than Los Angeles.

And, well, they got it.

Unless Devers gives Boston a nice big single-fingered gesture on his way out the door by publicly volunteering to play first base in San Francisco, it will presumably be Wilmer Flores shifting from DH to 1B and Devers taking over the DH duties. But the net result is a .905 OPS replacing what has been a black hole at first base for most of the season for the Giants.

The less obvious reason the Dodgers are a loser in this deal is because when the Devers/Red Sox drama reached a tipping point and it felt like a trade could be coming this offseason, it was Los Angeles who immediately made sense as a motivated suitor with Max Muncy nearing the end of his contract. (Though, they do have a 2026 club option for him, and he is hitting infinitely better than he was when we first started searching for potential Devers landing spots.)

Instead of acquiring one of the best hitters out there, they'll have to deal with pitching to him on a regular basis for the next eight years.

Winner: Rafael Devers (and the Theatre in San Francisco Next Weekend)

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Through all the drama, Rafael Devers just kept coming to the ballpark and doing his thing at a high level.

His home run on Sunday was his 15th of the season, leading the Red Sox both in that department and in on-base percentage (.401), also drawing his American League-leading 56th walk of the year.

In a world where Aaron Judge isn't already -10000 to win it, Devers might have been in the AL MVP mix, almost single-handedly keeping the Red Sox within shouting distance of a playoff spot, even while probably wanting to shout at the likes of Craig Breslow and John Henry on a daily basis.

But without ever outright demanding a trade, he got his wish, getting out of what had rapidly become a hostile marriage over the past eight months and getting to spend the remaining eight years of his contract somewhere else.

Not only that, but he almost immediately gets an opportunity to show his ex that he's doing just fine without them, as San Francisco will host Boston next weekend.

Will that be when he hits his first ball into the San Francisco Bay?

Or will there be orders from someone pulling the strings to give Devers some sweet chin music on his first trip to the plate on Friday night?

"Juan Soto at Yankees" a few weeks ago had potential for drama, but this is going to be a whole different level of must-watch TV.