The Boston Red Sox gave their third baseman Rafael Devers the largest contract in team history in January 2023. About two years later, even the Red Sox appeared to acknowledge that it was a bad contract. They traded Devers in June of last year, sending him along with his 10-year, $313.5 million contract to the San Francisco Giants.
Now, a top baseball analyst has named the Devers deal as “the worst contract in baseball,” as the 29-year-old who has converted to first base and designated hitter continues to struggle in San Francisco, with only 16 hits in his first 79 plate appearances this season with 23 strikeouts—one every 3.4 trips to the plate—and a .577 OPS.
Devers’ OPS+, which measures a hitter against all others in the league, has sunk to just 66, meaning that Devers has performed 34 percent worse than the average National League hitter so far. But the Giants, who assumed the entirety of the three-time All-Star’s remaining contract, still owe Devers more than $226 million over this season and the next seven.
Analyst: Devers Declining and Will Not Bounce Back
FanSided analyst Chris Sanders, writing on Thursday, expressed no optimism that Devers would improve.
“After another 0-for-4 against the Reds on Thursday afternoon, I’m here to tell you that, if you’re just assuming that Devers’ production will revert to his career norms, there’s a good chance you’re sorely mistaken,” Sanders wrote. “If he’s already declining at the plate now, things are about to get ugly over the eight years and more than $200 million remaining on the massive extension he signed before things went south with the Boston Red Sox—as ugly as we’ve seen from any contract in recent memory.”
In his nine years with the Red Sox, Devers posted an .851 OPS and belted 215 home runs. Why is Sanders certain that the 10-year veteran will only get worse?
“It’s not like Devers has been unlucky so far this season,” Sanders wrote. “He’s been straight bad by just about every metric, and most of his expected stats are in the same neighborhood as his actual ones.”
Red Sox Fixed a Mistake by Dumping Devers Salary
The story around why the Red Sox traded Devers has usually centered around Devers’ discontent over being asked to move off of third base when Boston signed Alex Bregman as a free agent at the outset of spring training.
But Devers’ sharp decline since the trade, on June 15 of last year, may point to Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow’s suspicions that the contract was drastically overvalued. Devers’ performance on the Giants would appear to bear out those suspicions.
“Given just how much money, and for just how long, San Francisco is committed, that already makes him the worst contract in the sport,” wrote Sanders. “Ask yourself a simple question: Would the Giants be able to swap Devers’ contract with [insert bad long-term deal here] in a straight-up trade — i.e., would another team view Devers’ deal as the better value of the two? I’m not sure you can find a contract for which the answer would be yes.”
Sanders appears to acknowledge that Breslow knew what he was doing when he traded Devers, and Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey did not. Posey, according to Sanders, was “so desperate to finally add a middle-of-the-order bat” that he jumped at the chance to get Devers “without wondering why Boston was making him so available in the first place.”
Analyst: Red Sox Devers Contract Now ‘Worst in Baseball’ After 2025 Giants Trade