On Committing To Your Guys
Depending on when you’re reading this, the Red Sox first game of the year against the Yankees in New York is about 24 hours away. That means the Red Sox front office has 24 hours or thereabouts to work out contract extensions with Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts.
Don’t hold your breath.
News came yesterday that the Red Sox had discussed an extension with Devers and gone so far as to offer him a contract. Devers turned down the offer.
It’s not known exactly what was offered. What is known is this:
Jose Ramirez signed a five year, $124 million contract extension to stay with Cleveland, so we know the Red Sox offered Devers more than five years at $25 million a year.
Much has been said about Devers future in Boston, and Bogaerts’ as well. Heck, I’ve said a lot about it here in this newsletter. Star players leaving the Red Sox is a bit of a sore subject for some Red Sox fans, and as I’m regularly accused of “not letting the Mookie trade go,” I’ll cop to being in that group.
I’m not here to re-litigate the Mookie trade. Heck, this isn’t really even about the Mookie trade. Oh, there are parallels, to be sure. [Seinfeld voice] Parallels! But each of these players isn’t Mookie and the team attempting to re-sign them (or not) is not in the same place both financially and roster-wise as the one that traded Mookie. Which is all to say this is a different situation with different specifics.
But oh my gosh does it smell the same!
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From where we sit right now, it sure seems Xander Bogaerts will opt out of the remaining three years and $60 million of his contract next off-season and very likely leave the organization he has been a part of for over a decade. Devers has a season remaining of team control after 2022, but if the team and player can’t agree to an extension, it sure seems like the M.O. of this front office is to move him for something rather than let him walk after the season.
As the aforementioned ‘not letting go’ fan, this hurts preemptively. It’s not hard to look into the future a bit and see a time with Bogaerts in a Giants uniform and Devers playing for the White Sox or whatever. Know that just writing that sentence hurt me. But it sure seems like that’s the road we’re headed down.
The front office doesn’t do the sentimental stuff though. Yes, they tried to extend Devers, but they’ll only do it at their number. While I and and many on the internet might hand Devers a blank check and a pen and tell him to fill it out and give it back, Chaim Bloom is coming at this from a far more rational place.
And that’s actually good. I think I’ve made it clear that this isn’t the result I want. I’ve watched Devers since he signed with the Sox as a 16-year-old in 2013. I remember Bogaerts signing with the Red Sox in 2009. That’s one of the wonderful things about following a baseball team. These players become something more than just players. You follow them as they literally grow up from boys to men to All Stars. The connection is a real one. It’s why I’m never going to get over the Mookie trade, not fully. It’s why I won’t ever forgive the Red Sox for not signing Jon Lester. These players mean something to us fans.
And the team benefits from that attachment. Consider all your Xander jerseys and Devers baseball cards. I know I’m guilty there more than a few times over. But that’s not how smart front offices operate. Bloom and company will look at the players and they’ll take their ages, their positive attributes and their negative attributes all into account. Sure, maybe there’s a ‘you’ve been here a long time and our fans love you’ bump but it’s not much if that even exists at all.
Devers is really young and he’s an amazing hitter, but his fielding is atrocious. Maybe he can clean it up this season, but maybe he needs to be moved across the diamond to first base, a spot the Red Sox already have filled, or worse, to DH, a spot the Chaim Bloom Red Sox are extremely unlikely to commit $30 million a year to locking up for the foreseeable future. These possibilities are all getting tossed in the hopper when the Red Sox front office decides what kind of offer a player is worth.
With Xander the issue is similar. Is he a shortstop? He thinks so. The Red Sox aren’t so sure. Can you commit the money and the years to a guy entering his 30s when you can’t be sure what position he will play or if he’ll play that position well?
What made the Mookie trade and the Lester failure so infuriating is that both players didn’t have those downsides. Both were top players at their positions with very little baggage besides the market rate contract they both wanted. In this case things are more complicated.
That doesn’t change the fact that I and many or even most fans want the players we love signed and then sort the rest of it out later. That’s what my heart wants. My head though is telling me maybe that’s not the best way to run a baseball team.
In the end, what we want more than Rafael Devers and more than Xander Bogaerts is for the Red Sox to win. Maybe that winning comes with the players we love, or maybe it comes with new players we’ll fall in love with. The end result is the important thing and that’s what the front office is focused on.
I’m not sure I’m fully on board with that, but that’s certainly how the team is being run at this moment in time. There is a fundamental dichotomy between the way fans view these players and the way the front office player analysts view them. And that’s probably how it should be. Front office analysts should be thinking about the full picture, should be asking how the player will age, where he’ll fit on the roster in X number of seasons, how his salary will impact their ability to bring in other talent, and ultimately what the team will get out of the deal, among probably many other questions I’m not smart enough to think of right now.
Fans don’t place the same level of importance on those things because that’s not how they look at the team. It’s love, not analysis. We love Rafael Devers and Xander Bogaerts. They’re our guys. They’re Boston Red Sox and they should always be Boston Red Sox. Of course, dammit.
If Xander leaves, if Devers leaves, it’ll be devastating. It’ll shake my fandom. But that won’t mean it’ll be bad for the franchise. Winning is great, it’s the thing we fans want more than anything, but there is a line somewhere. It’s hard to fall in love again.
I'm sitting here reading while sporting my Mookie jersey (Dodgers version ... I'll save the Sawx one for tomorrow, Opening Day), nodding my head. I agree. You're right. They're maybe probably right. Forget about not getting over Mookie ... I still bristle a little over Lynn, Burleson, and Fisk in the winter of '81.