Move them out.
Get considerably less in return.
Feed people in media that the player was difficult.
That's the Red Sox way.
The narrative of Devers being “difficult” wasn’t exclusive to the Sox brass telling it to the media. Devers dug his own hole with his own words and actions/non-actions. I can understand being upset by the monthslong chatter about the team possibly acquiring Bregman or Arenado, and then the deceit in saying Bregman would play second, and then having him spend almost zero time in ST at second and then giving him third and telling Devers to throw away his glove. Sure, that would upset someone who had pride in playing the field and not being a hit only guy. Sure. But he’s still making 300 million to play baseball. Even with FU money, he’s still an employee and a teammate with a prime objective to win games and championships.
Then when Casas went down and he didn’t jump up and raise his hand to volunteer… i can understand lingering feelings. But again, a good person and a good teammate would have. He isn’t that. I can, though, appreciate some of what he said: that he can’t just leap into an entirely new position. Again, a person of pride didn’t want to be embarrassed again, in an entirely new way—by failing (again, by being a bad 1B as well as a bad 3B). But, again, you gotta try.
It should have been a lesson to him to see all of his other teammates playing multiple positions—even when they had very little previous experience there. But, he was already too far down into his self pity hole and too prideful to reach for a hand to pull himself out. And still, although I ‘hate’ all of those perspectives he held, I can understand them.
What just severed all sentiment I had for him was what I just read on SOSH, from someone who is respected as being plugged in:
Devers got upset with Campbell for quickly/easily volunteeering to work out at first. Made him look bad? Well, that (if true) represents that Devers is not just prideful and wounded. He’s an abject moron and an a-hole. I wasn’t down with the corporate line that they had to get rid of him because he didn’t lead like a $300m guy, only because it’s still the GM’s duty to field the most competitive team and this move makes the team worse, way before the deadline when such decisions need to be made. And because they didn’t shop him, and because Henry rejected a deal that may have been better because he didn’t want to spend money on the ostensibly better players return. But if that last bit was true, yeah, you had to do it.
On the other side of things, there was talk about Devers not running out certain grounders, but Cora said he had been dealing with some g-g-g-groin stuff. And after that egregious pull up, a couple of days later, the commentators said that he was feeling much better and in that game he did hustle down the line. In the next game, he didn’t hustle, and I surmised he had overdone it that previous game and was back to feeling not so good again.
Thank goodness for the pitching during this recent stretch of games:
www.espn.com
