The San Francisco Giants are 31-46. Rafael Devers is hitting .238. The trade rumors are heating up. The contract is the problem.
That is the situation in a few sentences. ESPN’s Buster Olney reported this week that the Giants are open to offers on Devers, which marks a real shift from earlier in the season when insider Robert Murray said the team had not internally discussed trading any of its core position players. The 1.5-month gap between those two reports tells you everything about how San Francisco’s season has unraveled.
The Giants are 8.5 games out of a playoff spot. They are positioning as sellers. Per multiple reports, they are also open to dealing Willy Adames and Matt Chapman, though the most attainable trade chip remains second baseman Luis Arraez given his contract and lower prospect cost.
Devers is a different kind of conversation. He will make $28.5 million in each of the next seven seasons. That is $199.5 million in future commitment, paid out by a player who is hitting .238/.302/.438 with 0.3 fWAR through nearly half a season. Those are not numbers that motivate a contender to take on the contract without massive financial concessions.
Jon Heyman put it directly. “To trade Devers, how bad would that look to pay that down by 40 percent? I think you’d have to pay it down to at least 40 percent. Seems unusual and unlikely.”
Forty percent of $199.5 million is roughly $80 million the Giants would have to eat. That is the price of admitting they made a mistake when they acquired him from the Red Sox last summer. Buster Posey, the new president of baseball operations, would essentially be writing off the biggest trade of his predecessor’s tenure.
The case for doing it anyway is real. The Devers contract is a millstone on the Giants’ cap flexibility for the next seven years. San Francisco is trying to rebuild around a younger core, and paying a 29-year-old DH-type player $28 million annually through 2032 is the opposite of what a smart rebuild looks like.
The contenders most likely to engage are the Yankees, Phillies, and Dodgers. Each has the financial firepower to absorb partial salary in exchange for a real bat, and each has a need for left-handed power in the middle of the order. The Yankees in particular have been linked to Devers since the Red Sox traded him a year ago.
The complicating factor is Devers’ positional flexibility, or lack of it. He came up as a third baseman, moved to DH last summer in San Francisco, and has not shown enough at first base to make any team confident about a defensive plan. That is a real obstacle when teams like the Yankees already have an in-house DH spot they cannot fill with three different bats at once.
The Giants probably do not move Devers in the next five weeks. The contract is too big, the performance is too poor, and the financial commitment required to facilitate a deal is too steep for a Buster Posey front office that is barely a year into the job.
What happens after the deadline is the more interesting question. If the Giants finish the year 25 games under .500, the conversation gets serious in the offseason. By then, the Yankees might have the cap space, the Phillies might have a clearer need, and the Giants might be willing to eat $100 million to get out from under the rest of the deal.
For now, Devers stays in San Francisco. The next move belongs to a front office that has to decide whether to admit the mistake or live with it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
