The Aftermath

The Giants acquired a great player — or did they?

Because I’m one of the dumbest people to ever suck air, I’ve had to develop some strategies to protect against my intellectual deficits. One of them has been to always be skeptical of my joy, because chances are that I’m too stupid to see how it’s wrong to enjoy something for some reason. This strategy was invoked yesterday. I thought it was a good idea for the San Francisco Giants to trade for slugger Rafael Devers. I mean, just watch all of these highlights from last season:

215 home runs (18th in MLB), 696 RBI (10th), and 273 doubles (5th), since his debut in 2017, and a career line of .279/.349/.510 to go with three All-Star selections, two Silver Slugger awards, and MVP votes in five of the last six seasons. I would consider him a great hitter. What position will he ultimately play? TBD, but that’s not my focus right now!

President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey told the KNBR morning show that ownership impressed him through the long process of acquiring Devers.

They want a championship-caliber team out there and this is a huge signal. […] Hopefully, signals to the fan base […] that our goal is to be the last ones standing.

That sounds good to me. I like that my team has ambitions and takes concrete steps to make them happen. The Giants have tried and failed to use their money advantage to sign guys so we always knew that a big trade would have to satisfy the big fish need. In order to do that, the team would have to buck the industry trend of being too precious with their prospects. They finally have some of note who could be moved and they pulled the trigger. Posey’s behavior is better than the alternative (hemming and hawing), right?

Plus, acquiring Devers led to this funny (to me, anyway) discovery:

But at the end of the day, this is Dumb Fan Pleasure. According to 100% impartial sources, this trade is a borderline disaster for the Giants. My favorite kind of baseball analysis is The Thing You Think Is Good Is Actually Bad You Stupid Idiot, and the national baseball writers didn’t disappoint!

Here’s MLB.com’s Mike Petriello:

Baseball Prospectus’s Jarrett Seidler goes a bit deeper into the numbers:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more obviously obscenely underwater contract get moved without retention and with only a minor offset. Wowwwwww

I can evaluate this as a cold baseball deal like the Red Sox FO likely did, or I can evaluate this the emotions, but if you ask me what the Red Sox are doing, it’s probably dumping him before the car goes off a cliff no matter what they say to the media about the other stuff

Moving on from a DH running a 75 zcon for his last 1000 PA, which is not really a profile you want to owe hundreds of millions to over the next decade

[Strike Zone Contact Rate…] is generally a very good predictor of future hit tool when combined with other stuff

The plain English version is that for the last year and a half Devers has been the only hitter in the league who makes contact at a 20 grade level within the zone who doesn’t suck

the group of teams that are both good and spendy enough to make this move in-season are mostly comprised of leadership which are going to run Devers’s current deal into an advanced model which spits out a result like “welp that’s like $100 million more than you should be committing to him”

This is a salient point in the analysis. We all figure that the last 5-6 years of Devers’ deal will be bad to really bad, but there’s evidence that it’s going to be bad immediately, too. Out of 125 qualified hitters since the start of last season, Rafael Devers is DEAD. LAST. in players’ contact percentage in the strike zone. That’s… significant!

But let’s take a look at zone contact in the Statcast era and see if we can find any solace from low Z-contact guys over the years.

So, I take a little solace here because there are some guys on here who have wound up being okay despite having seasons with lots of swing and miss in the zone (Willy Adames, Ronald Acuna Jr., Luis Robert, Matt Chapman) — but only a little. There are a couple of caveats, as you can see:

• There are a lot of 2020 seasons on this list. That was a 60-game season during a global pandemic. Are those rates illustrative of anything other than that?
• You don’t see a lot of guys who wound up being okay show up on this list more than once.

It’s important to keep in mind that we haven’t even played half the season yet, so there’s a nonzero chance that Devers’ rate improves, thereby making 2024 the outlier rather than the trend. I’ll admit that I feel this is unlikely, but regardless of my feelings, it’s plausible.

The general tone of the criticisms is that Devers is a bad player because of his contract. That it’s “underwater” already and that the ~$250 million the Giants owe him over the next ~8 years (not exact because there are actually several years of deferrals built in) makes the trade a heresy against efficient baseball. Add in the negative measure data — despite the All-Star results — and you have a perfect turd of a deal according to totally impartial sources. I am giving tremendous credit to Mike Petriello (Dodgers fan) and Jarrett Seidler (Mets guy) and even former Dodgers beat writer and close friend of Clayton Kershaw, Andy McCullough, the benefit of the doubt that they think Devers is a bad player and that’s why the deal is bad for the Giants. Said McCullough, who gave the Giants a “C” for the acquisition:

He is, for sure, one of the top 15 to 20 hitters in the sport, and he will help the lineup of a San Francisco club that has kept pace with the Dodgers in the early months of the season.

The question for the Giants, though, is if he will remain among that group during the subsequent nine years of his deal, during which San Francisco will owe him $250 million, in his age-29 to age-36 seasons. Anyone with easy access to an actuarial table can tell you how those things tend to go.

Now, is it easy to imagine all three of these guys rationalizing it differently if the Dodgers or Mets traded for Devers? A thousand times yes. Petriello and McCullough’s immediate defensiveness is more naked homerism than Seidler’s immediate thumbs down and “the industry’s” belief that the contract was underwater before the ink dries isn’t all that compelling to me because most of the teams are spending less than the Giants as a general policy. The criticisms shouldn’t stick for the simple reason that a lot of the same naysayers had concluded that the Giants would need to overpay to land a slugger because they can’t obtain (or develop them otherwise). The moment they do, it’s suddenly a bad deal?

The Giants are a rich team. Thinking about their payroll flexibility is the height of concern trolling in that it’s wholly ignorant. The Giants added the type of player they haven’t had in the organization since Barry Bonds. They have tremendous payroll flexibility (CBT payrolls the next 4 years, per Cot’s MLB contracts: $160.2MM, $135.8MM, $136.3MM, $118.8MM) along with the highly valued asset of “controllable arms.”

The ultimate test is how Devers does in a Giants uniform. Does he make the Giants better? Ben Clemens put it best last night on FanGraphs:

Guys like Devers don’t grow on trees. Want an example of what I mean? There are no players on either the Red Sox or Giants projected for a better batting line the rest of the season. In 2024? You guessed it: No player on either the Red Sox or Giants produced a higher wRC+ than Devers. There are better hitters than Devers, but there aren’t many. Building a baseball team is a game of marshaling scarce resources, and one of the scarcest of all is a truly impactful hitter.

If he’s great this season and the next few, it’s a win for the Giants.

Remarkably, ZiPS does not project him to hit 30 home runs at any point. This will be a real test of Devers’ talents and Oracle’s park effect. We have 25 years of history to show us that, absent unsanctioned PED use, Devers is unlikely to be a masher. But he could be effective in so many other ways. Clutch. No platoon split. The kind of hard contact the lineup hasn’t featured in the Statcast era. The ripple effect of his presence — will Heliot Ramos see better pitches? Will Willy Adames relax now that he’s got another friend on the team? Will Jung Hoo Lee and Bryce Eldridge reap the benefit of having less pressure to carry the lineup? Or will Devers simply thrive in a less toxic environment? Still, even on paper, the addition is not necessarily as amazing as it might seem at first glance.

Our own Brady Klopfer’s big concern is that the Giants gave up prospects for a $250+ million designated hitter, so the skepticism isn’t coming just from the east coast. Eno Sarris follows the Giants closely and said this:

Why I would trade Kyle Harrison: he’s a low slot high spin efficiency starter, like an Andrew Heaney. Very difficult to find secondary pitches that are elite for them, especially if they don’t turn over changeups well. Best is to hope velo stays up, develop many meh secondaries.

I don’t see the downside with this move. Maybe James Tibbs III winds up being the best player in this deal down the line, but a Rafael Devers in hand is worth two in the minors, or whatever.

At worst, Devers transforms the lineup from below average to average — unless he pulls a Ricky Ledee or the uncertainty revolving around which position he will play long-term winds up being too disruptive. That might be a situation where we must Trust the Posecess. The best case scenario is that Devers energizes the entire lineup and we get something closer to the 2021 team. In between are a number of upside scenarios that would make us all very happy, and I think somewhere in this range is likelier than either extreme.

So, the aftermath of the move is that Boston fans are miserable, Dodgers fans are skeptical, Buster Posey looks like an aggressive, yet rational actor in his first year on the job, and Giants fans are happy. What’s not to like?