Questionable Trades

A weird weekend with two of the most inexplicable trades ever. The most egregious was the Red Sox shipping Rafael Devers to the Giants for a bunch of whatever. I grant you that Devers has become a malcontent who can’t play defense and is really resentful about being asked to DH, so maybe the Red Sox are just looking to get out of what is probably going to end up being a bad back end of his contract. But for what? This is the Red Sox. That the Sox are now operating like they were the Twins or Reds infuriates everyone in New England. But this is the modern sports franchise–just another asset to the billionaires with no particular interest in winning. It’s sad. But on the merits, this trade is nonsense and does nothing for the Red Sox:

If you look at baseball completely in the abstract, with bean-counting surplus value as your only guiding light for evaluating a trade, this one looks reasonable enough. Devers is under contract for a lot of years at a lot of dollars per year, and projection systems consistently think that he’ll generate low WAR totals for his salary in the back half of his deal. Harrison was a top 25 prospect not so long ago. Tibbs was a first round draft pick last year. Bello is an interesting lottery ticket. Hicks – okay, Hicks might have been a salary offset. But the point is, it’s likely that if all you care about is WAR accrued per dollar spent, the Sox come out ahead on this deal for most reasonable models of surplus value.

I don’t think those models make a ton of sense here, though. The Red Sox are trying to make the playoffs. You know what their team could use more than a 22-year-old in High-A and a former top pitching prospect with a 4.50 career ERA? They could use a slugging DH with the perfect swing for Fenway. If their wildest dreams came true, maybe he’d be 28 and under team control for a long time so that they didn’t have to try desperately to find a replacement soon.

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.

This absolutely makes the Giants serious contenders and dooms the Red Sox for at least this year. I really have no idea what Boston is doing, not just around this trade, but over the past three or four years. And no one else does either. I will say this–tickets to Fenway are much, much cheaper to get than they were 10 years ago.

Then there’s the NBA, where the Orlando Magic gave up the kitchen sink to acquire Desmond Bane from Memphis. Bane is a real nice player, but basically this trade turns the Magic into a second round team with little hope of getting better than that, though maybe they could sneak into an Eastern Conference Finals with this roster given the overall weakness of the East. There is more defense of this trade than of the Devers trade. John Hollinger balances both sides of it. The Ringer is outright for it, even if it is also noting the risks.

I get it–Banchero, Wagner, and Suggs all have potential, though the three of them played a total of 97 minutes together this year due to injuries. You add Bane to this and you do have a nice team.

The problem is that NBA GMs are going to look at the Pacers and say, we can be one step away from the Finals too. And perhaps that’s true. But the Pacers are a historically weak team to make an NBA Finals. It took Boston flailing and then losing Jayson Tatum, the Cavs collapsing, and an epic series against the Knicks for this to happen. That’s taking nothing away from Indiana, who have had a hell of a run complete with epic comeback after epic comeback. But that’s not really repeatable by other teams. Maybe if I was an Eastern Conference GM, I’d see it this way too. But it’s unlikely to work that well and it really hamstrings any ability for the Magic to improve themselves down the road, while giving the Grizzlies a lot of assets to move going forward for someone who can help them more than Bane.

I also note that the Grizzlies got a hell of a lot more for Bane than the Blazers did for Lillard. But then most things in NBA allow me to remember how poorly my Blazers have been run for the last two decades.