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This is my take of the Raffy situation, what’s at the root of it and why we’re were we are at the moment.
It starts with the contract extension he worked out a few years back. Raffy knows he’s had his struggles in the field, but he also is a prideful player despite the outward appearance of just a kid happy to be playing baseball for a career. So when he was negotiating that he apparently wanted some assurances from the team he would remain at 3B for the foreseeable future. He knew eventually he’d likely wind up getting moved to DH, but figured sometime in his 30s would be when that happened. And in some of the comments that have come out in the media since this Spring that promise was made to him.
Now jump to this past winter. In preparing for additions to the team and building the 2025 Red Sox it seems apparent that Cora and Breslow decided upgrading defense at 3B would be a good idea. Can’t really fault that notion. But how they went about it can be faulted. They knew Raffy would be resistant to the idea. But they really wanted to land Alex Bregman, so it appears they decided to be less than forthcoming with Devers on their pursuit of Bregman. If you go back and look at the archived MLBTradeRumors articles about Bregman through the winter, any time Boston is mentioned they indicate they’re considering him for playing 2B, with Raffy continuing at 3B. Cora and Breslow knew if they talked about Bregman playing 3B Devers would likely make comments objecting to that, and that may have influenced Bregman to sign somewhere else to not create unnecessary drama with his new team. So I believe Cora made the decision to not be honest with Devers, figuring he could smooth things over with him later on after they landed Bregman. It appears that was a rather large miscalculation on his part. While he was able to get Devers to come around to the idea of being the DH going forward there’s still lingering hurt feelings on how it all went down on Devers’ side of things.
Now that something unfortunate has happened with the Casas injury and the team could really benefit from Devers being willing to “take one for the team” and try playing an unfamiliar position for them, that burnt bridge still hasn’t been repaired. I think part of Cora’s comments earlier this week saying he wasn’t considering playing Raffy at 1B was his attempt at protecting Devers a bit, but the media was going to continue hounding Devers for a direct response, and yesterday they finally got it. And the upshot is he’s still upset about how the team went about things with the decision to take 3B away from him. (And make no mistake, that’s exactly how he probably sees it, they took 3B away from him.) Asking him to consider playing 1B now just opened up a sore spot for him that the team really didn’t do a good job of trying to address and heal.
Now in going through all of this, one thing I don’t think is being considered is that this may not be a permanent situation. Raffy’s reaction seems to be very much an initial gut reaction here. Given time to reflect on it, like he had in ST with the move to DH, he may come around on this. But expecting a reaction of “sure, whatever I can do to help the team” so soon after the hurt feelings of being forced off his original position was in his case expecting a bit too much.
It starts with the contract extension he worked out a few years back. Raffy knows he’s had his struggles in the field, but he also is a prideful player despite the outward appearance of just a kid happy to be playing baseball for a career. So when he was negotiating that he apparently wanted some assurances from the team he would remain at 3B for the foreseeable future. He knew eventually he’d likely wind up getting moved to DH, but figured sometime in his 30s would be when that happened. And in some of the comments that have come out in the media since this Spring that promise was made to him.
Now jump to this past winter. In preparing for additions to the team and building the 2025 Red Sox it seems apparent that Cora and Breslow decided upgrading defense at 3B would be a good idea. Can’t really fault that notion. But how they went about it can be faulted. They knew Raffy would be resistant to the idea. But they really wanted to land Alex Bregman, so it appears they decided to be less than forthcoming with Devers on their pursuit of Bregman. If you go back and look at the archived MLBTradeRumors articles about Bregman through the winter, any time Boston is mentioned they indicate they’re considering him for playing 2B, with Raffy continuing at 3B. Cora and Breslow knew if they talked about Bregman playing 3B Devers would likely make comments objecting to that, and that may have influenced Bregman to sign somewhere else to not create unnecessary drama with his new team. So I believe Cora made the decision to not be honest with Devers, figuring he could smooth things over with him later on after they landed Bregman. It appears that was a rather large miscalculation on his part. While he was able to get Devers to come around to the idea of being the DH going forward there’s still lingering hurt feelings on how it all went down on Devers’ side of things.
Now that something unfortunate has happened with the Casas injury and the team could really benefit from Devers being willing to “take one for the team” and try playing an unfamiliar position for them, that burnt bridge still hasn’t been repaired. I think part of Cora’s comments earlier this week saying he wasn’t considering playing Raffy at 1B was his attempt at protecting Devers a bit, but the media was going to continue hounding Devers for a direct response, and yesterday they finally got it. And the upshot is he’s still upset about how the team went about things with the decision to take 3B away from him. (And make no mistake, that’s exactly how he probably sees it, they took 3B away from him.) Asking him to consider playing 1B now just opened up a sore spot for him that the team really didn’t do a good job of trying to address and heal.
Now in going through all of this, one thing I don’t think is being considered is that this may not be a permanent situation. Raffy’s reaction seems to be very much an initial gut reaction here. Given time to reflect on it, like he had in ST with the move to DH, he may come around on this. But expecting a reaction of “sure, whatever I can do to help the team” so soon after the hurt feelings of being forced off his original position was in his case expecting a bit too much.
