FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: June 21, 2025

By most measures, the Rafael Devers commerce occurred out of the blue. It got here with out advance discover of his availability, and the Pink Sox reportedly weren’t procuring him round. Instantly, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis commerce within the NBA, as a result of rarely in our scoops-driven media panorama, the place even the tiniest rumor is handled as foreign money, does a transaction involving a celebrity catch us without warning.

And but, now that the shock has worn off, buying and selling Devers seems like a logical final result to the saga that started in March, when the Pink Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base with out giving the incumbent a heads up. The small print of the following rift have been coated at nice size, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I received’t go into them right here. Lots of the reporting because the commerce has described the scenario in Boston as untenable, and the injury performed to the connection between Devers and the crew as irreparable. However based mostly on how badly the Pink Sox botched their preliminary response to the battle, after which stored bungling their subsequent makes an attempt at reconciliation, from my perspective, it looks like they didn’t make repairing it a lot of a precedence.

We’ll sort out your questions in regards to the Devers commerce and a lot extra on this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. However first, I’d wish to remind all of you that whereas anybody can submit a query, this mailbag is unique to FanGraphs Members. In case you aren’t but a Member and want to hold studying, you may join a Membership right here. It’s one of the best ways to each expertise the location and help our workers, and it comes with a bunch of different nice advantages. Additionally, when you’d wish to ask a query for subsequent week’s mailbag, ship me an electronic mail at mailbag@fangraphs.com.