Rafael Devers stepped in against Sonny Gray for his first Fenway at-bat since the trade Friday night, and the building let him have it. Four pitches. Strikeout looking. Boos before he’d even finished setting his feet in the box.
Tyler Milliken caught the moment from the press box:
Strong amount of boos for Rafael Devers in his return to Fenway Park. pic.twitter.com/bkYG4DF5KG
— Tyler Milliken (@tylermilliken_) August 21, 2026
Fair enough, Boston. You’re allowed to be mad. You just picked the wrong target.
Run the tape back. Spring training 2025: the Red Sox sign Alex Bregman, and suddenly there’s a third baseman already at third. Devers gets the DH conversation. Alex Cora described the moment plainly: “He was very vocal about how he felt, and we made a decision. Alex is going to play third, and Raffy is going to DH.” Nobody in the organization ever said the quiet part — that Bregman’s signing is what created the logjam — but you don’t need a press release to connect two dots that close together.
Devers took the DH assignment. Grumbled, but took it. Then in May, with Triston Casas out for the year on a torn patellar tendon, the front office came back and asked him to also play first base. That’s where he drew the line. No debate, no compromise. He wasn’t playing first base, and that was that.
A month later he was a Giant. San Francisco took on the rest of his $254 million contract, and Boston got Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison, James Tibbs III and a lottery-ticket reliever back. Hicks is running an 8.20 ERA on a $12.5 million salary. Tibbs got flipped to the Dodgers for spare parts before he ever mattered here. That’s the return on a franchise player who’d been in the organization for eight years and had a ring to show for it — and it fits the Red Sox’s track record of deadline missteps lately.
And the guy the whole reshuffle was supposedly built around? Bregman walked after one season and signed with the Cubs. Craig Breslow’s entire pitch at the time was that Boston needed to “lean into pitching and defense” instead of paying two infielders top dollar. Cool plan. Same front office, same accountability gap we’ve written about before. The guy they kept the money for left anyway, and the guy they moved on from is hitting bombs 400 miles away.
Back to Friday night, though. Somewhere between the strikeout and the ninth inning, Fenway ran a tribute video: 2018 championship shots, a few frames of Xander Bogaerts. The mood in the building flipped. Actual cheers. Devers smiling in the dugout like a guy who wasn’t expecting it. Then he stepped up again and put one 412 feet into center, his 26th homer of the season, cutting the Giants’ deficit to 5-4.
Devers isn’t interested in relitigating any of it. “I don’t want to think about the past, I don’t want to talk about the past,” he told reporters before the game, adding that he’s matured and learned to move forward. Fine by him. He’s got 26 homers, a fresh $254 million safety net, and zero reason to care what Fenway thinks of the trade anymore.
Boston’s the one still stuck with the bill.
