Don’t expect a long-term deal between the Red Sox and Rafael Devers
The Boston Red Sox have yet to come to terms with Rafael Devers on a salary for next season, let alone a long-term deal that extends beyond 2021.
Devers is in his first year of the arbitration process and he’s the only eligible Red Sox player who hasn’t already agreed to a contract for next season. If the sides are unable to agree to terms before Friday’s deadline to exchange salary figures, the case will go to an arbitration hearing where a panel will make the decision for them by siding with either the figure submitted by the team or the player.
MLB Trade Rumors projected Devers to receive $6.3 million as a first-year arbitration-eligible player. It’s unclear if the Red Sox have made an offer for a similar amount or if Devers is holding out for more.
Locking up Devers to a long-term deal to buy out his three arbitration years and perhaps prevent him from hitting free agency after the 2023 season would make this arbitration projection a moot point. That option doesn’t appear to be on the table at the moment though. Devers’ agent Nelson Montes de Oca told Alex Speier of The Boston Globe that a multi-year contract extension for his client hasn’t been discussed.
That statement isn’t all that surprising. The pandemic-shortened 2020 season combined with a league-wide loss of revenue has made determining arbitration figures more difficult than ever. Any discussions about a long-term deal would face the same challenges.
The free-agent market has been crawling along at a sluggish pace. Teams are already suffering from not having fans in attendance last season and many are hesitant to invest in the top free-agents until they have clarity over whether or not the 2021 season will have any limitations on ticket sales. The elite players in this class should still eventually cash in but many others are going to find offers well short of their expectations in this market.
Those concerns could extend to players under team control seeking long-term deals, including Devers. With three years before he’s eligible for free agency, it’s not in his best interest to rush into locking in a deal while baseball’s economy is in the tank.
Complicating matters is that Devers is coming off a down season. In 2019, Devers set career-highs across the board by hitting .311 with a .916 OPS, 32 home runs, 115 RBI and a league-leading 54 doubles. The shortened season obviously cut down drastically on the counting stats but Devers also saw his batting average plummet to .263 to go along with a disappointing .793 OPS. He was even worse in the field, committing a major-league high 14 errors and recording -6 defensive runs saved.
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Battling through an ankle injury that he suffered early in the season partially explains this regression but there were also concerns about his conditioning coming into Summer Camp following a lengthy hiatus caused by the pandemic.
There’s growing optimism that a more traditional offseason and training camp will allow a healthy Devers to get back on track. However, the Red Sox need to see it happen before they can entertain the option of a long-term deal. They can’t hand him a big contract based on his 2019 production until he washes away the bitter taste of 2020. Likewise, Devers would be foolish to sign a long-term deal while his value is down.
The eagerness to secure Devers’ future in Boston may be an overreaction to losing Mookie Betts. Fans don’t want to see another star traded away before they have the chance to leave them in free agency. The scenarios are entirely different though. Devers has great potential but he’s not the generational talent that Betts is so he won’t command a record-breaking contract. If Devers ever hits the free-agent market, the Red Sox can afford him if they really want to. He won’t have that opportunity for several years so there’s no rush.
The point of an extension is to create cost certainty for the team while providing security for the player. With so much uncertainty regarding how the market will recover from last year’s revenue losses or the impact COVID-19 will have next season, finding common ground for terms on an extension is nearly impossible. Paying Devers based on pre-pandemic conditions could backfire if the market is slow to recover and the team ends up overpaying in retrospect. If the Red Sox tried to use that as an excuse to lock Devers into a team-friendly deal, his agent would probably hang up the phone.
The Red Sox want to keep Devers in Boston but the timing simply isn’t right for an extension. That could change once the pandemic is behind us and we regain some semblance of normalcy but we’re not out of the woods yet. In the meantime, the focus should be on coming to terms on an arbitration salary for 2021. Arbitration hearings can get messy so it’s in everyone’s best interests for the two sides to settle an agreement on their own. Otherwise, disputing their cases in front of a panel could be damaging to future negotiations when the time comes to talk about a long-term deal.