How the Devers trade hurts or helps the Cubs

It's not unusual for a fan to hear of a big trade or free agent signing not involving our favorite team to immediately wonder what the fallout of that deal is going to mean for their team.

When the Red Sox completed their now routine ostracism of their current best player who they will then trade for pennies on the dollar, the main ramifications of course were for the Red Sox and the team they gave Rafael Devers to. By "gave" I of course actually mean "traded."

The Red Sox President of Baseball Nonsense is a character fairly well known by Cubs fans. It's Craig Breslow, who worked for the Cubs from 2019 until after the 2023 season. Breslow initially had the fantastical title of director of strategic initiatives for baseball operations and then was given the equally obsequious title of director of pitching and special assistant to the president and general manager.

His work in those roles was basically the same. It was to tell as many writers at The Athletic as humanly possible what a great job he was doing and how wonderful he was at his job of developing pitching, even though during his tenure with the Cubs they developed Justin Steele (who had already been in the organization for five years before Breslow showed up) and fuck all else.

Breslow played his collegiate baseball at Yale, where his biggest accomplishment was being on the same Jewish Sports Review College Baseball All American first team as Sam Fuld and Adam Greenberg. I'm not even making that up.

He had a 12 year big league career playing for seven teams as a middle reliever. That plus Yale plus Theo Epstein got him a front office job.

The Red Sox hired him away from the Cubs after the 2023 season. You remember that season. It was also David Ross' last. The Cubs barely missed the playoffs, mostly because they didn't have enough pitching, not that Ross would have figured out how to do with it.

This past spring the Cubs and Red Sox were in a fierce bidding war for third baseman Alex Bregman. Neither team wanted to give Alex a long-term deal. The Cubs were interested in having Bregman be a bridge at third base to their top prospect Matt Shaw. The Red Sox were apparently interested in Bregman so that they could really piss off their incumbent All-Star third baseman, Rafael Devers. Devers is a younger, better player than Bregman.

Mostly because the Cubs were bidding just enough to barely miss out on Bregman so they could act like they were trying, the Red Sox "won" the bidding.

They had a delicate situation to navigate with what to do with Bregman and Devers, and Breslow and his manager Alex Cora (in his second stint with the Red Sox after being fired and suspended for cheating when he was with the Astros) knew just how to manage it.

They pissed off Devers by telling him Bregman had his job now and he could "lose his glove" and go to DH.

Devers was a little pissed off by this. And then, when their first baseman Tristan Casas ruptured his patella tendon in a game on May 2 and was lost for the season, the Red Sox asked Devers to start playing first base. Rafael reminded them that they had told him to "lose his glove."

Devers got off to a terrible start to the season. He struck out 15 times in his his first 19 at bats! Yikes.

So clearly his season went straight into the tank, right?