Kurtenbach: Buster Posey’s big Rafael Devers trade is a statement — the SF Giants are done playing second fiddle

Last week, I asked a simple question:

What makes the 2025 Giants Buster Posey’s team?

Well, a few days later, we have the answer.

Posey’s bold, brash, and perhaps even reckless trade for three-time All-Star slugger Rafael Devers on Sunday is a big black-and-orange stamp from the new director of baseball operations on the Giants organization.

Here’s what I’m about. 

The trade also made a statement to the fanbase and the rest of baseball: The Giants are done acting like anything less than the single big-league team in the richest metro area in America. They’re done trying to beat the Dodgers in the margins — they have the muscle and they’re going to flex it. After years of pushing fiscal prudence and not earnestly trying to keep up with the Joneses, Posey is done pretending anything else but the team in blue matters.

Devers, who has a cool quarter of a billion — $250 million — remaining on a deal that runs through 2033 for the player and until 2043 with deferred payments for the team, is coming to San Francisco for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison, and two minor leaguers. The Giants will take on every penny of what remains on Devers’ contract.

Is it a bit of conspicuous consumption? You bet.

Might the Giants want this move back in a few years? Perhaps.

But Posey is right: nothing matters but beating the Dodgers. And the Dodgers don’t worry about a contract like Devers’. So the Giants shouldn’t either.

The former catcher’s competitiveness is legendary. It was the driving force behind titles.

And we now have clear evidence of it manifesting in his new gig.

The goal is to close the gap, and the gap was huge. You can’t look at the Dodgers’ lineup and then the Giants’ this past weekend and think anything different.

But while Matt Chapman, Willy Adames, and Rafael Devers aren’t on the level of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, at least they can share a National League All-Star team locker room (and perhaps tips for how to invest their insane amounts of money).

This is the kind of deal that the Giants had to make, just like Posey had to roll a head a few weeks back.

The post-shake-up boost was waning. And while that’s not a valid reason to take on a quarter of a billion dollars, the questions of “what next?” that stemmed from that shakeup required more than just another Farhan Zaidi-like move. Dom Smith — as good a guy and as decent a player as he might be — isn’t going to lift the Giants over the Dodgers in the standings.

Another statement I made last week, before Game 1 of the Dodgers’ series — which the Giants lost 2-1 to fall two games back in the National League West: “Just just because the Giants are doing better than anyone should have reasonably expected doesn’t mean that this is the time to rest on the team’s laurels.”

Posey certainly did not do that.

This deal has surely been brewing for a little bit. Giants television analyst Mike Krukow said on KNBR that Posey recently asked him which of the team’s three young pitchers — Landon Roupp, Hayden Birdsong, or Kyle Harrison — was going to be the best. Might he have been gauging trade value? The opportunity to move Harrison — Krukow’s pick, for what it’s worth — as the centerpiece of a deal for a player like Devers doesn’t come around often.

And let’s be abundantly clear here: the trade package sent to Boston for Devers is embarrassingly light. In Harrison and Jordan Kicks, the Giants jettisoned two pitchers who are probably relievers at best (Hicks was already moved to the bullpen this season.) The Giants have only one untouchable minor-league prospect, and Bryce Eldridge is still safely stashed in Sacramento. Finances aside, this was a coup of a trade.

Boston just wanted to unload Devers’ contract. The Giants are willing buyers. If Devers were a free agent last year, he would have landed a similar deal. I’m sure the Giants would have extended an offer.

I’m not so sure Devers would have accepted it.

Which is why Posey’s trade deserves accolades, not hand-wringing.

If the Giants can’t buy players like Devers in free agency and they can’t create them in their farm system (at least at the current moment), then they’ll have to add them via trade. It’s that or simply not having elite-level players.

Unfortunately, situations like the Devers deal — a team looking to jettison a fair-market contract for an elite bat but not expecting a high-level return — come up rarely.

If Posey didn’t pounce on this deal, how would the Giants — with their bottom-of-the-barrel farm system — have added a player like Devers in the coming weeks or even the coming years?

There’s a similarity to the Warriors’ Jimmy Butler trade here: A weird situation, with the Bay Area team being the right team in the right place at the right time.

Like with Butler, it’s not as if the Giants are acquiring a truly distressed asset. The problems that made Butler expendable in Miami ceased to exist the second the Warriors acquired him and signed him to the extension he wanted from the Heat.

Devers’ issues that led to his trade should be left in Boston — the Giants aren’t signing a third baseman to take his job without consulting him; they already have a third baseman on a long-term deal in Matt Chapman (whose injury might have expedited things a bit, here).

We can all agree can all agree this will probably not be a good deal in the not-too-distant future. Devers isn’t much of a fielder, his preferred (to the point he was traded) position of third base is blocked, and if his bat slows down even a bit (he swings as fast as Adames — a cautionary tale), his value tanks.

But I have a two-word retort for such thinking: Who cares?

What did the Giants lose in this trade? The biggest loss is money, on which the Giants should be plenty set.

And what did they gain? Only the left-handed middle-of-the-order bat this team — which, again, is competing not just for a playoff spot but the National League West — desperately needed.

If ownership — and don’t forget that Posey is a part-owner of the team — isn’t worried enough about the financial aspects of Devers’ contract to prevent this trade, then no fan should be worried for them.

What did all the fiscal prudence over the last few years earn the fans? Tickets, concessions, hats, and parking didn’t go down in price because the Giants weren’t spending as much as they could.

If Posey didn’t take advantage of this situation — and the trade package says nothing if not “I’m taking advantage of you” — one would have to question his competitiveness.

Luckily, that’s something that we’ll never have to do.

After years of lowering standards, the man in charge wants it as bad as the fans in the stands, and he’s acting on those urges.

What more could you possibly want?