How the Red Sox-Rafael Devers breakup got so messy - ESPN

AWAITING TAKEOFF ON the Boston Red Sox's charter flight early Sunday evening, Rafael Devers sat with his teammates playing cards. The trip to Seattle would take a little more than six hours, and games were a reliable way to pass the time, a carefree bonding exercise for a team coming off a sweep of the rival New York Yankees. This was going to be a good flight.

Before the Boeing 757 lifted off, Red Sox manager Alex Cora approached Devers with a solemn look on his face. He had news, and there was no easy way to say it: Devers had just been traded to the San Francisco Giants. Devers was gobsmacked. He gathered his thoughts and belongings, said goodbye to his teammates, strolled off the plane and into a cab, and rode off to the next phase of his life.

For months, the tension between Devers and the team had simmered. What started in spring training as a repairable mismanagement of Devers' future — and his ego — by the Red Sox degraded into something far too familiar for the organization. Devers, according to a person familiar with his thinking, felt «lied to and betrayed» by the Red Sox. Cora, long one of Devers' chief supporters and advocates, supported his expulsion. Craig Breslow, the Red Sox's chief baseball officer whom Devers publicly badmouthed amid the hostility, played hatchet man. Red Sox ownership, which at first wanted to mend the relationship between the parties knowing that two years earlier it had guaranteed him $313.5 million to play a central role in a forthcoming resurgence, lost faith and greenlit the deal. And just like that, the last remaining member of Boston's 2018 championship team, the kid who had signed with the team as a fresh-faced 16-year-old and a dozen years later had grown into a three-time