Olney: After Devers debacle, Red Sox must right the ship - ESPN

For months, as the standoff between Rafael Devers and the Boston Red Sox played out publicly, Boston fans never really booed their designated hitter. This probably would've come as a surprise to others who've lived through that charming experience, including Hall of Famer Ted Williams, who once spat at a hostile Fenway Park crowd, and Roger Clemens (even before he pitched for their rival).

Rather, Red Sox fans almost uniformly cheered Devers, all the way to the ignominious end of his time in Boston on Sunday. Hours after hitting another home run against the New York Yankees, he was summoned from the club's traveling party and told he'd been dealt to the opposite coast. That fans never fully aimed animus at Devers despite his refusal to do what generations of stars have done — embrace change for the larger good of the team; in this case, changing positions from third base to first — says much more about their distrust of Red Sox leadership than about Devers or Red Sox Nation going soft.

That skepticism spilled out in talk radio, tweets and texts in the hours following the Devers trade, the reaction angry and cynical. «They're not even a real organization anymore,» one longtime New Englander and Red Sox fan wrote to me. «Here we go again,» another texted. «First Mookie. Then Xander. Now Raffy.»

These kinds of responses will grow exponentially if Boston flounders over the next few weeks. The Red Sox had won eight of their past 10 games when the deal went down — including five of six against the first-place Yankees — and just when the dysfunctional team actually began functioning on the field, they traded their best hitter.

But this is an uproar five-plus years in the making. The 2020 trade of Mookie Betts, a homegrown star,