How Red Sox Clubhouse Reacted To Recent Rafael Devers Saga

Rafael Devers created quite the situation last week for the Boston Red Sox with his comments about refusing to play first base.

It caused Red Sox owner John Henry, team president and CEO Sam Kennedy and chief baseball officer Craig Breslow to jump into action and fly to Kansas City to have a meeting with Devers. The situation also could have caused friction between Devers’ teammates inside the Red Sox clubhouse.

But 2013 Red World Series champion and NESN analyst Will Middlebrooks said that’s not the case during the most recent episode of “Sox Talk with Will Middlebrooks.”

“I’ve talked to several guys in the clubhouse off the record, like, ‘Hey, what’s up? How we really feel about this?’ Guys that I trust. Guys that trust me,” Middlebrooks said. “And they’re like, ‘We don’t care. We want Raffy to hit. When he hits, we win.’ That’s the mindset in the clubhouse is like, ‘We don’t care. We want to win.'”

The ongoing drama with Devers certainly didn’t impact the Red Sox on the field against the Royals. Boston took two out of three games against Kansas City, which entered the weekend series on a six-game winning streak.

Devers factored into both wins, racking up four hits and three RBIs in Saturday’s 10-1 triumph before belting a 440-foot, game-altering home run in the series finale win on Sunday.

Middlebrooks credited the leaders in the Red Sox clubhouse for not letting everything going on with Devers sidetrack them from the goal of winning.

“They’ve done a great job of not letting it become a distraction,” Middlebrooks said. “If you attack this in a different way from a veteran leadership role in a clubhouse and it becomes an issue inside your clubhouse, it becomes cliquey in there and it rots you from the inside out.

“And I think there’s some older guys in there that realize that and they say, ‘This is how we’re going to go about it. We love Raffy. Raffy has been a good teammate to us. This might look terrible on the outside, but we need to win and we need him if we’re going to win. And you know what, if this is how he feels, we’re going to have his back. We just got to go play baseball.’ This is an every day sport. You cannot let distractions get in the way. So, I think the clubhouse has done a really good job of handling this.”