Red Sox players learned at about the same time as the rest of the baseball world: Team decision-makers had traded Devers to the Giants for four players — pitchers Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks, as well as a pair of minor leaguers — in a seismic move that triggered bewilderment throughout the industry, including on the team plane.
All of a sudden, their best hitter was gone.
“Probably just as shocked as everyone else. That’s the best way to describe it. Didn’t really see it coming,” Trevor Story said Monday afternoon. “The timing of it comes at a weird time. We thought we were playing really good. It’s a brutal reminder that this game is a business. It showed its face.”
Outfielder Jarren Duran echoed that sentiment.
“I saw him get off the plane and just thought, ‘Oh, no way,’ but it’s Rafael Devers,” he said. “I was just shocked to see him leave the plane …
“They made a decision that they thought was best for us. We have to stick by it and move forward as a team.”
And Garrett Crochet: “Tough blow … It was a shock for sure, after the run we just had this past week.”
What was Devers’s reaction?
“He shook our hands,” manager Alex Cora said, “and he took off.”
The ensuing hours were weird at first, Cora admitted, before transitioning to “I don’t want to say business as usual, but it was a regular flight.
“Obviously, the guy means so much to that group, means so much to the organization, to the city of Boston,” he said. “I’m not going to hide it. But at the same time, we have to show up.”
A day later, as they prepared for the series opener with the Mariners, a competitor in the American League wild-card race, Sox players trying to move on appeared loose and jovial in the clubhouse. They attended routine pregame meetings, ate snacks, and shouted inside jokes across the room.
When chief baseball officer Craig Breslow walked through, he stopped at Aroldis Chapman’s locker to share a comment and a laugh.
Infielder/outfielder Nate Eaton arrived from Triple A Worcester as the answer to a trivia question: Who filled Devers’s roster spot?
In a transactional sense, Eaton was the easy answer, at least until right fielder Wilyer Abreu returns from the injured list, which is expected Friday.
In a larger baseball sense, it’s not as simple. Journeyman infielder Abraham Toro, who has been hot, moved into Devers’s No. 2 slot in the lineup. Kristian Campbell served as the designated hitter, with David Hamilton playing second.
How or if the Red Sox replace Devers’s All-Star-caliber production remains to be seen.
“Obviously, he has a big presence in the lineup. We’ll miss that,” Crochet said. “But we can’t really just sit here and harp on that. I don’t think that does anybody in this room any good. I don’t think that’s what the fan base wants to hear either.”
Cora said: “Raffy Devers is Raffy Devers. He’s a special hitter. We all know that. But this is an opportunity for other guys to get at-bats and contribute.”
In a coincidental announcement that underscored his popularity and performance, Devers led American League DHs with 796,382 votes in the first All-Star balloting update, released Monday by MLB.
But since he now is in the NL, he is off the AL ballot (and well behind the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani in the NL tally). So the AL DH leader is the Orioles’ Ryan O’Hearn at 353,029 — less than half of Devers’s total.
By the time the players arrived at the ballpark, Cora was the only member of management to address the team, Story said. Walker Buehler and Crochet said in separate interviews that the front office did not owe them an explanation.
“From the outside perspective, that would seem like a logical thing,” Buehler said. “But this is part of the business. We have no reason to get an explanation. They made a decision. Our job remains the same.”
The overall sentiment of Cora’s message, according to Duran, was simple: onward.
“We gotta keep going. That’s the bottom line,” Cora said in his pregame media session, delayed to an hour before first pitch. “We put ourselves in a good spot. We have played good baseball for an extended period of time. Now we have to do it without Raffy. But at the same time, we added some pieces that we do believe are going to help us, especially obviously in the pitching department.”
Duran said: “[Cora] trusts everybody we got right now. I trust everybody we have now, and we can’t let one little thing deter what we got going so far.”
This is one thing, sure, but it’s not exactly a little thing.
“He’s a great player, but at the end of the day, it’s how many guys? Twenty-six, right?” Duran said. “It’s just one guy. So we got 25 other guys who were pulling on the same line to win those series, not just one. So I think we gotta think about it like that, as a team.”
More Rafael Devers trade coverage:
Five things to know about the players the Giants sent to the Red Sox for Rafael Devers
What Mookie Betts said about the Red Sox trading Rafael Devers
What led the Red Sox to trade Rafael Devers? Recapping a tumultuous four months.
The Rafael Devers trade gives the Red Sox major flexibility, like it or not. Let’s break it down.
Tim Healey can be reached at timothy.healey@globe.com. Follow him @timbhealey.
