I will leave it to the Globe’s super-smart baseball scribes to speculate on what should be a busy winter for Boston baseball boss Craig Breslow and the Sox owners.

But for one final time, please let me address the myth of the Rafael Devers trade/salary dump that has been credited with turning around the Boston season, but, in fact, ultimately sunk the team in its final days.

The Red Sox batted .198 with one homer in the playoffs. Gonzalez, Refsnyder, Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu, Nathaniel Lowe, and Carlos Narváez combined to hit .054 (3-for-55).

This from a team that salary-dumped their selfish designated hitter, who went on to hit 35 homers and drive in 109 runs (third most in the NL and way more than any Sox batter) in 163 games.

In return for Devers, the Sox received the laughable Jordan Hicks (8.20 ERA in 21 games, still owed $25 million), Kyle Harrison (12 innings over three games) and a minor league outfielder whom they subsequently traded.

Worse, after making the feel-good salary dump, the Sox never replaced Devers’s bat. Devers hit .272 with a .905 OPS as DH of the Red Sox. Boston’s weak collection of 11 DHs went on to hit .268 with a .749 OPS. No Sox player came close to Devers’s 35 HR and 109 RBIs.

The Sox sure showed Raffy, huh? Got his butt out of town on a rail. And that felt good.

In truth, the Devers deal was FSG corporate genius, saving $250 million on Devers’s contract. But not replacing Devers’s bat was baseball malpractice.

After seven seasons of quiet, steady slugging, Devers behaved badly in 2025. He reacted poorly to the team’s acquisition of Alex Bregman and broke every rule of team play when he refused to pick up a glove and help out after Triston Casas went down with a season-ending injury. There’s no excuse for it. He certainly deserved to be suspended by the Sox.

But the Sox should have either figured out a way to make it work, or held off on trading him until the deadline, then acquired real ballplayers who could help this season.

But they didn’t want to make it work. They disliked the contract more than they disliked the player and seized the PR-Hall Pass opportunity to dump salary, knowing it would be a popular move with fans. Devers’s bad behavior gave the team great cover for a bad baseball move. So they pounced when the Giants agreed to pick up the remainder of Devers’s contract.

Fans loved seeing the Sox send a selfish millionaire ballplayer packing. The Sox PR machine was only too happy to demonize Devers and perpetuate a myth that the team got better because it shed the selfish slugger. As recently as last weekend, Breslow was still accepting congrats for the deal, looking back fondly at his trade-day statement that the Sox would go on to “win more games than they otherwise would have” by trading Devers.

Maybe they did, but probably not.

It was not the dumping of Devers that turned the Sox season around; it was the arrival of Roman Anthony, which came a week before the Devers deal. The Sox had just won seven of eight when they dumped Devers and I’m betting they would have finished with more than 89 wins if they had both players for the second half of the season.

Maybe they’d have hit better than .198 with one homer against the Yankees if they had Devers in the playoffs. Devers has 31 career homers against the Yankees; more than any player in baseball.

• Quiz: 1. Name five players from the Patriots’ 2007 team (18-1) who were selected as first team All-Pros by The Associated Press that season; 2. Name three Patriots who’ve led the team in rushing for three consecutive seasons since 1995 (answers below).

• The Red Sox were a third-place team in 2025. No third place team has ever won a World Series.

• Red Sox third base coach Kyle Hudson got a lot of attention this week when he held speedy Nate Eaton at third while Eaton was steaming toward home on Matasaka Yoshida’s single up the middle that was knocked down by Jazz Chisholm in a critical moment of Game 2 Wednesday. Some of us wished the Sox still had the late Wendell “Send-’em-in” Kim coaching third for that play.

Did you know that the 38 year-old Hudson played 14 big league games with the Orioles, including the cataclysmic season-finale of the chicken-and-beer-fueled Sox collapse of 2011? On that fateful night at Camden Yards, Hudson pinch-ran for Chris Davis with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and scored the tying run on Nolan Reimold’s ground-rule double off Jonathan Papelbon. Terry Francona was fired two days later.

• Hope you all noticed Rick Pitino in his Yankee jersey sitting in the second row behind the Yankee dugout at Game 3 Thursday.

• All of us are rooting for Jayson Tatum to make a full recovery and come back better than ever, but this typist wishes Tatum would disappear and dial down expectations while he recovers. Videos of his workouts and his presence at the gym make everybody feel better, but are bound to fuel speculation that he’s going to return sooner than anybody in the history of ruptured Achilles’ tendons. It’s not a competition, people. Let the man heal and come back when he’s 100 percent, not a day sooner. I’m fine putting this year on the shelf and waiting for 2026-2027, but it looks like we’re in for a winter of “Is Jayson coming back next week?”

Jayson Tatum answered questions at the Celtics’ media day event prior to opening training camp.Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff

• Everybody loves Al Horford and wishes him the best for his 19th NBA season in his new home with the Warriors. Horford is all class, forever the adult in the room, and a top-shelf, no-dust, championship teammate. This does not mean the Celtics should put his number up in the rafters. Enough already.

• The words and action of a few bozos does not color an entire country, but as a proud American, I was embarrassed by what I saw and heard at Bethpage Black last weekend when the Europeans kicked our butts again in the Ryder Cup. Wish our world-class golfers made more effort to go to the ropes and implore rowdy fans to calm down and stop hurling insults and beers at the European team.

“I don’t think we should ever accept that in golf,” said Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy. “I think golf should be held to a higher standard than what was seen out there this week. Golf has the ability to unite people. Golf teaches you very good life lessons. It teaches you etiquette. It teaches you how to play by the rules. It teaches you how to respect people. Sometimes this week, we didn’t see that . . . we will be making sure to say to our fans in Ireland in 2027 that what happened here this week is not acceptable.”

• Rookie Ryder Cup American Cameron Young, the USA’s best player in the tourney, is the nephew of LPGA pro Marjorie Jones, who is director of Instruction at Brookmeadow Country Club in Canton, Mass.

• By now you may have seen video of Shedeur Sanders’s wildly selfish and immature reaction when his teammate, Dillon Gabriel, was named to replace Joe Flacco as starting quarterback for the Browns’ game against the Vikings in London Sunday. When reporters asked Sanders for his reaction to the move, instead of supporting his teammate, Cleveland’s petulant rookie QB went into mime mode, moving his mouth without saying any words. It’s easy to understand why he fell so far and so fast in last year’s draft. Nobody needs this clown act in their locker room.

• Dodgers-Phillies feels like it should be the World Series — not one of two National League Division Series.

• Chicago Cub Randy Hundley caught 160 games in 1968, a record that is unlikely to be broken now that we live in the designated hitter era.

• Only three over-.500 MLB teams failed to make it to the postseason this year. The mighty Cleveland Guardians made it to the tournament with a .226 team batting average.

• GBH in Boston marked the 50th anniversary of the Carlton Fisk World Series walkoff homer by re-visiting Roger Angell’s classic New Yorker essay and enlisting New Yorker editor David Remnick to read an excerpt, replete with a recreation of John Kiley playing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” Worth a listen here.

• Sox fans around here will never get over the “No-NESN-Apple-TV-Only” fiasco on the night of the Sox regular-season Friday finale, a playoff-clinching game against the Tigers. It’s New England’s “Heidi Game” (look that one up, young-ins).

• Everybody loving those macho-man ICE recruiting ads during our NFL and MLB telecasts?

• Know what “doesn’t age well?” . . . Nitwit posts on Twitter/X dragging up old opinions and commenting, “This didn’t age well.’’

1. Tom Brady, Randy Moss, Matt Light, Asante Samuel, Mike Vrabel; 2. Curtis Martin (1995-97), Antowain Smith (2001-03, Corey Dillon (2004-6).

Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him @dan_shaughnessy.