Karma works like a boomerang.

A very expensive one, at that.

A dozen years ago, the Giants lucked out when the Boston Red Sox signed Pablo Sandoval. They watched the Panda waddle East, cash a massive check, and promptly forget how to hit a baseball.

It took a while, but the Red Sox might have exacted their revenge.

Rafael Devers has not picked up a nickname in his time in the Bay, but one is finding him at an increasingly alarming rate:

The Reverse Panda.

Buster Posey thought he bought a superstar to anchor his Giants’ lineup.

And he’s an anchor, all right — he’s weighing the whole thing down.

In turn, the cosmic scales are finally balanced, and the joke is entirely on the Giants.

You don’t need a history lesson to understand the gravity of this disaster — you just need a stomach strong enough to watch Devers at the plate.

Since packing his bags for Northern California last summer, the 29-year-old hasn’t just struggled; he’s been offensively offensive.

We broached the subject at the beginning of the week, and nothing has improved.

In fact, we’re at the point now where a sacrifice fly — a mere productive out — is considered progress for Devers.

Through the first full month of 2026, Devers is hitting a putrid .207 with two home runs and 11 RBIs. He’s carrying an abysmal .548 OPS, a number typically reserved for utility infielders with bad backs and light-hitting backup catchers. It’s still the worst mark of any qualified hitter in baseball.

He’s striking out in 30% of his at-bats and walking only 5% of the time (down from 15% last season). He’s violently, aimlessly hacking through center-cut fastballs and waste-pitch sliders alike like a guy trying to work his way through overgrown vegetation.

So, yeah, this isn’t just a slump — it’s an archeological dig into the depths of a lost swing.

No one expected Devers’ game to age well — the back-end of that contract was always going to look bad. But no one expected the back end to be the entirety of the Giants’ portion of the deal.

Perhaps it’s just our nation’s rampant inflation and my inability to wrap my mind around it (when did a 12-pack of Coke Zero start costing $14?), but Devers’ price tag makes Sandoval’s old, $95 million deal look like soda money. San Francisco is on the hook for another $226 million through 2033 — with his deferred money, he’s on the payroll until 2043.

But you don’t just write off a quarter of a billion dollars because a guy lost his bat speed before he turned 30.

Meanwhile, without anyone to strike fear into any pitchers’ hearts in this lineup, the Giants’ nine is a sputtering, unwatchable mess, scratching across a league-worst 3.34 runs per game.

I could list off all the other things the Giants’ lineup is awful at, but we don’t have enough space.

The quarter-billion-dollar man seems to be front and center to any discussion of team-wide, in-the-box ineptitude, and yet he wears a face of stubborn defiance:

“Why should I be frustrated?” Devers, who is breaking bats and slamming helmets after bad at-bats, told beat reporters — whom he had avoided for three weeks — in Philadelphia earlier this week. “It’s my job. It’s the only one I know how to do.”

Right now, he isn’t doing it. At all.

He’s completely lost the plot against velocity, and he can’t do much of anything with off-speed pitches.

He’s able to get off his “A” swing — 75 miles per hour or faster in bat velocity — only 15% of the time this season, down from 28% during his time in Boston last season.

And he isn’t punishing the mistakes he used to effortlessly deposit into Ted Williamsburg. In fact, his most impressive display of raw power this season was when he snapped his bat over his knee in Cincinnati.

Baseball is a sport built on failure surrounded by a cruel, cynical business, but this level of irony is almost too rich to digest.

For years, Red Sox fans fumed over the Panda, a beloved Giant who morphed into an expensive New England disaster.

Apologies: disastah.

Now, Giants fans are watching Devers, a beloved Red Sox prodigy, turn into yet another expensive Bay Area failure — a Juicero of hitting.

Again, perhaps Devers can turn it around. He’s started slow before.

Regression to the mean is the sport’s greatest safety net. Maybe Devers wakes up tomorrow, remembers he’s a three-time All-Star, and launches 30 homers. Maybe he figures out how to catch up to a major-league heater again.

But the data under the hood indicates this is a feature, not a bug.

And hope is a terrible strategy when you’re staring down the barrel of a decade-long financial commitment.

But what’s the alternative but to hope it turns around? Admitting your marquee acquisition is functionally broken?

What button can Buster Posey push to create a distraction from this?

(We all know what button it is. We also don’t yet know the R-naught of whatever Devers has. Let’s keep Bryce Eldridge away until the studies are completed.)

In the meantime, Giants fans are living a waking nightmare they once found hilarious from afar.

They laughed when Sandoval took Boston’s money and immediately hit a wall. It was, in fact, kinda funny.

They aren’t laughing anymore. The Red Sox finally returned the favor, with interest.

The Reverse Panda is here, and he looks to be sticking around for a while.

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