Buster Posey’s bold, brash and perhaps even reckless trade for three-time All-Star slugger Rafael Devers is a big black-and-orange stamp from the new director of baseball operations on the Giants organization.

The trade also made a statement to the fanbase and the rest of baseball: The Giants are done acting like anything less than the single big-league team in the richest metro area in America. They’re done trying to beat the Dodgers in the margins — they have the muscle and they’re going to flex it. After years of the Giants pushing fiscal prudence, Posey is done pretending anything else but the team in blue matters.

Devers, who has $250 million remaining on a deal that runs through 2033 with deferred payments for another 10 years after that, is coming to San Francisco for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison and two minor leaguers. The Giants will take on every penny left on Devers’ contract.

Is it a bit of conspicuous consumption? You bet.Might the Giants want this move back in a few years? Perhaps.

But Posey is right: Nothing matters but beating the Dodgers. And the Dodgers don’t worry about a contract like Devers’. So the Giants shouldn’t either.

The former catcher’s competitiveness is legendary. It was the driving force behind three Giants titles.

And we now have clear evidence of it manifesting in his new gig.

The goal is to close the gap, and the gap was huge. You can’t look at the Dodgers’ lineup and then the Giants’ this past weekend and think anything different.

But while Matt Chapman, Willy Adames and Rafael Devers aren’t on the level of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, at least they can share a National League All-Star team locker room (and perhaps tips for how to invest their insane amounts of money).

This is the kind of deal that the Giants had to make, just like Posey had to cut someone — former teammate LaMonte Wade — a few weeks back amid the team’s massive hitting slump.

The post-shakeup boost was waning. And while that’s not a valid reason to take on a quarter of a billion dollars, the questions of “what next?” that stemmed from that shakeup required more than just another Farhan Zaidi-like move. Dom Smith isn’t going to lift the Giants over the Dodgers in the standings.

Posey certainly did not rest on the Giants’ laurels as they found themselves in the NL West hunt.

This deal has surely been brewing for a little bit. Giants television analyst Mike Krukow said on KNBR that Posey recently asked him which of the team’s three young pitchers — Landen Roupp, Hayden Birdsong or Kyle Harrison — would be the best. Krukow picked Harrison.

Might Posey have been gauging trade value?

And let’s be abundantly clear here: The trade package sent to Boston for Devers is embarrassingly light. In Harrison and Hicks, the Giants jettisoned two pitchers who are probably best positioned in the bullpen — where Hicks already moved this season. The Giants have only one untouchable minor-league prospect, and Bryce Eldridge is still safely stashed in Sacramento. Finances aside, this was a coup.

Boston just wanted to unload Devers’ contract. The Giants are willing buyers. If Devers were a free agent last year, he would have landed a similar deal. I’m sure the Giants would have extended an offer.

I’m not so sure Devers would have accepted it.

Which is why Posey’s trade deserves accolades, not hand-wringing.

If the Giants can’t sign players like Devers in free agency and they can’t create them in their farm system (at least at the current moment), then they’ll have to add them via trade. It’s that or simply not having elite-level players.

Unfortunately, situations like the Devers deal come up rarely. Boston was looking to move a fair-market contract for an elite bat, but not expecting a high-level return.

If Posey didn’t pounce on this deal, how would the Giants — with their bottom-of-the-barrel farm system — have added a player like Devers in the coming weeks or even the coming years?

There’s a similarity to the Warriors’ Jimmy Butler trade here: a weird situation, with the Bay Area having the right team at the right time.

Like with Butler, it’s not as if the Giants are acquiring a truly distressed asset. The problems that made Butler expendable in Miami ceased to exist the second the Warriors acquired him and signed him to the extension he wanted.

Devers’ issues that led to his trade should be left in Boston — the Giants aren’t signing a third baseman to take his job without consulting him; they already have a third baseman on a long-term deal in Chapman (whose injury might have expedited the trade).

We can all agree this will probably not be a good deal in the not-too-distant future. Devers isn’t much of a fielder, his preferred position of third base is blocked, and if his bat slows down even a bit, his value tanks.

But I have a two-word retort for such thinking: Who cares?

What did the Giants lose in this trade? The biggest loss is money, on which the Giants should be plenty set.

And what did they gain? Only the left-handed, middle-of-the-order bat this team desperately needed.

If ownership — and don’t forget, that includes Posey — isn’t worried enough about the financial aspects of Devers’ contract to prevent this trade, then no fan should be worried for them.

What did all the fiscal prudence over the last few years earn the fans? Tickets, concessions, hats and parking didn’t go down in price because the Giants weren’t spending as much as they could.

If Posey didn’t take advantage of this situation, one would have to question his competitiveness.

Luckily, that’s something that we’ll never have to do.

After years of lowering standards, the man in charge wants it as bad as the fans in the stands, and he’s acting on those urges.

What more could you possibly want?