Rafael Devers Is Carrying a 58 Win Team on His Back

Two more homers Saturday at Citi Field, six for the Giants as a team, a 9-5 beating of the Mets, and a stretch from Devers I've stopped being able to explain in normal baseball terms.

I had this game on in the background while I moved a couch, which tells you exactly how much I expect out of the Giants in September. Then Devers homered in the first inning and I stopped moving the couch. Then the whole lineup started putting baseballs over the fence in Queens, and I sat down on the couch I was supposed to be moving and watched all nine innings of a 9-5 win. I'm not sorry about it.

Six home runs. The Giants hit six home runs at Citi Field. This team, the one I've been calling unwatchable since May, walked into New York the day after getting beaten 10-6 and put six balls in the seats on ten hits total. Devers got two. Christian Koss, who came into the day with one career homer, got two. Osleivis Basabe and Grant McCray got the others. It was the kind of afternoon where you keep waiting for the other shoe and it never drops.

But this is about Devers. Everything Giants related right now is about Devers.

Look at what he's done since August 24. Thirteen games. Fifty at bats, twenty one hits, .420. Nine home runs. Twenty one RBI. Sixteen runs scored. He's slugging over 1.000 across almost two full weeks of baseball. Friday he went 3 for 4 with a homer and five RBI in a game the Giants lost anyway. Saturday he went 2 for 4 with two homers and three more RBI. Over his last five games he's hit five home runs and driven in twelve, and his OPS in that window is 1.857, which I checked three times because it looks like a typo.

The part that gets me is where he started. Through August 13 he was hitting .244 with 24 homers in 121 games. Fine for most hitters, a disappointment for the guy they gave the contract to, and I'd made my peace with it. I'd written him off as a good player having a mediocre year on a bad team. Then he did this. He's at .258 with 35 home runs and 91 RBI and an .858 OPS, and he's got three weeks left to chase 38, which is the career high he set in Boston in 2021.

Ninety one RBI. On this offense.

Sit with that one for a second. He's driving in runs that mostly aren't there to be driven in, on a club that goes weeks at a time without stringing three hits together, and he's still going to finish somewhere near a hundred. I don't know how you do that from the middle of a lineup nobody has to pitch around. He's done it anyway.

Saturday's damage was a first inning line drive to right, a solo shot before the Mets had even hit, and then the two run job to left in the fifth that scored Jonah Cox and made it 6-2. That fifth was the ballgame. Koss took Zac Thornton deep for the second time in three innings, Devers followed him, and Thornton was gone after five with six earned on seven hits.

Anthony Molina deserves a paragraph of his own. Five innings, one hit, no runs, six strikeouts, one walk, and an ERA down at 2.79. He got the win. I have no idea what the Giants have in this kid and I've been burned too many times to promise you anything. But the back half of this season has quietly turned up a couple of arms that look like they belong, and he's one of them.

The Mets managed five hits all afternoon. A.J. Ewing hit a two run homer in the second to make it briefly interesting, Brett Baty walked in a run in the seventh, and Baty doubled two more home off Jason Foley in the ninth long after it mattered, which is the only reason the final says 9-5 instead of something uglier. Lindor, Soto, Bichette and Benge went 0 for 17 between them. That's a 64-77 club playing for nothing, and it's the only reason a Giants fan should show any restraint about a day like this.

So what do you do with this? The Giants are 59-84. They're twenty six and a half games out. Nothing between here and the end of the month changes one thing about this season, and I know that, and I'm going to keep watching anyway, because Rafael Devers is doing something I want to see the end of.

That's what a bad September is actually for. You stop watching the standings and you watch a guy. The one they spent all that money on, the one I spent half the summer wondering about, has spent two weeks reminding everybody why they wanted him. He looks like the hitter Boston had in 2019. Same swing, same violence off the barrel, same way of turning a nothing at bat into three runs.

Too late to matter? Of course it is. It's September on a team that's going to lose ninety something games. But I've sat through a lot of meaningless baseball this year and this doesn't feel meaningless. It feels like the first two weeks of the version of Devers the Giants are paying for, and if that's what April looks like, then this miserable year handed us something after all.

Nineteen games left. He needs four homers to match a career high he set five years ago. I'll watch every one of them, and I'll probably still have a couch sitting in the middle of the living room.

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