Rafael Devers Looks Wide Awake Again for the Giants

He went quiet for a few days, and you could feel the whole city start to worry. Then Friday night against Colorado he drove another one out, his 19th of the year, and the guy the Giants paid all that money for looked very much like himself again.

There is a version of this season where Rafael Devers is the whole story, and it is the good version. Friday night against the Rockies he stepped in during the second inning and put one over the wall in right, 347 feet and no doubt about it, his 19th home run of the year. It was the kind of swing that quiets a ballpark for a half second before it erupts, the barrel finding the ball out in front, the follow-through easy and violent at the same time. If you have watched enough of him, you know that swing. It is the one San Francisco went and got.

And here is why it mattered more than a normal early-inning solo shot. Devers had gone a little cold. Over the four games before this one, against Toronto and then Thursday against Colorado, he had scratched out a few hits but nothing had left the yard, and you could feel the familiar Bay Area dread creeping back in. Not him too. Not the one bat we were counting on. When a guy carrying an offense goes silent for even a long weekend, it starts to feel like a month. So watching him uncork that swing again in the second inning was not just a run on the board. It was a exhale.

Because the truth is he had already shown us what this looks like when he is right. Go back to that series at Coors Field last weekend, when he put two in the seats in a single game, one of them a 463-foot monster that is still probably rolling around the Rockies bullpen somewhere. That was not a fluke and it was not the altitude doing the work. That was a hitter in the middle of the hottest stretch of his season, driving the ball to all fields with that violent, compact cut. The power was always in there. The question this year was only ever how often we would get to see it, and for a few days the answer had been not enough.

What I like about Friday is the timing of it. This is not a hot streak against nobody in a blowout. This came in a tight game, early, in front of the home crowd, on a night the Giants needed their best hitter to look like their best hitter. The lineup around him has been up and down all year, and when Devers is going, everything else gets easier. Pitchers cannot pitch around him if the guys behind him are producing, and the guys behind him get better pitches to hit when there is a real threat in the middle. One swing does not fix a lineup, but the right bat waking up changes the math for everybody in it.

I am not going to pretend this rescues the season on its own, because it does not, and I have written enough honest columns about this team to keep it honest now. But I have also said all year that if there was one thing worth watching on this roster night to night, it was the man they signed to be the centerpiece. He is hitting in the heart of the order, he is closing in on 20 home runs, and when he is locked in he is the most dangerous hitter in the building by a wide margin. That is the whole point of a player like this. You put up with the quiet stretches because the loud ones look like Friday night.

So call it what it is. Rafael Devers went quiet, and then Rafael Devers woke up, and the Giants are a far more interesting team when he is awake. Number 19 is in the books, number 20 is coming, and for the first time in a few days the middle of this lineup has some teeth again. Keep the TV on. When this guy is right, you do not want to be reheating something in the kitchen when he steps in.

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