Rafael Devers Hit His 29th Homer Today and Nobody Said a Word About It
Three straight games with a home run. Twenty nine on the year for a club that has won 54. And the loudest thing I heard about him this week was a guy on the radio explaining that he isn't a winning player.
He did it again Wednesday. Two for four, 414 feet into the fifth inning, two more runs against Cincinnati while I had it on in the background, and my phone didn't buzz once about it. Not one text. Back in April a Devers homer got four people in my group chat typing at the same time. Now it's a Wednesday afternoon, he's got 29 of them, and the chat is busy arguing about Vitello getting himself run in the first inning.
That's this whole season in one screen. The one guy actually doing his job has been doing it so steadily that we quit noticing he was doing it.
Twenty nine homers. Seventy six RBI. Thirty one doubles, fifty eight walks, slugging .486 for a team that plays half its games in a yard where fly balls go to die in the wind coming off the water. He leads this club in homers and he leads it in RBI and neither one is close. Last Friday he went deep at Fenway against the organization that shipped him out here, and in Boston that's a two week story. Out here it got about nine minutes, because the Giants lost the series anyway.
Monday, 427 feet, 108.9 off the bat, a three run shot in a 5-0 win. Tuesday, into McCovey Cove, his sixteenth at Oracle this year, which no Giant has done since Bonds in 2007. Wednesday, 414 more. Three days in a row.
So somebody explain the criticism to me like I'm five.
I've heard every version of it since the trade. He didn't want to move off third. He pouted about DHing. He's a bad defender, he's out of shape, he chases, he strikes out too much, he doesn't run hard to first. And then the one that actually gets me, the one I keep hearing from guys who I know for a fact have not sat through 130 games of this thing: he's not a winning player.
Not a winning player. On a 54-78 baseball team.
What was he supposed to do about it? Two starters grabbed their elbows in the same week. Half the lineup around him has been in Sacramento at some point this summer. Adames is hurt. Bryce Eldridge is away from the team carrying something that has nothing to do with baseball. The bullpen has invented genuinely creative ways to hand games back since May. And the conclusion people reach is that the guy hitting fourth should have willed 25 more wins out of that mess.
He walked one off against the Angels in July. He carried them through a stretch this month where nobody else on the roster could catch up to a fastball. He has been in the lineup basically every single day of a season that stopped mattering around the All Star break, which is the actual test of a professional and the exact thing nobody gives him credit for passing, because it's boring. Guys on bad teams find reasons to sit in August. He keeps showing up and hitting baseballs 108 miles an hour in games nobody's watching.
Is the average ugly? Yeah. He's hitting .246 and he's struck out a hundred and forty five times and I'm not going to sit here and pretend that's fine, because it isn't. There are at bats where he expands the zone so badly I say something out loud in an empty room and then feel dumb about it. The punchouts are real. The .246 is real. I'd have traded eight of those homers for thirty singles back in June when this team still had a heartbeat.
Except the on base is .323 anyway, which means he's still taking his walks while he does it, and the slug is .486 in this ballpark, and if you pull his production off this roster you're not looking at a bad offense anymore, you're looking at one of the worst in baseball. That's the difference between a season you can put on and a season you turn off in the fourth.
What I think is really going on is simpler than any of the scouting stuff. Devers doesn't perform being good. There's no bat flip that gets clipped and posted, no speech at the podium, no dugout moment that goes around. He hits it, he runs, he sits down, he comes back and does it tomorrow. In a market that decided he was a problem before he ever put the jersey on, quiet reads as not caring. We did the same exact thing to Belt for a decade. Punished a guy for not being loud about it.
My dad watched about four innings with me last week and asked why the crowd wasn't more into him. I didn't have a good answer. Best I managed was that people made their minds up in June of last year and haven't looked at a stat line since.
One more and he's at 30, by the way. From 2005 through 2024, twenty straight seasons, not one Giant hit 30 home runs in a year. Not one. Adames finally broke it on the last day of last season and half the fan base treated it like a fluke. Devers is going to get there with a month still on the schedule, on a club sitting 24 games under, and I'd bet money it happens in a game most of you don't have on.
None of this is his fault. Not the rotation coming apart, not the bullpen, not the 26 games between this team and Los Angeles, not the manager watching eight innings of Wednesday on a clubhouse television. He was brought here to hit and he has hit, through a trade he didn't ask for, a position change he didn't ask for, a lost summer, and a fan base that spent four months hunting for reasons to be annoyed with him.
The offense has looked alive the last week and a half, too. Balls are landing. Guys are working counts. Some of that's Cincinnati pitching and I know it. Most of it is that the four hole finally has some company.
So when he gets to 30 and somebody in your group chat types yeah but they still lost 95, do me a favor. Ask them who they figure was supposed to hit those.
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