Rafael Devers Hit Number 30 in the First Inning in Atlanta and I Would Like Some Apologies

Twenty two years and two players. That is how rare 30 homers has been for this franchise. He got there on a club that has won 57 games, in a season he spent being told he was soft, out of shape and not a winning player.

I was standing at the counter waiting on coffee, the game on low because it is a Sunday morning start out of Atlanta and nobody in this house is emotionally available before ten. Devers came up in the first against Bryce Elder. One swing. 403 feet to right, 107.3 miles an hour off the bat, and the ball was gone before the broadcast had finished telling me what Atlanta's record was.

Number 30.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because I don't think most of you have. The last Giant to hit 30 home runs in a season, before Willy Adames snuck one in on the last weekend of last year, was Barry Bonds in 2004. That is twenty straight seasons of this franchise not producing a 30 homer bat. Twenty. We watched Pence and Sandoval and Belt and Posey and Crawford win three World Series without one, then watched the whole thing fall over, and the entire time that number sat there untouched.

Devers just got there with a month left on the calendar, on a club that has won 57 games.

So here is the full line, and I would genuinely love somebody to point at the disappointing part. He has played 138 games. He is hitting .252 with a .330 on base and a .490 slug, 30 homers, 32 doubles, 79 driven in, 79 scored, 61 walks, 255 total bases. An .820 OPS, half of it in a park that has been eating left handed power for twenty six years. He leads this team in home runs and he leads it in RBI and neither one is remotely close.

And the noise around him all summer has been that he is soft.

Let's go through the list, because I have heard all of it

He didn't want to move off third. He sulked about DHing. He showed up out of shape. He chases. He strikes out too much. He jogs to first. He's not a leader. He's not a winning player. That last one is my favorite, and I mean that in the worst possible way, because it got said out loud on the radio about a guy hitting cleanup for a team that was already twenty games under when he said it.

What exactly was the winning play here? Two of the starters grabbed at their elbows inside the same week. Adames has been hurt. The lineup around him has been a rotating cast of guys who were in Sacramento in June. The bullpen has spent four months finding brand new ways to give leads back, and one night in August it handed over six runs in the ninth inning of a game the Giants had already won. Somehow the answer people landed on is that the designated hitter should have willed twenty five more wins out of that.

The strikeouts are real. He has 150 of them and I am not going to tell you that's fine, because it isn't, and there are at bats where he swings at a slider two feet off the plate and I say something out loud in an empty kitchen and then feel stupid about it. The average is .252. Nobody is arguing that's a batting title.

But he walked 61 times while doing it, which is why the on base is .330 anyway, and the slug is .490 anyway, and if you lift his bat off this roster you are not looking at a bad offense anymore. You are looking at one of the two or three worst in the sport. That is the difference between a season you can leave on in the background and a season you turn off in the fourth and go do yard work.

The real problem is that he is quiet about it

Devers does not perform being good. There is no bat flip that ends up on your feed, no podium speech, no dugout moment somebody clips and reposts. He hits it, he runs it out at whatever speed he runs it out at, he sits down, and he comes back tomorrow and does it again in a game with no bearing on anything. In a market that made its mind up about him before he ever wore the jersey, quiet gets read as not caring.

Guys on bad teams find reasons to sit in August. Ask anybody who has covered one. A tight hamstring here, a day game after a night game there, and suddenly it is 118 games and everybody nods along. He has been in the lineup basically every single day of a season that stopped mattering somewhere around the All Star break. That is the actual test of a professional and it is also the single most boring thing to be good at, so nobody hands out credit for passing it.

A guy at work told me in July that Devers was the worst thing to happen to this franchise since the Zito contract. I asked him what Devers was hitting. He guessed .215. He was off by almost forty points and he was the most confident person in the room.

That is the whole dynamic in one conversation. People decided in June of last year and have not looked at a stat line since, and now they are going to spend September explaining that 30 homers on a last place team doesn't mean anything.

It means he did his job in a building where almost nobody else did theirs. It means the one guy everybody wanted to be mad at is the reason there were nights worth putting on at all. And when he gets to 32 or 33 and somebody in your group chat types yeah but they lost 90, ask them who they figured was supposed to hit those.

I'll wait. He has been waiting all year.

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