Giants 5, Tigers 2: Rafael Devers Hit His 24th Homer and Nobody Is Talking About the Year He Is Quietly Having

First home game after the front office shipped six veterans out the door, and the guy they gave up the farm for put one in the seats in the first inning. Twenty-four homers. Twenty-seven doubles. Sixty-four driven in. And every conversation about this team is still about everything else.

Bottom of the first, and he did not wait around

Rafael Devers came up in the bottom of the first with a runner on and put it into the seats. Two runs, just like that, before anybody in the park had settled into their seat. Twenty-fourth home run of the season. Then Jung Hoo Lee came up with the bases loaded in the second and dropped a two-run single into the outfield, and by the time Willy Adames got hold of one in the fifth for his 19th, this was a comfortable evening, a phrase I haven't been able to type about this team in weeks.

JT Brubaker opened it and gave up a run. Adrian Houser came in behind him and went five innings, one run, six hits, one walk, four punchouts. Keider Montero wore all five San Francisco runs on five hits and took the loss for Detroit. Final: 5-2, at home, first game back at Oracle Park after a week in which the front office handed six veterans to other organizations and told us it was a plan.

Now can we talk about Devers for one minute

Here's what makes me want to put my head through a wall. This man has 24 home runs. He has 27 doubles. He has 64 runs batted in. He's slugging .478 and sitting near .800 OPS in a ballpark that has eaten left-handed power hitters alive for a quarter century, on a team that has been shut out more times this summer than I care to count, hitting in a lineup that has given him nothing in front of him and less behind him. He's tied inside the top twenty in baseball in home runs. And the conversation about Rafael Devers all season has been about the trade, about the position change, about the batting average, about anything except the fact that the guy is having a genuinely productive year.

The .248 average is the thing everybody grabs, because that's the easiest number on the page and it's the one that lets people keep telling the story they already decided on last summer. Fine. Look at the rest of it. Fifty-one extra-base hits. He's on pace to clear 30 homers and 90 RBI on a team that's nineteen games under water, playing half his games in the worst hitting environment in the National League, in a season where his own organization spent July selling the roster around him for parts.

You want to know what that looks like on a team that was actually trying? It looks like a middle-of-the-order bat you build a lineup around. Instead he's the one everybody points at when it goes wrong, because he cost a lot and because that's what this fan base has been trained to do since about 2022, find the expensive guy and make him the reason.

Six veterans out, and the guy who stayed is the one carrying it

That's the part that gets me. Buster and the front office spent the deadline moving bodies out of this clubhouse. Six of them. The message was clear enough: this thing isn't happening in 2026, we're looking at next year and the year after. Okay. Then look at who's still standing in the middle of that lineup putting up 24 and 64 while everybody around him is either a rookie, a rental that didn't get moved, or a guy hitting .210.

Devers is 29. He's signed for a long time. He's the single best offensive player on the roster and it isn't remotely close, and he just spent an entire deadline week watching teammates get dealt and then came out in his first game back home and hit a two-run homer in the first inning. That isn't nothing. On this team, right now, that's close to everything.

Forty-nine and sixty-seven

None of this fixes anything. They're 49-67. They lost five of six coming into this. The season has been over in every meaningful sense since the middle of July and the deadline confirmed it in writing. But a home win over Detroit, three homers' worth of actual offense, five clean innings out of Houser, and Bryce Eldridge getting his reps in a lineup that finally has room for him, I'll take the evening.

And I'll say it one more time in case it didn't land: Rafael Devers is quietly having a very good year, in the worst possible circumstances, for an organization that has spent twelve months making excuses for why it isn't going well. Twenty-four home runs. Somebody put that on the scoreboard.

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