Rafael Devers struck out three times Sunday, his second hat trick in the last four games. Even the strikeouts still had their moments, though.In the first inning, Devers took a great swing and fouled off a middle-middle 98 mph fastball, possibly missing out on another home run by a millisecond. In the fourth inning, he hit a 113 mph foul ball that made Keith Hernandez snort in appreciation. This is the first time the San Francisco Giants and their fans have gotten a firsthand look at a locked-in Devers, and apparently even the strikeouts can be fun.Devers has been on a home run tear for the last three weeks, with 11 homers in his last 20 games entering Sunday, which will always generate a lot of attention. He’s been raking since the start of May, though, albeit in less dramatic fashion than recently. His month-by-month splits are remarkable:
Rafael Devers 2026 splits (through 9/6) MonthsBAOBPSLGOPSMarch/April.207.248.289.537May.306.356.593.949June.214.313.520.833July.267.370.533.904August.272.375.553.928September.391.5001.1301.630
For a month, Devers was one of the worst all-around players in the game. In the four months that followed, he’s been Rafael Devers, the notable slugger. It took exactly one month for everyone to forget how good he could be, and I’d say, “Shame on you,” except I watched every one of those April at-bats. It was a bad month.Now that it’s in the past, though, we can look back at Devers’ April with the sense of wonder it deserves. It was an extreme outlier of a month, perfectly timed for maximum attention and ripe for overreaction. So what happened? It was a weird enough month to deserve its own postmortem. So let’s look at Devers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month.The biometric data — as in, how he was swinging the bat — remains mostly unchanged since April. When Baseball Savant’s player pages started giving us percentiles and color-coded rankings for hitters’ bat speed and exit velocity, Devers had far too much blue ink (the bad kind) on his page, and it was easy to freak out. Is he already declining? Is his body breaking down?These are funny questions with the benefit of hindsight, considering that Devers leads the majors in games played this season. That would be a remarkable feat in any season, but it’s even more so in this one, where every other veteran Giants hitter has been caught in a snare trap and/or attacked by lions. But at the time, he looked like a player nursing a secret injury. That was almost a best-case scenario, even. Injuries can get better. Bat speed doesn’t have to.
