Devers of power

For now, we can say that the Rafael Devers trade has worked out for the San Francisco Giants. In the immediate moments after news broke and the ensuing days and weeks, there was a concerted effort by EAST COAST MEDIA ELITES to paint this deal as an all-time catastrophe because of how “Well, Actually” BAD Rafael Devers is — and he’s only going to get worse! While the future might be a disaster for the Giants, the present has given them a typical Rafael Devers season; which is to say, a really, truly

great season by a hitter. On Wednesday, he played his 74th game with the team, just one more than he played with Boston before being traded.

His 138 wRC+ on the season is ranked 13th in MLB, in the same tier as Freddie Freeman (136), Corbin Carroll (138), Pete Alonso (139), and Kyle Tucker (140). Even though we saw a great example of what Oracle Park can do to a hitter of his ilk the other night —

— the bopper has been unbothered by the park for the most part, as his .227 ISO is near his career avarege (.231) and of a kind with his 2022 & 2023 seasons (.225 & .229, respectively). He has 31 home runs overall, 16 with the Giants. It’d be nice to consider him the team’s first 30 home run hitter since Barry Bonds in 2004, and if Willy Adames fails to crest that hill himself — he’s SO CLOSE! — maybe we will have to debase ourselves and do exactly that; but for now, it’s unnecessary. We can simply marvel at Devers being the key hitter in the lineup.

Yes, the strikeout rate is alarming, and it does give credence to Baseball Prospectus’s Jarret Seidler’s concern that Devers’ best days are way behind him because of a 2-season trend in a declining strike zone contact rate.

2017: 80.4% (pitches in strike zone: 55.5%)
2018: 81.4% (pitches in strike zone: 50.0%)
2019: 83.4% (pitches in strike zone: 47.5%)
2021: 76.5% (pitches in strike zone: 48.7%)
2022: 79.5% (pitches in strike zone: 47.4%)
2023: 79.7% (pitches in strike zone: 46.9%)
2024: 75.6% (pitches in strike zone: 49.8%)
2025-BOS: 72.8% (pitches in strike zone: 49.0%)
2025-SFG: 73.9% (pitches in strike zone: 50.7%)

[I’ve omitted 2020 because that was a 60-game sample]

Now, to put this in a slightly more favorable context: despite Devers’ overall 73.2% zone contact rate being the second-worst in baseball (min. 200 PA) behind the light-hitting Gabriel Arias (career .216 hitter), Sacramento’s Nick Kurtz is at 76.7% (fifth-worst) and Shohei Ohtani’s rate is 78.6% (thirteenth-worst). You can rationalize that he’s swinging for more power and missing and with the Giants he’s become slightly more selective. It’s still something to keep an eye on.

The other aspect to this is that the Giants went from being a solid team to a bad one the moment the trade was announced, which famously caused the Giants to pull their starter from the Sunday night game that was about to begin. They’re 33-42 since June 15th (the day of the trade) and 33-41 with him in the lineup. The Red Sox are 45-30 since they dumped him on the Giants. That certainly fits the East Coast narrative that Devers is a trash human being whose mere presence ruins everything — they’re really not shy about heaving all of their hatred and self-loathing onto a guy, are they? It’s pretty comical how over the top people have been regarding their criticism of Rafael Devers. Manipulative people love bomb to attract people, but they hate bomb people, too, especially when they need to throw people off the scent of how terrible they are or their culpability in the situation. ANYWAY!

What’s interesting about the Giants’ collapse is that their runs per game has gone up since adding Rafael Devers to the lineup. Weird, right?! They were averaging 4.29 runs per game pre-trade and have averaged 4.43 since. What’s less interesting and probably more revealing than a Boston sportswriter’s angry column is that the Giants’ team ERA was 3.24 before the trade and 4.24 since. Weird, right?!

I have mostly forgotten the hubub over the position switch because the way it was portrayed by Boston and national media was a bit too hysterical-sounding for me to take seriously; but, he has taken to playing first base just fine. He might be — at best — average at the position, but making a position switch midseason is jarring enough that maybe we (or maybe just I) should hold off on cementing an opinion about his ceiling there.

But this isn’t about his defense, it’s about his power, the dimension the Giants’ offense has been sorely lacking. This season, the always great Michael Baumann over at FanGraphs ran a Fan Exchange Program and the biggest complaint about the fans who went with the Giants was “Hitting for power,” an hilarious result, I think, but the comedy not undermining the truth in any way. A lot of this post-championship era malaise would’ve been easier to choke down with some more dingers, doubles, and triples in the mix (the Giants are 27th in team slugging since the start of the 2017 season). Devers has provided exactly what the Giants had hoped.

Prior to the trade, the Giants’ offense had a 95 wRC+ — or, was 5% worse than the league average. Their team slugging percentage of .377 was ranked 23rd, and far lower than their average slug (.396) in the post-championship era. Since the trade, the Giants have been 4% better than league average (104 wRC+) and their team slugging percentage has risen to .407 (16th in MLB). Now, this isn’t simply the result of adding Devers (Willy Adames shaking off a terrible April and finally getting in gear helped), but it’s important to keep in mind that Matt Chapman was out of the mix with injury for a while and Heliot Ramos stopped hitting for power after May. So, it’s reasonable to think that Devers has had quite a lot to do with vastly improving the lineup.

Which was why the Giants traded for him in the first place. They wanted to make the lineup better, saw an opportunity and took it. Baseball trades don’t always work out so cleanly, but this one did.