Remember how happy you were when the San Francisco Giants, out of nowhere, traded for Rafael Devers?
That was something. In one shocking move, the Giants seemed to have solved two big issues that had plagued them for years: no true middle-of-the-order impact bat, and no superstar player to build around. They even took on his entire contract! It was incredible. It signaled a new era of Giants baseball might be on the horizon. Everything was great.
It sure is nice to live in the past sometimes, isn’t it? The Giants have been doing just that for the better part of the last decade, after all.
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But I digress. The club is once again mired in perpetual mediocrity, and their highly paid centerpiece is a big reason why. Through the first month of the year, Devers has been one of the worst players in all of baseball, and that isn’t hyperbole.
After Thursday’s disaster of a doubleheader, Devers is batting .207 on the season with only two homers, six total extra-base hits, 11 RBI and one of the worst OPS in the majors. He’s striking out once in every three at-bats, he’s hardly drawing any walks, he can’t hit fastballs right over the plate, he can’t make hard contact, and he’s not hitting for power. The only thing he’s successfully done is avoid talking to the press, up until the other day.
Highest strikeout rate in Giants franchise history among non-pitchers with 500+ plate appearances:
Joey Bart 35.4%
Tyler Fitzgerald 30.4%
Dave Kingman 30.1%
Rafael Devers 29.8%
— Josh Dubow (@JoshDubowAP) April 30, 2026
Most of those are big, big problems for the Giants, who still have Devers for a long time (he’s signed until 2033) at a big cost (he’s owed around $230 million after this year, per Spotrac). To say the Giants expected more would be an understatement. He was supposed to be the anchor of the lineup, their best hitter since Barry Bonds.
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He’s been closer to Rusty the Ballpark Robot than Bonds, and it’s left the Giants in quite the predicament. Devers is a notoriously slow starter who tends to really get going in May, but he’s never been this bad. Is this just another case of taking a while to get going? Or is he, at age 29, cooked?
The underlying numbers seem to support the “cooked” theory. MLB’s Statcast now tracks bat speed, and we can see Devers’ has been falling for a few years and now is firmly below average. It doesn’t seem likely to improve as he gets older, either.
If that’s a big reason why he isn’t hitting fastballs, especially four-seamers, anymore, it’s hard to see how he’s going to come out of this slump anytime soon. It sure doesn’t help that Devers apparently doesn’t seem to think there’s a problem so far, based on what he said when he finally did talk to the press.
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Of course, it’s impossible to completely count out someone with his track record. Maybe all he needs is the calendar to turn to May, which would be much more palatable than needing the calendar to turn back a few years. Maybe it is, as he claimed, just a prolonged slump.
But it’s terrifying, borderline nightmare-inducing, to think about the alternative. If Devers continues to decline, what can the Giants realistically do about it? They won’t be able to trade him without eating an exorbitant amount of money, which is not something this ownership group is wont to do. He’s on record saying he prefers playing defense instead of DHing, and he happens to play the same position as Bryce Eldridge, who’s on a tear at Triple-A Sacramento. For better or worse, they’re stuck with him.
Rafael Devers of the San Francisco Giants bats during the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Oracle Park on April 23, 2026, in San Francisco. The Dodgers defeated the Giants 3-0.
Michael Zagaris/Getty Images
And if he can’t turn it around, it’ll be yet another new and exciting way the Giants fail in their pursuit of star players. They can’t (won’t) sign them. They haven’t developed any in forever. And when they finally trade for one — a legitimate star who’d been one of the better hitters in the game for years — he completely falls on his face.
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What is it, exactly? Is it development? Coaching? Culture? Buster Posey has talked about addressing all of those things, and yet the Giants still look the same as they did last year, and the year before that, etc., etc. It’s getting old.
Devers was supposed to be the piece that changed everything, and he’s changed nothing. He’s gotten worse and so has the team. It’s as though he absorbed the Giants’ brand of mediocrity into his soul and this is the result.
Whatever the reason, the Giants need more. They have to do whatever they can to fix him, whether that means a mental break, letting him play the field even if they bring up Eldridge, anything. They simply have too much committed to him to do otherwise, and as he goes, so goes the Giants’ offense. If they have any hope of competing for a playoff spot this year, they need Devers to be the Devers we saw in Boston.
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In the past, he’s been good enough to carry an offense on his back. The Giants would be happy with just shouldering a little more of the load right now.
And if he can’t even do that? Well … remember how exciting it was when they traded for him? I remember. That’s the stuff.