Rafael Devers is having a time. In Sunday’s loss to the Texas Rangers, Devers struck out twice and walked once in five plate appearances. First, the good news: The free pass raised his on-base percentage on the season. The bad news: His on-base percentage on the season is .111. The worse news: Through four games, Devers has not yet collected a hit. The heart-breakingly awful news: Devers has struck out in two-thirds of his 18 plate appearances on the season, making him the first major-league hitter in history to strike out 12 times in his team’s first four games.
It’s as bad as it sounds. Prior to this putrid, horrendous start, only five players since 1901 had even struck out 11 times through their teams’ first four games, per the Boston Globe. Rob Bradford of WEEI culled some genuinely appalling metrics from Baseball Savant Monday morning, highlighting the depth of Devers’s struggles. The veteran has whiffed on a gut-churning 67.4 percent of his swings so far. No, he is not being particularly selective: Already, through four games, Devers has swung and missed at 31 pitches, 13 more than the next closest player in all of baseball, and that player (Teoscar Hernandez) has played an entire additional series. An unbearable 75 percent of the times that Devers has swung at a fastball, he has failed to make contact. I’m looking at Devers’s Statcast page right now and openly weeping: Pitchers have thrown him 48 pitches in the strike zone, and he has swung at 36 of these pitches, and those swings have resulted in three (3) batted balls. Someone needs to drape an arm over this man’s shoulder and just let him sob for a while. Be a friend!
Devers is keeping a brave face through this excruciating trial. After striking out in all four of his plate appearances Friday, he told assembled reporters that actually he is doing fine. “I feel comfortable at the plate. I feel good,” Devers said, tragically unaware that he would go on to add another five strikeouts in eight at-bats over the weekend. “I haven’t hit the ball, but I feel very good.”
At the risk of impugning Devers’s character, I am forced to at least acknowledge the possibility that he is sulking. Two years ago Devers signed a big 10-year contract extension to shortcut a year of arbitration and settle in as Boston’s long-term third baseman. Then he posted two strong years for a couple of also-ran Red Sox teams, and as a reward the team went out and hired an even better third baseman, shipping Devers to designated hitter, where he extremely does not want to be. He appeared somewhat out-of-shape, physically, in spring training, and participated in only five games down in the Grapefruit League, electing instead to face Boston’s vaunted pitching machines, which apparently are spearheading innovations in the hitting space. It seems safe today to say that this dismissal of live pitching has affected the man’s timing, but then what do I know.
Devers is not the only talented hitter who cannot make the bat touch the baseball. Dylan Crews, ballyhooed rookie outfielder for the Washington Nationals, has struck out each of the last eight times that he has stood in the batter’s box. You would have to watch Crews in order to really appreciate the severity of his present brain-boomage, but hopefully these numbers help: Over his last six plate appearances, starting in the fifth inning of Saturday’s loss and continuing through Sunday’s win, Crews has compiled six strikeouts on 19 total pitches. I triple-checked this, because it both seems impossible and also should not be possible.
Crews, too, is trying not to dwell on this misery. “We get scouting reports just like they do,” he said after Saturday’s disaster, and before he struck out three times on 10 pitches Sunday. “They know how to pitch us. We know how to attack them. Some days, it’s their day. Some days, it’s our day. No matter if it’s good or bad, we have to put it in the past and move forward.” Crews is cramming an awful lot into the past right now, for such a young man. I have been alive for almost twice as long as he has and my heart is absolutely breaking for him today.
I do not want to tell anyone how to be a good person, but if I were walking by Dylan Crews right now and I happened to have a stuffed animal in my hands, I would give it to him. Recall that last season another hot-shot rookie, Jackson Holliday of the Baltimore Orioles, was returned to the farm after striking out 18 times in 36 plate appearances across his first 16 days of big-league service. Crews, who did not look particularly overmatched during a call-up last summer, has fanned eight times in 12 plate appearances to start this campaign; at this rate he would be absolutely thrilled to match Holliday with a still-worrisome 42 percent strikeout rate over his next 24 trips into the box. Just making contact with a moving baseball, even by throwing himself bodily in front of one, would have to feel satisfying, if only to prove that he is not stuck in a nightmare.
The season is still young, and these are two highly regarded batsmen, and at some point in the not very distant future one or both of them is likely to string together some professional at-bats. Still: If you pass either of them around the office, and you happen to have an open box of Fiddle Faddle, maybe just share a handful. Or, hey, people like photos of pets, as long as they’re the cute ones and not the grody kind.
