What in the heck was wrong with Rafael Devers in April, anyway?

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. Advertisement 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: 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. Devers' bat speed was a tick down, but that can be almost entirely explained away by the weather, and it also probably wasn't the problem. Otherwise, he was taking very, very Devers-esque swings. But he wasn't doing anything with them. Advertisement Another reasonable hypothesis is that Devers was being attacked up in the strike zone with fastballs in the first month of the season, but he adjusted. This forced pitchers to bite off larger pieces of the strike zone, which is how Devers returned to form. Except that's not true, either. Fastballs at the top of the zone are still the way to get him out. While his whiff rate on pitches in the shadow zone dropped from 56 percent to 39 percent over the next few months … that still means he's missing on 39 percent of the swings he's taking at fastballs near the top of the zone. It wasn't that pitchers were pitching Devers tougher on average, either. There wasn't a flukey conspiracy of pitchers hitting their spots. The average batter has seen a pitch down the middle about 17 percent of the time this season. In April, Devers saw one about 20 percent of the time. He was getting his chances, but swinging through them. His whiff rate on pitches down the middle was 33.7 percent. The league average whiff rate on pitches down the middle is 13 percent. Devers still has notable platoon splits (1.009 OPS vs. RHP, .573 vs. LHP), and he saw more lefties than the average batter in April by about 5 percent. That affected his numbers a bit, but not nearly enough to explain away his struggles. It's possible my search wasn't exhaustive, and that buried somewhere in the haystack of data is a needle of a datum that suggests Devers' turnaround came after he shifted his feet a millimeter to the first-base side. However, at this point, I give up, and I'm ready to share my hypothesis about what was wrong with Devers in the first month of the season: Dude was screwed up. Apologies for the technical baseball jargon, but it's the only way to describe it. Devers missed most of spring training, and when he returned, he faced pitchers who threw much harder than when he was a rookie. They pumped fastballs by him at the letters, which has always been the way to pitch him, but he was so concerned with them that he was whiffing on pitches down the middle. Devers wasn't walking, so pitchers could expand the zone and get him to chase. He couldn't get in a rhythm. Advertisement You might think this is a disappointing conclusion. I disagree. It is an absolute delight to get a reminder that players can get screwed up at the plate for extended stretches in ways that don't have to show up in the bat speed, or the attack angle, or the exit velocity or any of the other 600 different metrics that can serve as a red flag during a hitter's slump. Devers' brain was the problem. He was looking for the wrong pitches at the wrong times. He fixed it. I don't think it's an accident that the nadir of Devers' season in terms of OPS was April 30 (.537). It fits with the image of a player taking a deep breath and starting over. April couldn't hurt him anymore. He immediately started an eight-game hitting streak, and while nothing can really hint at the kind of tear Devers has been on lately, he's been the same hitter as always, which is pretty good indeed. Save this story in the back of your mind for future slow starts and mysterious goings-on in April. Sometimes hitters can get messed up in ways that don't portend long-term doom. Sometimes they can just get messed up. And if it happens at the beginning of the season, the nice, clean line between last season and this one can make a slump seem more important — more permanent — than it is. It didn't look great. At one point, you were half-hoping the Dodgers would take the entire contract at the deadline. Not me, certainly, but you were definitely thinking about it. Then Devers reminded you of the player he's been for most of his career, which is exactly the kind of player the Giants have been looking for since Barry Bonds left: a left-handed slugger with enough power to thrive at Oracle Park. If the slump happened in June, a lot of the drama and nonsense could have been avoided. As is, let it live as a cautionary tale for future versions of ourselves. Sometimes players can forget to hit a baseball, but it doesn't have to be permanent. 'Remember the Devers April,' they'll say in 2084, when a Giants player struggles in the first month of the season. Nobody will remember where the saying came from, but it'll never fail to calm everyone down. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle