The proverbial back-of-the-baseball-card evidence suggests that Devers is a special talent. He entered Tuesday hitting .280 with a .349 OBP, .597 slugging mark (seventh in the majors), 14 homers (tied for sixth), and 31 extra-base hits (first).
Yet as impressive as those numbers are, they do not capture the blueprint-defying nature of who Devers is as a hitter. In a game where it’s almost impossible to hit pitches outside the strike zone, he is unapologetically aggressive. Devers swings at the third-highest percentage of pitches he sees (57.0 percent) and has the 10th-highest chase rate (40.5 percent) on pitches outside of the strike zone, yet he not only manages to get to head-scratching pitches but is capable of doing so in a way that seems almost impossible to most.
Entering Tuesday, there had been 4,461 extra-base hits in baseball this year. None had come closer to kissing dirt than the one Devers hit against Rangers starter Kyle Gibson on April 28, when he golfed a breaking ball that was just 9 inches off the ground for a double.
“There’s times when he’s kind of similar to Vladi Guerrero,” said Red Sox hitting coach Tim Hyers, referring to the Cooperstown-enshrined Guerrero who famously swung at nearly everything. “Not many guys can do that because they can’t impact the ball on the edges and slightly outside the strike zone like he can.”
Yet in some ways, the double wasn’t even the most entertaining aspect of that Devers at-bat against Gibson. It had been preceded by a 2-and-2 fastball that ran inside.
After the take, Devers backed out of the box, kicked the dirt, talked a blue streak to himself, and shook his head – then shook it again, and again, and again. He closed his eyes, inhaled, held his breath for an instant, then expelled a sharp rush of air like a 2-year-old trying to whistle. He shook his head one more time, got back in the box, nodded to Gibson, then demolished a breaking ball that would have been a strikeout against all but a few hitters.
He has additional eccentricities. Devers has been known to whack himself on the head with his bat, to pull his helmet down tight as if he’s trying to disappear inside of it, to engage in profane bilingual monologues.
“It’s Comedy Central, to be honest with you,” manager Alex Cora said of the experience of viewing Devers — one for which he gained a new appreciation during his 2020 suspension while watching the slugger on TV from home. “It was a great show. As a player, the fact that he can look so lost in one at-bat and then in the next one he can connect and go the other way and hit a homer or hit a laser to the other way, it’s eye-opening. He goes through his ups and downs obviously like everyone else, but it just feels watching, especially on TV, not where I’m at now, that he has a chance to do damage on any pitch, from way up top to down to the bottom. Obviously we would like him to do damage in the zone and not chase pitches out of the zone but that’s who he is and it was fun to watch on TV.”
It’s also the source of considerable amusement inside the Sox dugout.
“He’s just a happy guy who loves to compete. He knows he can win a lot of the battles. When he misses some pitches, that’s when you see some of the expressions and reactions in the batter’s box that, he shouldn’t miss that pitch, because if he connects, it’s seven rows deep in center field,” said Hyers. “He’ll go, ‘Do I have a hole in my bat?’ It’s funny. Is he hard on himself? Yes he is. But he has a lighter side. He loves to hit and he loves to get in the batter’s box and compete.”
Romero couldn’t recall the range of emotional demonstrations from Devers during the process of scouting him as a teenager in the Dominican Republic, but Red Sox minor league coordinator Darren Fenster — who managed Devers in Single-A Greenville in 2015 — recalled flashes of “kid-like reactions” during Devers’s first full pro season.
There are instances where managers might encourage players to be less demonstrative. But in Devers, Fenster saw a player whose emotions did not bleed from one pitch to the next.
“[It was] pure and authentic,” texted Fenster. “It was like without thinking he shows what his instant reaction is to something and then he gets back into the box and moves on. Maybe it’s his way of releasing that negative feeling that most guys internalize before it blows up.”
In 2016, Devers experienced his most severe professional struggles in High-A Salem, with a sub-.200 average through nearly two months. There, manager Joe Oliver saw a lot of Devers “tapping himself on the helmet, kind of pushing his head further into his helmet.” But again, Devers showed an ability to move forward in the face of his struggles.
“He was a perfectionist. He didn’t like making mistakes. He didn’t like making errors or having bad at-bats. He beat himself up about it,” said Oliver. “But I really think that he was able to cast it aside and not let it fester, not let it dwell.”
Devers tore up the minors, convincing the Red Sox that there was no need to recommend changes. If anything, the quirks have become even more pronounced amidst his success in the big leagues.
Few offer the sort of batter’s box theater provided regularly by Devers – but there is one player who had a brief Red Sox tenure in a storied career who comes to mind.
“Adrián [Beltré] kind of did a little bit of the same stuff. He was always messing around, whether it was tiptoeing – that little dance he did in the box, dropping down to a knee, checking his own swing. There’s definitely some similarities there,” said A’s first baseman Mitch Moreland. “[Devers is] definitely entertaining to watch out there – some of his mannerisms, smacking his helmet, stuff like that. He’s a character.”
Such a comparison underscores the unusual place that Devers has forged in the game at an early stage of his career, one in which he’s achieving dazzling production with a nearly inimitable style.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @alexspeier.
