Rafael Devers (0/21) - Further Proof that Sport is More than Math

The Billy Beane-managed Oakland Athletics never did win a World Series. (Stay with me here... I promise it all comes together.)

As GM of the team, he changed the way that statistics are digested and used in modern baseball and eventually had his story chronicled in the phenomenal film Moneyball. In what's now a well-known feel-good tale for sports fans, he pieced together a team with unconventional methods, rejecting the traditional ideas of his scouting team and using deep-dive statistical analysis to find undervalued players he could afford.

And as we know from the movie... it worked.

However, while a casual baseball fan could easily be forgiven for not noticing, the Oakland A's didn't actually win the World Series in that film, nor did they any year of the Billy Beane tenure.

That's not intended in any way as a slight, as after all, though they didn't win the big one, Billy's teams overachieved their expectations time and time again. However, what the famous example does show is that there's ultimately far more to baseball, and sport in general, than what statistics will ever be able to tell us.

In today's climate, where stats and analytics programs are easier to run than ever before and AI models can compare players on any metric in an instant, it's sometimes very easy to forget the intangibles that make such a big impact. So much of the intangible stuff is almost impossible to quantify, and so many are led astray in the evaluation process based on misuse of certain stats.

After an underwhelming year last year, the Boston Red Sox got fun and frisky with a few moves in the off-season. They got lefty Garrett Crochet from the White Sox, which is so far working out pretty well (1-0, 1.38 ERA through 2 starts). The Red Sox were short of elite pitching last year, and so though they gave up a lot of farm capital, that made a lot of sense.

What, in theory, made a little less sense was signing 3rd baseman Alex Bregman to a 3-year $120 million contract, making him the club's highest-paid player (based on average annual value). It stood out as strange because the man he replaced as the Red Sox' highest-paid player was Rafael Devers... also a 3rd baseman.

Devers had clocked four consecutive seasons hitting at least .271, adding at least 27 homers, and at least 83 RBIs. Hardly an obvious problem area for the team, but they clearly saw Bregman as an opportunity to elevate the team's hitting to contender level. On paper, it all makes sense: Bregman takes over at 3rd Base, and Devers, who's a slightly lesser fielder (94.4% vs 96.8% last year), moves to DH.

Alex Bregman has been excellent from the outset in a Red Sox uniform, batting .314 through 8 games. Devers, though a top-2 bat in your lineup a year ago, has looked a shell of his true self. He started the season an unprecedented 0-for-21, including a shocking 15 strikeouts. The team, then, despite the flashy new signing hitting the ground running, has worsened overall from the move.

When we talk about intangibles in our EJW Analytics models, this is exactly the sort of stuff we mean. You employ the on-paper, Billy Beane Oakland A's-style analytics to this situation, and the moves make perfect sense, but baseball players aren't robots; strange things matter to different guys.

The Red Sox have taken a guy in Devers who, for his whole career leading to the pros and for 950 of his 978 professional games, has fielded as well as hit. Anyone who has played high-level sports knows there's a certain rhythm you get into in the different phases of a game. For a sport like baseball, where there are so many games, that stuff is simply crucial.

That begs the question then: can you measure the impact of the move to DH on a player before making it? Well, in some senses, not really, but there are a few things that should be pretty easy to figure out.

1. Is the player happy with the move? If the player in question is confident that their new role improves the team and will allow them to be just as successful and happy, then it is more likely to work out. That should be pretty easy to work out inside your clubhouse. Devers wasn't just unimpressed with the acquisition; he was blindsided by it, and after hearing the news, stressed to gathered media that his position remained 3rd base. His confidence and general enthusiasm going into the season were always going to be low.

   
   

2. Is the player well-suited to hitting without fielding? Harder to work out for some players, but considering past games where he's occasionally served as DH and looking at his pinch-hitting record, some indication of lower production becomes evident. In 121 at-bats as a pinch hitter or designated hitter, Devers is a career .239 hitter (compared with .279 as a third baseman). Additionally, as a PH or DH, he averages an RBI every 10.1 ABs, compared with a pretty stellar 1 RBI every 5.91 ABs when playing at 3rd.

   
   

To be clear, I'm not for a second saying this move can't work out in the long run just because it looked ugly for 5 games. I fully expect Devers to grow as the season goes on and get back to at least the .240 - .250 range, if not higher. Indeed, even in his last 3 games, Devers has settled into his new role somewhat, and his offensive production has taken the necessary uptick. From 0-for-21, he's now hitting .167.

What you can learn from his poor start to the season is how to handle intangible and emotional, though pretty easy to understand, influencers.

Baseball is a strange sport in some ways in that you play 162 games, and then it all comes down to 2 or 3 that determine your season. These early-season games never seem to matter too much, but it's so often razor-thin margins at the end of the year that decide who goes where.

Those first 5 games where Devers failed to get a hit, struck out 15 times, and seemed visibly frustrated, the Red Sox were 1-4, including 2 losses by a single run. Based on his normal RBI rate of 1 RBI per 1.51 ABs, Devers should've had approximately 1.53 RBIs (using his 5 hitless games and 21 ABs), likely enough to win at least one of those games (though plainly that's not an exact science).

The misuse of statistics and misunderstandings about the human emotional aspects of sport are becoming a more and more common theme. Baseball, in particular, has enjoyed a statistical revolution in the years since Billy Beane worked magic with the Athletics. For a while, it was well-balanced, but it has now clearly overstretched.

Rafael Devers may go on to have an MVP season, but his 'absence' in those first 5 games undoubtedly had an impact on the Red Sox failing to pick up more than a single win. Their record since his bat turned back on? 3-0. Hardly a coincidence, one has to think.

Only time will tell if those 2-3 games they might've won at the start of the year will ultimately come to matter, but there should be no doubt that the Red Sox made critical errors in their recruitment and management processes during the offseason that directly impacted the success of the team in the opening week of the season.

EJW is an analytics and consultancy service with a new process for evaluating statistics and determining their true meaning and impact. We seek to find ways to measure things that are theoretically intangible through the use of AI research models and can provide services to your team, helping in critical stages of recruitment and performance analytics.

If the Red Sox had had us under contract through the off-season, we could've easily assessed and created a better plan for handling this situation to allow them to hit the ground running.

This Post was edited and analyzed by Gemini 2.0 Flash.