Two years and two narratives
On May 31st, 2009 David Ortiz was hitting .185/.284/.287 with one home run in 46 games. He’d struck out 48 times against 23 walks. He stopped brining his son to the Red Sox clubhouse. Things looked bleak. As April turned into May the question “was Big Papi done?” was on many minds.
But it didn’t last.
From the calendar change to June all the way through a few regular season games in October, Ortiz, hit .264/.356/.548 with 27 home runs. As a career .286/.380/.552 hitter this isn’t a tremendous decline. It’s a down year. 2009 was the first year Big Papi missed the All-Star Game since 2003 (for fun since it was in St. Louis and, with no universal DH, the starting first baseman for the American League was Adam Lind) He would go on to make the ASG in the next four seasons. One year was a blip.
What were April and May? Well, small sample sizes. It’s a phrased used in baseball a lot given the season is 162 games long. There is a lot of baseball to be played — don’t focus too much on any game, week, or maybe even month.
The start of the season features many “breakouts” or guys who “made adjustments” but these are just as false as the “he’s going 0-for-the-season” slumps that would be noticeable in say, July, but not taken as season-defining.
When he joined the New York Mets, Francisco Lindor got off to a dreadful start. His April and May line was .194/.294/.294. It was his age-27 season, that classical, magical year when baseball players have anecdotally performed at or near their peak. And out of the blue there was a dud of a season. Lindor would bounce back a bit in June by slashing .241/.311/.454 and would post an OPS over .900 in July over 12 games. In 2022 and 2023 he’d finish 9th in MVPM voting. He finished 2nd to Shohei Ohtani in NL MVP voting in 2024.
Corbin Carol won the NL Rookie of the Year award in 2023 as the Arizona Diamondbacks made a run all the way to the World Series. There were expectations for 2024. What happened? The outfielder put up an OPS of .538 in April, .614 in May, .742 in June, .822 in July, and 1.042 in August. He ended up at .790 in September to finish the season. Great in 2023, slump to start 2024, then moved back to where he had been: the star path.
Rafael Devers may have stared 2025 hitless over his first 25 plate appearances but since collecting that first one has already raised his line to .265/.373/.429. Forget a turnaround in June. Forget a disaster in May. Devers might already have the slow start behind him. I’m leaving the door open for another stretch of bad games in the first eight weeks of the season but this is a guy who walked 9 times in his first 12 games.
He wasn’t totally lost. He just wasn’t getting the contact needed. And we can’t forget his injury limiting his reps in Spring Training that really cemented Alex Bregman taking over the hot corner. Maybe Raffy really just needed more time against live, major league pitching to get going for the season.
Hitting three home runs in the first week doesn’t mean the player who does that is suddenly joining Barry Bonds as a home run leader. Devers starting off slow might mean a down year. It might mean a down month. Can that still drag down his season numbers? Of course. But if at the end of the season if Devers has an OPS over .850 and about 30 home runs, will it truly matter that his worst week was the first one of the season? Just don’t ask Jonathan Papelbon.