BALTIMORE — It is barely April, and we’re still in the throes of Panic Season around Major League Baseball, when flailing superstars and slumping teams manage to set off alarm bells even as their sample sizes remain astoundingly small.
Yet for as much as players and fans and managers are conditioned not to assign undue import to the start of a season, there’s never been a five-game start as astounding – statistically, and circumstantially – as Rafael Devers’ grim 2025 beginning.
Monday afternoon, as the Baltimore Orioles rolled out their orange carpet and heralded their home opener, Devers and the new-look Boston Red Sox aimed to find the individual and collective rhythms that eluded them in losing three of their first four games at Texas.
Instead, nine innings later, the Red Sox were left with another defeat and Devers fell deeper into a hole of historic futility.
He struck out three more times on Monday, leaving him 0-for-19 on this young season, with 15 strikeouts. No batter in major league history has struck out as much in the first five games of their season than Devers, who surpassed the Chicago Cubs’ Ian Happ (14 strikeouts in his first five games of 2018) for most punchouts to start a season.
But at least Happ had a base hit to his name. Devers has outdone both him and former Houston Astros slugger Evan Gattis, who in 2017 set the previous high for strikeouts – 12 – in a five-game hitless stretch to start a season.
Devers' downslide follows switch to DH, Bregman signing
Happ and Gattis certainly didn’t have a cloud of spring training controversy pass over their heads like Devers, who famously was shifted to designated hitter after the Red Sox’s February signing of Alex Bregman to take over third base.
It was a move that challenged Devers’ pride, since the Red Sox did not sign him to a $313.5 million contract extension to swing the bat four ...
