A Quick Thank-You Note to Rafael Devers

While the Red Sox season is over, we still have a postseason to unpack, players to discuss, offseason speculation, and tons more!

I want to start with Rafael Devers, who is the definition of a wunderkind. The youngest player on the Red Sox, nay, in the entire Major League, contributed more than most of his teammates in the past two games and made history doing so. He had a two-run homer and an additional RBI on Sunday and a history-making 9th inning inside-the-park home run in Monday’s loss.

With his first postseason HR on Sunday, Devers became the youngest Red Sox player ever to homer in a postseason game. He also joined Mickey Mantle, Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Miguel Cabrera, and Andruw Jones, the only players to homer in the postseason before the age of 21.

https://twitter.com/Sports__GIF/status/917497349991292928

And on Monday, he became the youngest player in baseball history to hit an inside-the-park home run in a postseason game. That’s right, in the entire history of Major League Baseball, it’s RAFAEL DEVERS. The last postseason ITP home run was hit by Oakland A’s Mark Kotsay in the 2006 ALDS. Devers’ Monday blast is also the first Red Sox postseason ITP homer since Larry Gardner on October 11th, 1916. It took over one-hundred years, and the drought was ended by a child prodigy.

Rafael Devers is one of the reasons I’m not completely destroyed by this postseason loss. He’s a great young player to rebuild a team around, and at only 20 years old, I’m sure we’ll get many more big moments out of this kid in the years (decades?) to come. He has spirit and immense potential, and I’m excited to see him grow into a formidable player, maybe under the guidance of new team mentor David Ortiz? Imagine how adorable those two will be together! Until then, congratulations and thank you, Rafael Devers, for these bright spots in an otherwise bleak ALDS. We can work on the bat flip, kiddo.