Self-Regulation And The Rafael Devers Slump
In the month of August, Boston Red Sox slugger Rafael Devers hit .160-something. I won’t belabor the theory here, but recently I noticed that Devers no longer seems to be talking to himself between pitches/swings—a practice that I, as an autistic person, saw as self-regulatory. (To be clear: I am not armchair diagnosing Devers as neurodivergent; neurotypical people have self-regulatory behavior, too.) It got me wondering if either someone told him to stop, or something made him feel self-conscious about the behavior. Mostly, I want someone to go back and review the last couple of months of Devers at-bats and tell me if I’m right about the timing, and that his rather dramatic slump began when he stopped verbally self-regulating at the plate.