Dwight Evans And Fred Lynn Say I Was Right About Rafael Devers

For the Red Sox home opener at Fenway Park on Friday, WEEI hosted Dwight Evans and Fred Lynn during the second inning, and I was going to post this as an addendum to my post about Rafael Devers needing to get out of his head and into his body, but instead I’m just going to post this all on its own.

Flemming: Dewey, you’ve been a superstar in this town. Raffy’s struggling to get out of the gates. What do you think he needs to do to kind of keep moving forward?

Evans: Well, in spring training when he started DH’ing, I noticed that one thing he was doing was—he was sitting on the bench after each at-bat, and that’s one thing you can’t do. You gotta get off the bench, you gotta go up to the clubhouse, try to hit some balls into a net or whatever, and stay busy. But you just can’t sit on the bench, and from what I hear the last few game he’s getting up and getting out and going upstairs. So, that’s what you have to do.

Lynn: I’d like to say something about the DH thing, because I did it late in my career, when I was in Detroit, and my approach was pretty aggressive. It felt like four pinch hit attempts, and so you have to wrap your head around it. You’re gonna get four shots at the guys, and so it’s mental. Unless he has some kind of a physical thing bugging him, it’s a mental thing you have to conquer, ‘cause as players, defenders, when you’re not defending and now your’e just sitting watching, there’s a lot of things that go on in your brain, and you have to kind of calm down. Now, Dwight says maybe you go in there and hit balls. I didn’t have that opportunity. I talked to guys or whatever, go loosen up before I’m gonna hit, but I’d watch the opposing pitcher to see what he’s doing. Everybody’s going to be different in that regard.

Evans: But you have to stay busy.

Lynn: That’s correct. You can’t just sit there. But he didn’t know what to do with himself.

Flemming: ‘Cause if you’re 0 for 3 with a couple of strikeouts, at least you could go out and contribute defensively instead of just sitting there thinking about the oh-fer you’ve got going.

Middlebrooks: To Dewey’s point, you can’t just sit in the dugout ‘cause then all you do is think about the last at-bat. If you do something else just to help you reset and get ready for the next one.

It’s very much worth noting that Evans and Lynn are old-school baseball players, and their first thought isn’t going to be about analytics but about psychology: how is what’s happening effecting me as a human being?

So, I was right.

And once he set to work staying in his body between at-bats he started busting out all over.