Welcome to Rates and barrels.

It's Tuesday, April 8th, Derek Van Riper, Enosarous, and a special guest joining us.

It's Jen McCaffrey.

Jen covers the Red Sox for The Athletic. Does a great job on that beat. And I think so far this year has already crammed in basically a year's worth of drama into about two months. Jen, how are you doing today? I'm doing okay. Thanks for having me, guys. It's got to be the busiest beat in baseball. I mean, you go back to the Alex Bregman signing in February.

Maybe go back as far as the winter meetings when they made the blockbuster deal for Garrett Crochet.

But I feel like a lot of the conversation through the first week plus of the season was around Raphael Devers.

And Devers just not looking like himself, really slowed down throughout the spring. And as you've seen

him adjust over the past week, what's been the big difference? Is it just the simple fact that

he's finally got more reps? Is it getting a little more comfortable with the new role? What do you

attribute the turnaround to after that slow start? Yeah, it's a couple of things. So I guess one thing is the timing.

You know, he missed pretty much all of spring training.

So end of last year, he ends on the injury list with these two shoulder injuries that were at separate times last year.

So he spent all winter kind of rehabbing these shoulders, never picked up a bat.

So the first time he picks up a bat is in day one of spring training, basically shoulders, never picked up a bat. So the first time he

picks up a bat is in day one of spring training basically, but spent pretty much a majority of

the time on the backfields, kind of building up reps and kind of finding his rhythm again.

And continually said throughout camp, he felt better facing, you know, guys on the backfields,

guys doing their live VPs and all that kind of

stuff instead of, you know, getting into games. So he really only got into five spring training,

big league spring training games at the end. And as you guys know, you know, facing minor

leaguers on the backfields in a quiet spring training setting is much different than a major

league setting. And it obviously, you know, affected him timing Timing-wise and just the, you know, adrenaline and kind of everything that goes into a game setting. So that's part of it. The other part of it is they had noticed with his stance, you know, he has his very unique stance in the batter's box. His feet had kind of shifted too narrow. And they were trying to get him at a better base, his back leg. He kind of hangs out almost outside the box and they were trying to get him at a better base, his back leg,

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