Rafael Devers' first full Giants season ends early with core muscle injury, surgery expected

Rafael Devers' first full season with the San Francisco Giants is over. The team placed its designated hitter on the 60-day injured list Sunday with a core muscle injury he had been playing through for much of the year, ending a season in which he led the club in home runs despite playing much of it in visible discomfort.

Devers was scheduled to see Dr. William Meyers, a specialist in athletic core-muscle injuries based in Philadelphia, on Monday, with surgery anticipated as soon as Tuesday if the consultation confirmed it was necessary. It is the same specialist who performed season-ending bilateral core-muscle surgery earlier this year on Devers' own teammate, third baseman Matt Chapman, a coincidence that has not been lost on a Giants clubhouse now missing two of its heaviest-hitting regulars for the stretch run.

The numbers on a shortened season

Devers finishes 2026 hitting .258 with an .865 OPS, according to MLB.com's report on the transaction, with 37 home runs — a team-high figure and the most by a Giant since Barry Bonds hit 45 in 2004 — and 98 RBIs. He hit 11 of those home runs in his final 18 games before the shutdown, a stretch that suggests the power was still there even as the underlying injury worsened. San Francisco selected outfielder Scott Bandura from Triple-A Sacramento to fill the vacated roster spot, giving Bandura his major-league debut, according to the Giants' official transactions log.

By advanced measures the season stands up even better than the traditional line suggests: Devers posted a 135 wRC+ and 3.4 wins above replacement in his abbreviated campaign, a mark that would have placed him among the better offensive performers at the position over a full 162 games. That he compiled it while working around an injury severe enough to eventually require a trip to Philadelphia for a surgical opinion says something about how far he was willing to play through discomfort before the club and medical staff finally shut him down in mid-September rather than let him try to finish out the schedule.

An injury that had been building

Giants manager Tony Vitello indicated the issue was not a sudden onset. "I think it's something that's bothered him for a few years now and kind of something that was a mystery to him," Vitello said, a description that matches the pattern of core-muscle injuries in baseball, which frequently develop gradually from the rotational stress of swinging and can be difficult to diagnose precisely until they become disabling. The team's injuries and roster-moves tracker lists the malady simply as a core muscle injury, the same broad classification applied to Chapman's case earlier in the year.

"I think it's something that's bothered him for a few years now and kind of something that was a mystery to him." — Giants manager Tony Vitello

What it means for San Francisco and for Devers

Devers arrived in San Francisco in a mid-2025 trade from Boston, ending an eleven-year run with the Red Sox organization that had made him a two-time All-Star and a central figure in the franchise's 2018 World Series roster as a rookie. This was his first full season wearing a Giants uniform, and the club built its 2026 lineup around him and Chapman as its two middle-of-the-order power sources. Losing both of those bats to the same type of surgery in the same calendar year is an unusual blow for a lineup that had leaned heavily on both players' track records; the Giants must now finish the season, and any postseason push, with a reshaped lineup card built around younger, less-tested players like Bandura.

For Devers personally, the injury does not threaten his standing with the organization — he remains under contract through 2033, one of the longer deals in the sport — but it does mean a winter built around recovery rather than a conventional offseason throwing and hitting program. The explicit goal, per the San Francisco Standard's reporting on the decision, is a full return for 2027 rather than trying to squeeze a few more weeks of 2026 out of a compromised swing that had, by his manager's own account, been bothering him for years before finally forcing the issue this month.

What happens next

If Tuesday's consultation confirms surgery, Devers would join Chapman in a lengthy recovery process typically measured in months rather than weeks for this type of procedure, meaning San Francisco is now planning its 2027 roster around two key hitters who will need to prove their surgically repaired cores hold up under a full season's workload. In the meantime, NBC Sports' player-news desk reported that the timeline puts the earliest realistic return for competitive game action well into next spring, a schedule the Giants are treating as a floor rather than a target given how the injury lingered before finally forcing the issue. For a Giants team that built its 2026 lineup around Devers' bat, the September 13 transaction closes the book on a season that, statistically, was one of his best power years even as it ended six weeks early. San Francisco will play out the rest of its schedule without either of its two biggest power bats, and the front office heads into the offseason having to weigh how much to spend reinforcing the lineup given that both players will be coming off the same category of surgery within months of each other.