LaMonte Wade Jr -- sample size fluke or not a sample size fluke

That's almost a Hamlet reference. It's not, but almost!

Coming into play tonight, LaMonte Wade Jr has a batting line of .103/.232/.241, and for those of you unfamiliar with baseball stats, that’s awful. After a couple of years that were great in the beginning but then tapered off near the end, Wade is trying something new: awful in the beginning and then let’s see how it goes.

But! It is early, and we can’t draw too many conclusions from the first three weeks of the season. Also but! Sometimes a guy looks so bad that you have to trust your eyes, just as soon as some spreadsheets and numbers tell you what your eyes are saying. So it is with Wade right now, who (despite going 1-for-3 with a walk last night) is dangerously close to that area.

So what’s going on? Will it stop? And is this just the player LaMonte Wade Jr is now, or is it a fluke?

What’s the first thing we look at in a situation like this? That’s right (here I’m assuming you gave the right answer, because you’re smart and attractive): BABIP. And we’re already bearing fruit here, because Wade’s BABIP is a shockingly low .135. For reference, over the course of his career, Wade has had a .280 BABIP, meaning that he’s seeing half the hits from balls in play than he has seen historically. So that’s doing a lot of the work of keeping his average down.

But not all of the work. Wade has also seen a big jump in his strikeout rate this year. His previous career high in K% was 23% back in 2021, and so far here in 2025, he’s striking out 30% of the time. That’s a pretty staggering jump, and it’s tough to find one single cause. According to Fangraphs, Wade is taking more strikes than he ever has as a Giant (about 1% higher called strike percentage than last year), and he’s swinging through more pitches than ever (0.2% higher swinging strike percentage than last year), but neither of those are wildly out of line with his career like the overall strikeout rate is.

While Fangraphs says the difference in swing-throughs is marginal, Baseball Savant tells a slightly different story. Wade has seen a large increase in one specific category of swing-throughs: two-strike breaking balls. Historically, in his career, Wade has gotten put away on 13-17% of two-strike breaking balls. Last year, it jumped to 20%, and this year he’s all the way up to 25%. Last year, he counterbalanced that at least a little bit with a better rate of two-strike swing-throughs on fastballs, which was at 15.5%; this year, he’s at 17.7%.

Wade is also swinging through way more pitches to get to two strike counts. Previously, his highest swing-through rates as a Giant were 19.2% on fastballs (2024), 24.1% on breaking pitches (2023), and 35.1% on offspeed pitches (2024). This year, he’s at 21.3% on fastballs, 29.4% on breaking pitches, and 41.2% on offspeed, which is a curious difference from what Fangraphs found. My guess is that this model includes pre-two strike foul balls as swing-throughs and Fangraphs doesn’t, but I couldn’t say for sure.

However, the swing-throughs aren’t the entire story here. We touched on BABIP up above, and in most cases a low BABIP early in the season would just be, hey, bad luck, it’ll turn around, but even that is not necessarily the case here. The quality of Wade’s contact has been significantly worse than at any time since he’s been a Giant. I mean, this chart? This chart isn’t good:

There are only a few things that he’s been good at this year. Not chasing bad pitches is one of them, and that means he walks a lot. He’s done a good job of optimizing launch angle. His average exit velocity is a little above average. He’s pretty average at whiffs and squaring balls up. Everything else, though? He’s been bad.

Striking out a ton. Terrible bad speed. Never hitting the ball hard. Rarely barreling the ball. He’s underperforming his expected wOBA, but that expected wOBA is still awful, and his expected batting average and slugging percentage are worse. The major league bat that we’ve seen for years is just not there right now.

Some of this could be mechanical. Over the offseason, Wade changed his stance, squatting lower in order to draw more power from his legs. He also changed his grip, gripping lower on the bat like he did in 2021, which was supposed to help him with middle-in pitches. Hitters are always making tweaks, and maybe those were the right tweaks for 2021 Wade, but not 2025 Wade, so he has to keep working.

We are still very early in the season. This could all go away with one great week, where LaMonte Wade Jr makes tons of contact, hits the ball hard all over the field, and gets those numbers back to where they should be. As a Giant, he’s shown plenty of ability to do just that; as a 2025 Giant, he hasn’t. With Bryce Eldridge not yet having played a game and Casey Schmitt out for a month, there isn’t exactly anyone knocking on the door at first base right now, but Wade can’t keep performing this way forever.

Nobody wants the Giants to do anything drastic, but the longer this goes on, the higher the odds get that they’ll…well, probably put him on the IL and then give him some rehab games to figure stuff out. But if he’s still struggling after that, then the team’s going to have a decision to make, and it’s not going to be a fun one.