Welcome to part 2 of this three-part series in which I talk to players who will be on this year’s Sacramento River Cats. In part 1, I talked to Heliot Ramos and Cole Waites, one of whom is already on the team. Could either of today’s players be joining him soon? Anything’s possible!
I mean, they won’t, because the Giants don’t want to put either of them on the 40-man before they have to, but it’s technically possible, which is, to paraphrase Futurama, the best kind of possible.
Will Wilson
The Giants made a smart, big-market team trade to get Will Wilson in the system, and then they had to sit him for a year. It was not what they had in mind when they acquired Wilson and Zack Cozart and Zack Cozart’s $10 million salary from the Angels in December of 2019, but it’s the way things turned out, what with the whole world shutting down and whatnot.
When Wilson did take the field for the Giants, he hit well for Eugene in 2021, got promoted to Richmond, and struggled. In 2022, he started off doing well for Richmond, got promoted to Sacramento, and struggled. He’s not too worried about how the second half of his year went though, chalking it up to, “Just small sample size and then injury on top of that. Not getting to put everything together.”
In Spring Training this year, though, he showed why the Giants paid so much (to someone else) to get Wilson in the system. He hit .310/.460/.586 in 38 PAs, looking like the kind of talent that the Angels originally took in the first round in 2019.
“I felt good,” Wilson said about his spring. “Felt good to just put it all together. There’s been sparks of good, sparks of bad, so it’s nice to put everything I’ve been working on together and see it come to fruition.”
But Spring Training doesn’t mean a lot on its own; it’s all about how you bring your success there over into the season. So what’s Wilson planning to do this year? “Just carry over this spring,” he said. “It felt good for it to all work in unison, so if I can continue to do that and be consistent with that, it’ll be a good season.”
Casey Schmitt
At Media Day, one of Sacramento’s local news outlets talked to every player who attended and asked them the same few questions. These ranged from simple stuff like, “What’s your name?” to slightly more interesting questions like, “Who was your favorite player growing up?” and, “Do you play as yourself in MLB The Show?” But the last question every time was, “Who is the funniest player on the team?”
Except for Schmitt (who said Will Wilson), every one of them said the funniest player on the team was Casey Schmitt.
But Schmitt’s success is no laughing matter (check out that segue!). The Giants drafted him in 2020, which he describes as, “Really cool. It was a special moment for me and my family.” But since it was 2020, and we all remember 2020, he went on to add, “It was a little weird because of Covid, but it was definitely really cool.”
Schmitt debuted in 2021, a season in which he got 280 plate appearances with San Jose and hit just .247/.318/.406. “On paper, it [didn’t go] very well,” he said, chalking up some of his performance to injuries. “[I] got hit in the face and the wrist. It was a tough year,” he said matter-of-factly, but also in a way that suggested the key was just to put that season behind him.
That seemed to work, since Schmitt had a breakout year in 2022, crushing the ball to the tune of .273/.363/.475 over 383 PAs in Eugene and a .342/.378/.517 line in 127 PAs in Richmond. Then, just for fun, he hit .333/.313/.600 in 16 PAs in Sacramento, putting himself on the prospect map.
What was the difference? He looked at his 2021, identified weaknesses in his game and addressed them. “[I] worked on things that I felt like I didn’t have the year before at the plate and defensively,” he said, all in an attempt to get better.
And it worked, to the extent that people around the Giants are now projecting him to be an important part of the team’s future, whether it’s at shortstop or third base (for the record, Schmitt said he likes playing both positions and doesn’t have a preference between them). That’s meant that now fans have high expectations of him.
But Casey Schmitt can’t think about that when he’s on the field. When asked if he has to tune all that noise out when he’s on the field, he said yes. “For me, I just go out and play, try to do my thing and have fun. At the end of the day, I just want to win.”
And for once, he wasn't joking about that.
Nice one, Señor Pith!