Before we get going, I don’t want to act like this entire losing streak is entirely on the Youths on the Giants. They are certainly not the only ones who are performing poorly: Since the All-Star Break, Mike Yastrzemski is hitting .061/.205/.182 (all numbers will be through Sunday’s game), JD Davis is at .120/.303/.240, and Austin Slater has hit one (1) home run and done basically nothing else. The lack of production is coming from everyone not named Wilmer or Joc, which is, if you’re paying attention, almost all of the offense.
But the Giants built their resurgence on the backs of their rookies. Casey Schmitt had that great week that turned the moribund team around, and Blake Sabol hit some dingers, and Luis Matos added a burst of energy, and Patrick Bailey was a miracle in baseball player form. They were the ones who revitalized the Giants. Sure, it was helpful when Michael Conforto got it going, and when Mitch Haniger was around and hitting, and I don’t want to minimize LaMonte Wade Jr being an OBP machine all season, but the rookies did the work to get this team going.
Now the rookies have stopped doing the work, and the team has stopped going. Since the All-Star Break:
Luis Matos: 34 PAs, .273/.294/.333, 0% BB%, 5.9% K%, 0 homers, 73 wRC+ (He will be by far the best of the rookies)
Blake Sabol: 20 PAs, .200/.200/.350, 0% BB%, 60% K%, 1 homer, 44 wRC+
Brett Wisely: 28 PAs, .130/.286/.174, 17.9% BB%, 39.3% K%, 0 homers, 43 wRC+
Casey Schmitt: 28 PAs, .120/.214/.160, 10.7% BB%, 21.4% K%, 0 homers, 10 wRC+
Patrick Bailey: 28 PAs, .111/.143/.148, 0% BB%, 35.7% K%, 0 homers, -23 wRC+
You can make an argument for Matos — I briefly did on Thursday — that the quality of his at-bats and his contact means that, with enough playing time, he should be fine. Statcast seems to be trending in that direction right now, with his expected wOBA outpacing his actual wOBA by about 45 points, a significant difference. Matos is a little below average at making hard contact, but he’s significantly above average at making contact at all, so his baseline offensive profile is still solid. Great. Hooray for the hypothetical version of Luis Matos who is getting hits, who we should see shortly.
The rest of those performances are just different flavors of unacceptable. Yes, it’s nice that Sabol homered, but there’s clearly a hole in his swing (miss you, Brandon Belt!) that major league pitchers can exploit, and if the Giants could send him to the minors without losing him back to the Pirates, you have to think they would. Wisely has simply never looked like a big league hitter, despite the solid defense at multiple positions. Schmitt has been in a slump for two months at this point, and is basically only still on the roster because everyone else who could take his spot is worse.
And then there’s Patrick Bailey.
A month into his time in the big leagues, Bailey was drawing unironic Buster Posey comparisons from all corners who had somehow talked themselves into that not being a stupid, premature thing to do (including me, but on a podcast that nobody will go back and listen to after a week has passed, there’s no real record of that). He was hitting for average. He was hitting for power. And the defense! My God, the defense! It was a thing of beauty!
The defense is still there, of course, but he’s completely stopped hitting. You can see that he’s completely stopped hitting, but it’s up there in black and white. It hasn’t been just since the break either; in the first part of July, from the 1st through the 9th, he hit just .160/.222/.200. His walk and strikeout rates have been bad all year, but through the end of June he had a very high BABIP that buoyed his overall numbers; since then, his good luck on balls in play has turned, and it hasn’t been fun to watch.
So, do the Giants have anyone else? Well, do you want them to demote Bailey in favor of Joey Bart? I bet you don’t want that. They could call up Heliot Ramos, who’s been on a tear in AAA but can only play in the outfield, which would only allow him to replace Matos, the best of those rookies. They could call up Isan Diaz, who is an infielder, but then you’d get mad at me all over again for spending so much time hyping him up over the last calendar year when it turns out he can’t hit in the majors.
For the record, in the month of July, Diaz is hitting .167/.250/.296 with a 41% K% in Sacramento, so he’s not exactly hitting in the minors right now either.
But they aren’t the ones you want to see, are they? You want to see The Prospect You’ve Heard Of. You want to see Marco Luciano.
Well, Luciano did just get called up to Sacramento himself, and is off to a nice start there in his first 22 plate appearances, hitting .300 with a couple walks and some power. But if the Giants call him up, they will just restart the cycle all over again. Schmitt got called up while he was on a hot streak, eventually cooled off, and hasn’t found himself yet. Bailey got called up while he was on a hot streak, eventually cooled off, and hasn’t found himself yet. Matos got called up while he was on a hot streak, and I bet you can guess how the rest of this sentence goes.
If a Farhan-related complaint is forming in your mind right now, let me remind you of Christian Arroyo in 2017, who got called up while he was on a hot streak, eventually cooled off, and never found himself in a Giants uniform. The last front office did this, and the next one will too.
Luciano is on a nice little hot streak, and that doesn’t make him ready. Hell, just looking at any peripherals tells you he’s not ready; he’s got a 4:1 strikeout to walk ratio, and that .300 BA is relying on a .455 BABIP. He’s hitting ground balls almost 60% of the time. He is not ready. It is not a slight against a guy who has not yet turned 22 to say that he is not yet ready for the majors, and Marco Luciano is not yet ready for the majors. He did pretty well in AA this year, but if we’ve learned anything from Bailey and Matos, we can’t read too much into that when it comes to today.
So what is the answer? Honestly, I don’t see one. On Giants Chroncast — rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts! — we talked about the trade deadline just this week, and were almost completely unable to find anyone in the middle infield who might be available and help the Giants. I threw out Matt Duffy as a desperation idea, since at this point the bar is “not actively embarrassing,” which Duffy would probably be able to clear. The Reds have apparently made Jonathan India available in trades so that they can clear space for all their other great young players, but he’ll cost quite a bit.
Otherwise, the team seems kinda stuck until Thairo Estrada comes back, which isn’t lkely to be particularly soon, and will only fill one of those spots anyway, and it’s not like Estrada was hitting particularly well himself before he got injured. If you feel comfortable with Wilmer Flores starting regularly at second base — an iffy proposition on its best day — then you can give that a shot.
But what it really comes down to is that these players aren’t good enough today. They might well be better tomorrow, and the franchise is counting on that to happen, but the July 2023 versions of these guys should not be on a major league roster. I’m inclined to throw caution to the wind and say call up Tyler Fitzgerald — he’s hitting .282/.342/.479 over 265 PAs in AAA with reasonable walk and strikeout rates — just because it’s not like he’s going to be worse than what they have.
And hey, even if Fitzgerald doesn’t work out long term, maybe the team can still catch lightning in a bottle, let him carry them for a month, and then figure out the rest later. It’s gotten them into playoff position, so why not roll with it? I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? That we’ll pin all our hopes and dreams on an unsustainable BABIP-driven hot start, only to watch with increasing trepidation as his numbers fade and his at bats become depressing? Ha! I can’t imagine that happening to anyone on the Giants, so no risk there.