Wasn't Rafael Devers supposed to fix the offense singlehandedly?

What happened to that? I liked that.

The Giants played their second straight game with Rafael Devers in the lineup last night, which also happened to be their second straight game in which they scored exactly two runs. This is not ideal. Devers, as you’ll recall, was supposed to jump-start a moribund offense, not succumb to its ways. The Giants were supposed to start scoring more runs with one of the best hitters in baseball in their lineup, not continue to not score more runs.

And yet, here we are. Sure, you could say that it’s early in the Rafael Devers era, or that there’s a lot of variance in baseball, or that it’s early and there’s a lot of variance in baseball, but it’s time to face facts: Acquiring Devers did not immediately and permanently fix every problem with the Giants’ roster.

I know, I know. It’s tough to accept. Here, I’ll give you a minute to let it sink in.

In theory, the Giants’ current lineup should mostly be pretty solid. Obviously, there aren’t any questions about Heliot Ramos or Devers at this point, and with Dom Smith having an excellent month, and Mike Yastrzemski finding his form again after a lost May, that’s a solid base for an offense. Casey Schmitt’s also been good in limited time, though I hasten to add that half of his grand slams this month came off of position players pitching, so his numbers should at least somewhat be taken with a grain of salt. And Wilmer Flores, while not being particularly close to the heights of his outstanding 2023 season, has been giving the team solid at-bats with perfectly reasonable numbers, and then kicking it up a notch with runners in scoring position, just to keep us from complaining about him. And it worked! We would never complain about sweet, wonderful Wilmer Flores.

There are no complaints there, so let’s move on to guys who we might just be able to complain about: the disappointments. Willy Adames is in this category, because of course he is, but we also unfortunately have to throw in Jung Hoo Lee. Yes, Lee’s April was excellent, and it is buoying his overall season numbers, but since the calendar flipped to May, he’s been struggling. In that time period, he is hitting .219/.287/.350, which is particularly tough coming from someone batting either at the top or in the middle of the order. Those are a lot of rallies either getting killed or never getting started. Adames’s numbers over that same timeframe are similar — .205/.287/.372

And then finally, we come to what have been the two black holes of the Giants offense: second base and catcher. The Giants have gotten nothing out of Patrick Bailey’s bat all season; his two ducksnorts last night brought his OPS for the month to just over .600, but that’s based off a .250 average and a .350 BABIP, so even that likely won’t last. For the season, Bailey’s hitting .193 with an OPS of .528. His backups haven’t been much better — Logan Porter’s hitting .143, Andrew Knizner is hitting .095, and Sam Huff, DFA’d for not bringing enough offense to the table, was at .208. Yes, there are better overall stats for evaluating offense than batting average, but in this case, none of them hit for a ton of power or take a ton of walks, so it’s perfectly reasonable to point at that one, easily understandable stat and say, “Yeah, that’s how well they’re hitting.”

But everyone already knew that about catcher. The Giants have made an active decision to sacrifice offense there in order to get Bailey’s glove behind the plate, where he is a wizard. Buster Posey and Bob Melvin are both former catchers, so they both deeply believe in the importance of having a strong glove behind the plate. Whether or not it’s a good decision — whether or not you want to actively choose to pencil Jeff Mathis into the lineup every day — it is a decision, and a defensible one.

This is not the case at second base. Tyler Fitzgerald was supposed to hit. He’s done a perfectly fine job defensively — Fangraphs has him at 15th out of 40 second basemen with at least 150 plate appearances — but his bat has disappeared. He’s hitting .238/.298/.331 on the year, and an even worse .143/.218/.163 on the month. Over May and June, he has 102 plate appearances and only four extra-base hits, all of which were doubles. Over the same timespan, he only has two RBIs, and no, getting a lot of RBIs doesn’t mean you’re a good player, but not getting RBIs sure seems to be a red flag.

Also a red flag: Fitzgerald’s Statcast page:

There is not one part of hitting that Tyler Fitzgerald has been good at this year. His stats there run the gamut from below average to abysmal. Yes, he’s fast (though not a particularly good baserunner), and his range in the field is good, but he has not been hitting, and looking at that chart, it doesn’t seem likely that he’s going to start anytime soon.

Before the season started, there were signs that something like this was on the table. Fitzgerald’s hot streak last July, while very fun, looked a lot more like luck than skill. His numbers came crashing down to Earth in September, and while his overall season line still looked good, the way the league figured him out sure didn’t. And his low walk numbers and high strikeout numbers were, at best, ominous.

Here’s similar information in tabular form:

The results he’s gotten this year are completely in line with the way he’s been hitting the ball. This is the thing to worry about. He’s not getting unlucky at all; last year, he was simply very lucky, and that warped everyone’s perceptions of what to expect from him. Even if you eliminate all the strikeouts and focus just on the ABs in which Fitzgerald makes contact, even there, he’s not good. His expected wOBA when he makes contact is .319, which is very low. Just as a comparison, Willy Adames, who has mostly earned his poor numbers this year, has an expected wOBA in all PAs of .303, and an expected wOBA when he makes contact of .363. Fitzgerald has been almost as bad when he makes contact as Adames has been overall, and Adames has had a terrible year offensively.

So what’s the solution here? If we’re being honest, Fitzgerald probably needs to work things through in Sacramento. He won’t ever have the power he showed in July last year, when he was hitting homer after homer after homer, but he needs to be in an environment where the team can break down and rebuild his swing. What would the team do in the meantime? Well, that’s the tricky thing, isn’t it? They could start Casey Schmitt at second, since he would likely be their best internal option. Christian Koss and Brett Wisely are still around, though the team seems pretty down on Wisely and Koss has been worse than Fitzgerald this year.

But it might simply be the case that the answer will come from outside the organization, or it won’t come at all. If the Giants are serious about putting the best possible team on the field, that team will likely need a new second baseman. They also need more out of shortstop, but Adames has a much longer track record than Fitzgerald and a much larger contract, so he’s (probably rightly) going to get more rope.

But the team doesn’t have to be tied to Tyler Fitzgerald. It was the right move to give him a real chance this year, to show what he could do after such promising results in 2024. But at this point, he’s shown what he can and can’t do, and the team needs to find a solution. If it’s not Fitzgerald, they need to figure this out quickly, because the Giants offense has already cost them a lot of opportunities for wins, and if they’re serious about making the playoffs, they need hitters in the lineup who can seize those opportunities. If that doesn’t describe Tyler Fitzgerald, then they need to find a second baseman who it does describe.