What is the Giants' best outfield configuration?
A good problem to have, unless you did everything right and got sent down anyway
The Giants took Alex Dickerson and Darin Ruf off the IL yesterday, and in turn optioned Jason Vosler and LaMonte Wade Jr. Vosler has shown himself to be a capable baseball player (the highest compliment there is), but most of his value comes from being able to play a lot of different positions, including first, second, third base, and the corner outfield positions; Wade, though, is a little trickier.
LaMonte Wade Jr has been a revelation since getting called up near the end of May, hitting .264/.346/.486 with four home runs in 82 plate appearances. He has started 17 of the team’s 22 games in that span, appearing in four more, and in those 21 appearances, the team has gone 16-5. He’s been a fixture in the leadoff spot, sparking the team’s surprisingly high-powered offense with his own surprisingly high-powered performance, and he’s played excellent defense at first base, right field, and left field to boot. He has, in short, done way, way more than anyone could have reasonably expected.
But he has minor league options left so, sorry man, see you when someone else gets hurt.
Ruf does make sense on the roster, admittedly. He’s a right-handed bat who mashes lefties, and with the Giants facing a string of left-handed starters this week, he needs to be in the lineup. Wade, meanwhile, has 0 hits in 23 career major league at bats against lefties, and has barely faced any southpaws even in the minors this year — in 6 at bats, he has one single. Going back a bit in his minor league career, in 2019 he had a 50 point OPS difference (.740 vs .693), and in 2018 the difference was about 240 points (.800 vs .563).
So it’s possible that when the Giants look at LaMonte Wade Jr, they see a platoon player. Now, when the Giants look at almost anyone they see a platoon player, so this wouldn’t be unprecedented, but in Wade’s case they have a lot more reason to believe it (Side note: I am sure that, like literally any professional hitter would think, Wade’s opinion is that if you gave him lots of consistent at bats against left-handed pitchers, he’d do fine. C’est la vie!), and so, when they won’t be able to find at bats for him, down he goes.
It’s a pretty simple rotation at this point. Against righties, the team will roll out an outfield of Dickerson-Duggar-Yastrzemski, and against lefties, it’ll be Ruf-Slater-Yastrzemski. There’s just no room for Wade in there, and it’s better for him to get consistent at bats in AAA (though their outfield is pretty packed too, but oh well) than to languish on the bench in the majors.
Now, you can quibble about Duggar, if you’d like. He’s hitting .316/.380/.573, and okay, you can’t quibble with that, and playing his typically excellent defense, which, again, is a quibble-free zone. But that impressive slash line comes with a 34% strikeout rate and a .463 BABIP. In other words, when he puts a ball into play, it becomes a hit almost half of the time. Here’s a complete list of hitters who never did that over a full season: Tony Gwynn, Ted Williams, Bill Terry, Ichiro Suzuki, Ted Kluszewski, Mickey Morandini, and every other hitter who ever played Major League Baseball.
I’m glad I shortened the list, because otherwise that would have taken a while.
It is entirely plausible and likely that Steven Duggar is better than he had looked for the last couple of years, and bully for him. It is not plausible that he is this good. And yet, even with the offensive regression that is sure to come, he plays such a strong center field, and he’s shown such growth at the plate (especially when it comes to his power — his 6 home runs this year are already a career high) that you simply can’t send him down for Wade, who has a similar skill set but probably isn’t quite as good as Duggar in center field. This isn’t an insult, because almost no one is quite as good as Duggar in center field. That’s a high bar.
So we’ve covered Duggar, and talked about why Ruf’s on the roster. Yastrzemski, even with a slow start to the year, clearly isn’t going anywhere, and Slater, like Ruf, is being platooned against the lefties that Wade probably can’t hit. So that’s it then. 5 outfielders who all have spots, and no room for Wade. Oh well!
Except…I’m forgetting someone, aren’t I?
Trading for Mike Tauchman cost the Giants Wandy Peralta (who is not distinguishing himself in New York) and prospect Connor Cannon, who hits for power and has a phenomenal name. More to the point, Tauchman has been a player that Farhan Zaidi has been targeting for years, and he’s not going to give him up now. Even more to the point, he’s saved two games this year with home run-robbing catches. And most to the point, Tauchman doesn’t have options and would have to be DFA’d for the team to even try to send him to Sacramento.
So this move is about protecting inventory, same as it ever was. The Evans/Sabean Giants were notorious for making the team slightly worse in the short term to protect their inventory in the medium term, but Zaidi has generally been more ruthless with his roster management. The team will call a guy up, try him out for a short time, DFA him and get a new guy, watch the first guy leave the organization, and then DFA the second guy when he’s not that good either.
That’s not happening with Tauchman. There are a few possibilities here. One is that the team values what he brings right now. So if you combine his strong defense (Have I mentioned the homer-saving catches in the last paragraph? I haven’t? How rude of me) with his ability to work pitchers, those two things in themselves are valuable even when he’s not producing offensively.
And that could be the case. But for the team to value those things more than the extremely concrete things that LaMonte Wade Jr has been doing to win games? That seems iffy. So maybe, the same way that Duggar’s been lucky, Tauchman has been unlucky. Except, no, you check his Baseball Savant page and, if anything, his slugging percentage should be lower. All his expected rate stats have a deep blue surrounding them, meaning oh boy is that bad.
So we come back to: Farhan has always liked Mike Tauchman as a player. The Giants don’t want to lose him. He will stick around until morale improves.
Sorry to LaMonte Wade Jr, who has been non-trivially better. Sorry to people who want the team to maximize wins every second of every day. The team doesn’t just have inventory to protect. They have this specific inventory, and they’ll be damned if any other organization is gonna get their grubby little paws on it, even if that would make the Giants better tomorrow.