Willy Adames - sample size fluke or not a sample size fluke
That's not a Ham- HEY WAIT A MINUTE IS THIS A BIT ARE YOU DOING A BIT
In one sense — the literal one — Willy Adames’s numbers so far this season are not nearly as bad as Lamonte Wade Jr’s. Adames is hitting .198/.268/.267, which is distinctly bad, but not nearly as bad as .098/.233/.230. Sure, the difference between a .535 OPS and a .463 OPS might seem academic — they’re both quite awful! — but one is unequivocally better than the other.
But the underlying numbers? Those tell a different, even more unpleasant story. I know, I know, it’s exciting. “I hope we find a way to make these numbers look even worse,” you’re saying right now, and friend, do I have some big news for you!
If you read Tuesday’s newsletter, then you saw a screenshot of LaMonte Wade Jr’s Baseball Savant percentile rankings, which weren’t great. Here’s that same graphic, only a little expanded to encompass Wade’s overall game:
You can see that, other than a few categories, Wade has been very bad at hitting this year. We already talked about this on Tuesday, so we’re not going to go into it, other than to say that this thing is dire. Sure, he’s done a good job baserunning (even though he’s pretty slow), and his fielding is just a little below average and not horrible, but that’s still a deeply concerning set of results.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the same rankings for Willy Adames:
Hey, that’s worse! That’s much worse!
Sure, Adames’s batting run value is slightly better than Wade’s, but LaMonte Wade Jr is hitting under .100, so yes, Adames should be doing better than Wade there. But Adames is hitting the ball at a lower exit velocity, not hitting the ball at a good launch angle, chasing more pitches, whiffing on way more pitches, and walking a lot less. His fielding has also apparently been atrocious — watching games, I have not noticed this, but that’s a hard thing to judge on TV — and even though he’s fast, he’s been a bad baserunner.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever looked at one of these for a major league starter and seen him be in the first percentile of something. So that’s new and exciting!
All the caveats that went into Wade’s analysis on Tuesday still apply: it’s very early in the season, things can turn around, these few weeks don’t outweigh an entire major league career, it would be great for me personally if Adames was good and therefore I will keep hoping that he’s good, and I want to like him so he will probably start hitting better immediately. You know, the standard stuff.
But it’s hard to ignore that this year, Adames hasn’t been particularly good at hitting anything besides curveballs and cutters, and that’s probably only because he hasn’t seen that many of either. Four-seamers, the pitch he’s seen the most of? He’s fallen off a cliff, with a .205 batting average against. Sinkers, which he absolutely crushed last year? .190 batting average against. Sliders, another clear strength of 2024 Willy Adames? They’re eating up 2025 Willy Adames, who’s only hitting .111 against them. What about changeups? Surely he’s good against changeups, considering his almost .500 wOBA against changeups last year. Well, no. He’s hitting .143 against them in 2025, with a .200 wOBA.
And those are the four pitch types he’s seen the most this year. Seems bad that he hasn’t been able to hit any of them!
Unlike with Wade, though, the Giants are going to have to see this thing through. As much as the organization likes Wade and wants him to be an effective starter this year, they have contingency plans at first base. Wilmer Flores could play there, especially once Jerar Encarnacion is healthy. Casey Schmitt and David Villar can play there. Bryce Eldritch is looming like some kind of eldridge monster. There are options.
There really aren’t other options at shortstop, and there shouldn’t be. The team signed Willy Adames to lock down that position for a lot of years, and so they didn’t come up with a Plan B. The whole point of signing Adames to the biggest contract in team history is that he is the plan. Yes, they could cobble something together with Schmitt or Tyler Fitzgerald or Christian Koss at shortstop if necessary, but as long as Adames is healthy, they’re not going to do that. That is his position, and it’s up to him and the coaching staff to figure it out.
So what is there to figure out? Well, he should hit better. Problem solved!
More specifically, I guess, it seems like he’s not making good contact. His launch angle has never been higher, but 12% of the balls he’s hitting are pop-ups (a career high) and looking at his batted ball profile, 36.5% of the balls he’s hitting are classified as “Under,” meaning, well, you can probably guess. His “Flare/burner” category is also the highest it’s been since 2019, which indicates bad contact, and both his Solid% and Barrel% are extremely low. In other words, he’s making way more bad contact and way less good contact.
This is April and Willy Adames has a long track record, so we don’t want to panic too much. Maybe he’s just been guessing wrong and it’ll even out over the course of a long season. I cannot emphasize enough how plausible that is. You shouldn’t completely panic and give up on a guy this early in the year.
But you can panic a little. Adames has absolutely been a disappointment so far, and it’s reasonable to point that out and express some trepidation at the future. Hopefully this newsletter inspires him to go on a tear, and then it’ll all be because of me, and we can sit next to each other on cable cars at the World Series parade. But a few weeks into his Giants career, Willy Adames has not been a good player. He has a lot more weeks to go, though, and those ones are going to have to be better.
Also, I see what you did there with Bryce.😉
For me, the difference between Adames and Wade is that Adames has a history of being not great in April. I would move him out of the 2-spot until (presumably) he reverts to normal, and then put him back batting second. That’s what I don’t understand about Melvin’s use of him.