It was getting pretty hairy there for a second.
Willy Adames was cooked! That 7-year, $182 million contract was in a nosedive on its way to becoming the biggest free agent bust in the history of the San Francisco Giants. And yet, here we are the week before the All-Star break and the Giants might be in the clear. Willy Adames is hitting like the player they envisioned.
But you’ve been watching the games, too. You don’t need me to tell you that Willy Adames is hitting great right now. Then again, sports blogging can be about obvious things, right? I suppose the value add is to look at a situation and make a prediction. I guess I’ll do that?
Six weeks ago, I threw a bunch of Statcast graphs at you to show that I saw a guy who was getting over the “new team, big contract expectations” pressures and was starting to hit a lot more like the player profile that got the Giants excited to sign him in the first place.
While Willy Adames had always been a slow starter (career .220 avg/.705 OPS hitter, April-June), he’d never been this bad at the beginning of the season. He was getting worried!
“That’s how it goes sometimes. Unfortunately, it took too long this year. Fans were worrying. Everybody was worrying. I was worrying. My parents were worrying. I’m like, ‘Chill out, chill out. It’s a long season. We’re good.’”
This career abnormality is why he’s never whiffed an All-Star spot, by the way. He’s nabbed MVP votes a couple of times, but being an average player for the first three months of every season doesn’t get people excited to have you among the NL’s best. Luckily, the Giants are now enjoying the benefits of Adames’s full profile, where the first three months rot into a beautiful bloom across the final three months.
Here’s a graph showing him on the upswing since hitting rock bottom (May 11th):
Here’s his Statcast profile from the end of May:
And here’s where it is today:
His .318/.400/.557 line in 105 PA has made him the 8th-most valuable position player over the last 25 days, and this isn’t one of those times where there’s a weird top 10 or top 25 of small sample size guys. The group is All-Star talent.
Now, it’s very easy to get excited about a masher having a hot streak, and I’ll heed the need for a hedge in every baseball blog post that tries to make a prediction. If you just look at the rolling numbers again…
That just looks like peaks and canyons: ////, so it’d be reasonable to expect that this current hot streak won’t soft land into league average production, it’ll crater into the zone of his first ~180 PA for another spell: .217/.297/.233. August has been the best month of his career by far, too:
April/March .221/.306/.372 .678
May .227/.300/.426 .726
June .225/.304/.409 .714
July .257/.328/.454 .782
August .283/.349/.504 .854
Sept/Oct .256/.334/.446 .780
Should the Giants expect that sort of a performance or is this 25-game burst just a high flying act that will push his season line to a respectable ending come game 162? I tend to think so. He’s had an .800+ OPS just twice in his career: 2020 & 2021. I think it’s better to think of him as a .750 OPS shortstop with plus defense.
With those parameters, raising his season average OPS by 56 points (it’s currently .684) shouldn’t be a problem. The vibes in the hitting group are pretty solid at the moment —
— and with Matt Chapman’s return, Adames, Heliot Ramos, and Rafael Devers should be enough of a force to help each other get better pitches to hit or help them soft land during cold spells. And if the Giants wind up getting better performances from Jung Hoo Lee and/or others, the offense will be a force instead of a liability.
But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Is Willy Adames’s hot streak sustainable? Oh god no. No streak is, but that’s not the point of this post. As with the one I wrote back in May, the point is to demonstrate that he’s rounding into form.
Confidence is immeasurable (for now), but it counts for something and because of that belief I see him achieving his final form. Yes, I know, that’s a tough call to make with three months of the season to go, but having shed the yoke of expectations and his traditional slow start and because of the length to the lineup that Rafael Devers provides, there’s only reason for optimism where Willy Adames’s hitting is concerned.