San Francisco Giants Infielder's Struggles Hard to Interpret in Early Season

The San Francisco Giants are off to a promising start in 2025, but one of their key veterans has not followed suit at the plate.

Apr 4, 2025; San Francisco, California, USA; San Francisco Giants first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. (31) hits a triple during the fifth inning against the Seattle Mariners at Oracle Park. | Bob Kupbens-Imagn Images

The San Francisco Giants are on an absolute heater to open the 2025 season, putting together a 17-9 record through the first few series, and proving they have what it takes to compete in an extremely strong National League West.

With three teams having 16 or more wins in the division, things are going to get extremely intriguing over the summer stretch of the season, and when the postseason rolls around, there may be multiple teams making it from there.

The Giants have been led by impressive performances from Jung Hoo Lee, Tyler Fitzgerald, Mike Yastrzemski, Logan Webb, and others. However, some of their other players have been struggling throughout the first few weeks, and one of the most notable has been first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr.

This season was expected to be a breakout for the veteran, as he looked to change his batting stance a bit and focus more heavily on generating power out of his batting stance. Unfortunately, he has not been making strong contact nearly as much as was expected of him so far, and instead, has found himself amid a decently long streak of tough at-bats.

Through 22 games, he is slashing .094/.234/.219 with eight RBI, seven runs, a home run, and 21 strikeouts to 12 walks. His fielding has been solid, which is a positive, as in 157.0 innings he has 146 putouts, 15 assists, 14 double plays turned, and an error, good for a .994 fielding rate.

The most intriguing part of this all is that he has been seeing the ball well and is not swinging at ill-advised pitches in most cases. According to Baseball Savant, he ranks 91st percentile in the MLB in walk percentage and 97th percentile in chase percentage.

Being among the best in both of those means the plate vision of the player is exceptional, the issue is contact and bat speed, as he is well below average in the latter in the 21st percentile. This leads to being 11th percentile in hard-hit percentage, but interestingly enough, his exit velocity is around league average, sitting in the 56th percentile at 90.2 miles per hour.

Part of the issue is that he is swinging at first pitches more often this season, to the tune of 28.6% compared to 22.2% in 2024, and a career average of 25.2%. He is also striking out 4.5% more of the time than he did in 2024, so ultimately while he is walking at a good rate, he has fallen into the trap of being a strikeout or walk batter.

Hopefully things will clear up for him in the coming weeks and he can get back to his old offensive production.