After so many years of striking out spectacularly in their pursuit of a star slugger — from Bryce Harper to Aaron Judge to Carlos Correa to Shohei Ohtani to not even bothering to pursue Juan Soto — the San Francisco Giants hoped they'd finally found their man this offseason. In a market thin on quality position players, Buster Posey and Co. blew the market out of the water for one of the best available, signing former Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Willy Adames to a seven-year, $182 million deal in early December.
Just two months in, it hasn't gone the way anyone had planned. Adames didn't hit his first homer until April 14, and he slashed .202/.279/.263 over his first 30 games with his new team. A brief hot streak in late April and early May hinted that he might be snapping out of it, but he's hit just .167 over his last 12 contests. Overall, it's been ugly: a .646 OPS that's 14 percent worse than league average, plus arguably the worst defense at shortstop of his entire career.
Of course, we're exactly two months into a seven-year partnership. It would be easy to just chalk this up to a small sample size fluke or a slow start and trust that Adames will find his way to the back of his baseball card in due time. But there are real red flags here, on both sides of the ball, that should have Giants fans having at least a little buyer's remorse already.
For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work on The Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB season.
Giants' Willy Adames contract is already flirting with disaster
For starters, it's not like Adames had the longest track record as an elite offensive player. He's posted an OPS of .800 or higher in a full season exactly once, back in 2021, although he did put up a .793 mark in his walk year with the Brewers last season. Still, while he's always had a swing geared for pull-side power, that power has come with a pretty low floor; he hit just .217 across 149 games in 2023, after all.
It's pretty clear which Adames the Giants have gotten so far. He's once again swinging and missing at a more-than-healthy clip. But what's really troubling about this season is what's happened when he's made contact: Adames has always been among the best in baseball at pulling the ball in the air, but while his fly ball rate has stayed the same, where he's hitting those fly balls haven't.
He's pulling the ball far less than he ever has before, and going the other way more — a bad combination in his new home stadium, as Oracle Park is among the least forgiving places in baseball for power to right field. Adames' bat speed has taken a nosedive this season; maybe he'll recover some of that explosiveness as the season goes on, but right now he looks like a completely different player.
Of course, it's also possible that we're just already starting to see evidence of Adames' decline. He won't turn 30 until September, so maybe that's premature. But between the decline in bat speed and his precipitous decline in range at shortstop, this is a markedly different guy than the one we saw perform at a borderline All-Star level in Milwaukee. And that should be keeping Posey up at night, considering he's on the hook for some $26-27 million a year for the better part of the next decade. Adames needs to start showing flashes of the player he used to be, and fast.