The Giants are shaking up their struggling offense. The team announced Wednesday that first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. and backup catcher Sam Huff have been designated for assignment. Veteran first baseman Dominic Smith, who recently opted out of a minor league deal with the Yankees, has been signed to a one-year, major league contract. San Francisco also selected the contracts of outfielder Daniel Johnson and catcher Andrew Knizner from Triple-A and optioned infielder Christian Koss.
After a hot start to the season, the Giants have dropped 14 of their past 23 games. The offense has been the primary culprit, particularly over the past two weeks. Over the past 14 days, Giants hitters have posted a combined .209/.297/.306 batting line. They haven’t scored more than four runs in a game since May 16 and have been shut out or held to one run seven times in that span.
Wade’s struggles have been a major component of the team’s offensive drought, but unlike many of his teammates, the 31-year-old veteran has simply never gotten going in 2025. Wade was hitless in his first 18 trips to the plate this season and hasn’t pulled himself out of that funk. He’s batting .167/.275/.271 on the season and is currently in the midst of a 3-for-22 skid.
It’s been a swift and fairly shocking decline for Wade, who was a solidly above-average bat for San Francisco from 2021-24. He’s been the Giants’ primary first baseman in that stretch, and while he’s never been a huge power threat, he’s been an on-base machine. Wade was one of the best acquisitions of the Farhan Zaidi era in San Francisco, coming over from the Twins in a Feb. 2021 trade that sent righty Shaun Anderson to Minnesota. The swap drew minimal attention at the time, but Wade went on to bat .248/.352/.415 in his first four years as a Giant.
As recently as last season, Wade slashed .260/.380/.381 with a massive 15.5% walk rate. He’s been heavily platooned in his career, taking just 12% of his plate appearances against lefties and slashing .193/.288/.250 in that time, but Wade has been consistently productive against righties until 2025.
Wade’s 2025 struggles seem to stem from a loss of bat speed and, accordingly, pronounced troubles against velocity. He punished four-seamers from ’21-’24 but is hitting just .164 with a .262 slugging percentage against them in 2025. Statcast measured Wade’s bat speed at 73.8 mph in 2023 and 72.4 mph in 2024; he’s down to 69.7 mph in 2025, which places him in the 18th percentile of big league hitters.
Wade is still drawing walks at an outstanding 12.4% clip, and his 18.1% chase rate on pitches off the plate is the sixth-lowest among the 220 MLB hitters with at least 150 plate appearances this season. It’s clear that he has excellent pitch recognition and is still making good swing decisions — he’s just not doing any damage when he does make those correct choices.
In Wade’s defense, his .211 average on balls in play is more than 70 points shy of league-average. That can’t be entirely explained by bad luck, however, as he’s currently sporting a career-high 47.3% fly-ball rate. Fly-balls that stay in the yard are easier to convert into outs than grounders and especially line-drives, so even there’s unquestionably been some bad luck at play, Wade’s current batted-ball profile shouldn’t portend a rebound all the way back to his career .279 BABIP. That’s especially true given that he’s already hit more harmless infield pop-ups (six) through 169 plate appearances than he did in all of 2024 (four) in 401 trips to the plate.
Wade is being paid $5MM and is a free agent at season’s end. There’s still about $3.12MM of that sum that’s yet to be paid out. That figure could make it hard to find a trade partner, though the Giants could pay down a portion of the salary if another team has some interest.
The remaining money on Wade’s contract might be steep enough to allow him to pass through waivers if the Giants go that route, as any team that claimed him would take on that full $3.12MM (or a bit less, depending on the date he’s actually placed on waivers). If Wade were to clear, he has enough service time to reject a minor league assignment and retain the rest of that guaranteed money. In that scenario, any club that signs him would only need to pay him the prorated league minimum. That’d be subtracted from what the Giants owe him, but San Francisco would still be on the hook for the rest of his salary.
More to come.