Giants designate longtime 1B/OF for assignment

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.

For at least the time being, Wade will be replaced by Smith. The former first-round pick is a veteran of eight big league seasons but has seen his offense drop after a huge 2019-20 showing wherein he batted .299/.366/.571 in 396 plate appearances with the Mets. Smith has begun to slip into journeyman status; the Giants are his seventh organization since 2022.

However, even though Smith has bounced around the league, he’s managed to deliver passable, if unspectacular offense in each of the past two seasons. Over 893 plate appearances between the Nationals, Red Sox and Reds, he’s slashed a combined .247/.321/.370. That’s about 8% worse than average, by measure of wRC+, but is still miles better than what Wade has produced so far in 2025. Smith was hitting decently with the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate in Scranton, slashing .255/.333/.448 with eight homers in 189 turns at the plate.

In all likelihood, Smith will be a placeholder at first base. Top prospect Bryce Eldridge was promoted from Double-A to Triple-A yesterday and shouldn’t be too far from getting a look in the majors. The 2023 first-rounder is still only 20 years old, but you wouldn’t know it when taking a look at the .280/.350/.512 line (147 wRC+) he produced against older, more experienced competition in Double-A this year. Eldridge is widely regarded as one of baseball’s 25 best prospects, and once he gets a call to the majors, he’ll get everyday at-bats at first base. Smith could hang around in a bench role if he’s hitting well enough, but Eldridge is considered San Francisco’s first baseman of the future and shouldn’t be long for the minors.

Huff, 27, has appeared in 20 games this year and only tallied one multi-hit effort. In 58 plate appearances, he’s turned in a .208/.259/.340 batting line with a huge 43.1% strikeout rate. The former Rangers top prospect has struggled to make contact throughout his limited run in the majors over the years. Huff entered 2025 with a career 33.6% strikeout rate in 214 plate appearances at the MLB level.

Patrick Bailey is entrenched as the Giants’ starter behind the plate and is among the sport’s best defenders at any position, but he’s struggling with the bat as well (.191/.254/.276). Bailey is so good defensively that the Giants aren’t going to make any changes there, but with their catcher batting an MLB-worst .191/.253/.291, they’ll shuffle things up on the reserve side and hope for a bit more offense from Knizner.

Knizner, 30, isn’t a great hitter himself. He’s a career .210/.279/.317 hitter in 887 major league plate appearances. That said, his career 23% strikeout rate is markedly lower than that of Huff. Knizner isn’t as well regarded from a pitch-framing standpoint, but Statcast gives him much better grades than Huff when it comes to blocking balls in the dirt.

Knizner has also had a massive showing in Triple-A this year, batting a combined .378/.512/.520 with more walks than strikeouts in 129 plate appearances between the top affiliates for the Nationals and the Giants. No one would realistically expect him to maintain even 75% of that pace in the majors, but given Huff’s struggles and the broader-reaching difficulties incurred by the Giants’ lineup as a whole, it’s not a surprise that Knizner’s eye-popping numbers earned him a bump to the big leagues.

Rounding out today’s influx of new bats in the Giants clubhouse is Johnson, whom they signed out of the Mexican League earlier this season. As was the case with Jerar Encarnacion in 2024, Johnson posted video game numbers in Mexico (.429/.512/.943) and caught the eye of Giants scouts. He’s been quite good since signing back on May 2, hitting .272/.312/.534 with six homers and five steals in 109 plate appearances. He’s seen brief MLB time with the Guardians and Orioles but has only 95 big league plate appearances to his credit. Johnson has a solid Triple-A track record, having slashed .257/.323/.452 in parts of six seasons.