Poll Can Willy Adames Turn Things Aroun

2025 has been a good time to be a Giants fan so far. s turn at the helm of baseball operations has helped push the club to a solid 31-25 start, putting them just one game back of the Cardinals for the final NL Wild Card spot and three games back of the Dodgers for the NL West crown. While San Francisco would surely prefer to be in playoff position right now, its been a very encouraging start for a club that was for an 81-81 record and a 28.5% chance of making the postseason prior to the start of the 2025 campaign. Strong as the clubs start has been, however, thats been almost entirely without contribution from their marquee free agent signing of the 2024-25 offseason. Its been a rough first year in San Francisco for , to put it mildly. Long viewed as an excellent two-way shortstop, Adames has yet to post on either side of the ball for the Giants. Advanced defensive metrics are notoriously finicky and take quite a long time to stabilize, but Adamess -3 Outs Above Average and -2 Fielding Run Value are both worrying figures for a player who was a Gold Glove candidate as recently as 2023, while his -8 DRS this year stands dead last among all qualifying shortstops. Errors are hardly the best way to measure defensive value, but only and have committed more of them in 2025. No matter how you slice it, Adames has started his stay in the Bay Area off with lackluster defense. Perhaps that would be easy enough to look past if Adames was putting up strong numbers at the plate. Unfortunately, that hasnt been the case. Hes hitting just .208/.288/.333 with a wRC+ of 77. His 26.2% strikeout rate and 9.8% walk rate arent out of the ordinary relative to his career numbers, but they are the worst figures hes posted in both categories since 2022. The primary red flag in Adamess profile this year is his vanishing power, however. After averaging 28 homers a season from 2021 to 2024, the shortstop has hit just five in his first 56 games as a Giant. At least Byron Baldwin Jr. Jersey some of that can be blamed on his ballpark, and Statcast suggests that Adames would have as many as eight homers if he played all of his games at a friendlier ballpark like Dodger Stadium. Park factors arent the only thing to blame for Adamess power-outage, however. While his barrel rate of 11% is more or le s in line with what hes done throughout his career, Adames is pulling the ball le s often than he ever did with the Brewers and hitting the ball softly more frequently than ever before. The fact that Adames has stopped pulling the ball as much and is hitting it the other way more is surely a big reason for his drop in power, particularly combined with the aforementioned unforgiving park factors at Oracle Park, which are especially harsh on right-handed oppo hitters. That leaves Adames with an altered batted ball profile that works in tandem with his new environment to create some of the worst results of his career. That means his struggles arent likely to end so long as he keeps going the other way, but the good news is that Adames can get back to the approach he demonstrated in 2023 and 24, when he pulled 45.8% of his batted balls and went the other way just 19.5% of the time, its not hard to imagine his results improving considerably. While it may be too late in the season at this point to expect Adames to match his 119 wRC+ from last year, getting back up around league average or even matching the 107 wRC+ he posted over the last four years could be a much more realistic target. How do MLBTR readers think the rest of Adamess season will play out from here? Will he be able to make the adjustments nece sary to hit well in Oracle Park and turn his season around, or will he remain a below-average hitter this season? Have your say in the poll below: Can Willy Adames Turn Things Around In 2025? No, he'll continue to struggle and post a below-average season. 51.21% (1,677votes) Yes, he'll finish the year as an average or better hitter. 48.79% (1,598votes) Total Votes: 3,275 Kyler Kropp Jersey