The Giants announced that they have designated outfielder Justin Maxwell for assignment in order to clear space on the 40-man roster for September callup Nick Noonan.
Maxwell, 31, batted .209/.275/.341 in 274 plate appearances with the Giants this year. He’s soaked up a number innings in the outfield as San Francisco has dealt with injuries to its entire starting outfield — Hunter Pence, Angel Pagan and Nori Aoki. Maxwell is capable of playing all three outfield spots and is a particularly good defender in the corner outfield positions. As Alex Pavlovic of CSN Bay Area tweets, the move is at least somewhat surprising, as the team could’ve transferred Tim Lincecum to the 60-day disabled list. Lincecum has been on the DL since late June.
Why?? Lincecum isn’t going to be back anytime soon anyway..
Agreed — it’s an odd move considering that they didn’t have to make it. Lincecum’s already been on the DL for 60 days, so they could still have made that move and activated him at any point while maintaining a bit of outfield depth.
They have six OF already (Aoki, Byrd, Blanco, Pagan, De Aza and Perez). How much depth do they need? A better question is whether they should have kept Maxwell over Perez, but Perez is a better defender and faster, which is probably all you need from a 6th OF. And if they need a pinch runner, they can always recall Carbonell to play the running and defense role like Darren Ford did a few years ago.
Theoretically the more outfielders on the roster, the less we’d have to see Pagan in the lineup, which would be great. But Bochy would probably still have him in CF leading off like he is today – he’s been very loyal to Pagan even though he’s been atrocious on both sides of the ball (-2 WAR).
As bad as Pagan has been most of this year (playing injured, of course), he’s still better than Maxwell, who doesn’t play CF anyway.
Maybe the handwriting was on the wall when Bochy didn’t double switch him in for Bryd last night when Kontos came in to pitch. The pitcher spot was due up 2nd the next inning and you knew that Kontos was going to pitch more than 1 inning. And of course Kontos couldn’t lay down the bunt with Crawford on…
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He was fantastic the first couple of weeks of the season. After that? Not so much. It’s a shame, but time to move on.