Mitch Haniger To Undergo Forearm Surgery
TODAY: The Giants announced that Haniger will undergo forearm surgery tomorrow, and a more specific timeline on his recovery will be provided on Friday. Davis will miss the next 3-10 days with a Grade 1 ankle sprain, so while an IL stint will be necessary, the infielder looks to have avoided a more serious issue.
JUNE 13: Giants outfielder Mitch Haniger fractured his right forearm during tonight’s game against the Cardinals, the club informed reporters (including Maria Guardado of MLB.com). Third baseman J.D. Davis was also diagnosed with a right ankle sprain.
Haniger was hit by a Jack Flaherty pitch on a check swing in the third inning. He immediately departed with Blake Sabol taking his spot in left field. Unfortunately, x-rays quickly revealed the fracture, which is sure to result in another lengthy stint on the injured list.
It’s horrible luck for the veteran outfielder. Haniger has had plenty of injury concerns over his career, including some fluke issues that have kept him out for extended runs. A 2019 testicular rupture sustained when he fouled a ball off himself ended up necessitating multiple core surgeries that cost him all of 2020. He returned for a full season in 2021 but missed a large chunk of last year with a high ankle sprain in his right leg.
The Giants rolled the dice on Haniger’s power upside despite his injury history. San Francisco inked him to a three-year, $43.5MM free agent guarantee with a post-2024 opt-out clause. The first season of the deal hasn’t gone as planned. Haniger opened the year on the IL after suffering a Spring Training oblique strain. He returned in late April but started slowly, hitting .230/.281/.372 over 160 trips to the plate with his new club.
Haniger is now headed back to the IL, leaving the Giants with a gap to plug in the outfield. While they could turn to Sabol or Austin Slater more frequently alongside Michael Conforto and Mike Yastrzemski, it seems they’re considering bringing up one of their top prospects instead. As Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle noted (on Twitter), Luis Matos was pulled from tonight’s game with Triple-A Sacramento. The 21-year-old outfielder, who’s already on the Giants’ 40-man roster, is hitting .348/.415/.548 between the top two minor league levels.
Haniger’s injury isn’t the only concern from tonight’s game for San Francisco. Davis sprained his ankle while sliding into third base. He attempted to walk the injury off but moved rather gingerly and was taken out of the game. Casey Schmitt came in to replace him at the hot corner.
Davis has been one of San Francisco’s best hitters. The righty-swinging infielder is sitting on a .286/.369/.476 line with nine homers and a robust 10.9% walk rate through 245 plate appearances. If the injury sends him to the IL, Schmitt figures to take over third base. The rookie cooled offensively after a blistering start and owns a .276/.286/.405 slash over his first 32 MLB games. He’s walked just once in 119 plate appearances. Schmitt is making contact and regarded as a plus defensive third baseman, though, so he’d be a high-upside fill-in.
Giants Select Casey Schmitt, Designate Darin Ruf For Assignment
11:02am: The Giants announced that they’ve selected Schmitt’s contract. In a corresponding move, they reinstated first baseman/outfielder Darin Ruf from the injured list and designated him for assignment. Outfielder Cal Stevenson was also optioned to Sacramento.
11:00am: The Giants will select the contract of infield prospect Casey Schmitt prior to tonight’s game, reports Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. The 2020 second-round pick will be making his Major League debut.
Schmitt, 24, has gotten out to a .313/.352/.410 start in Triple-A Sacrmento, striking out at a 19.3% clip against a more tepid 5.5% walk rate. For the season’s first few weeks, Schmitt was hitting for average but doing little else, walking at only a 3.6% clip with just a .367 slugging percentage. He’s picked up the pace of late, however, hitting .327/.393/.473 with a homer, five doubles, three stolen bases, an 8.2% walk rate and just a 13.1% strikeout rate over his past 14 games and 55 plate appearances.
While Schmitt has played primarily shortstop so far in 2023, the bulk of his minor league work has come at third base. In all, he has 512 career innings at shortstop and 1223 innings at the hot corner. The Giants have also played him at second base three times this month — the first three appearances of his career at that position — likely in an effort to increase his versatility and his utility on the big league roster.
The Giants have received outstanding production from infielders Thairo Estrada (.344/.394/.534) and J.D. Davis (.287/.360/.515), but with Brandon Crawford shelved by a calf strain (and struggling even when healthy), the infield has been thinned out. Brett Wisely and David Villar have both gotten looks at second base, with Estrada sliding over to shortstop in place of Crawford, but neither has hit well at all in 2023. Schmitt can give the Giants an option at either middle-infield slot, with Estrada handling the other, and hopefully provide a spark to the lineup in the process.
Scouting reports on Schmitt peg him as a plus defender on the left side of the infield, so it stands to reason that he can handle whichever of shortstop, second base or third base the Giants ask of him on a given day. What remains to be seen is whether this proves to be a short-term call-up until Crawford returns or whether Schmitt will get the chance to play his way into a more permanent role with the club. Given the team’s 15-19 start, it’s sensible to take a look at Schmitt and adjust the roster around him if he adapts well at the big league level. If he’s indeed in the Majors for good, he’d be on track to reach arbitration as a likely Super Two player following the 2025 season and reach free agency following the 2029 season — though future optional assignments can of course alter both trajectories.
As for Ruf, the 36-year-old’s return to the Giants will prove quite brief. Released by the Mets earlier this year, he quickly re-signed with the Giants and appeared in nine games before landing on the injured list due to a wrist injury. In 27 plate appearances prior to that IL stint, Ruf posted a solid .261/.370/.348 batting line.
The veteran Ruf was an outstanding find for the Giants in his return from a productive three-year run in the KBO, batting .248/.358/.455 in 726 plate appearances with San Francisco from 2020 through the 2022 trade deadline, when he was traded to the Mets in exchange for the aforementioned Davis and three others. It proved to be a disastrous trade for the Mets, as Davis immediately began hitting in San Francisco, while Ruf’s bat cratered in Queens; he hit just .152/.216/.197 in 74 plate appearances with the Mets last year and didn’t appear in a single game in 2023 before being cut loose.
The Giants will have a week to trade Ruf, place him on outright waiver or place him on release waivers. He has enough service time to reject an outright assignment and still retain his full $3MM salary. The Mets are on the hook for that sum as part of last summer’s trade, so any team that picks Ruf up will only be required to pay him the prorated league minimum for any time spent on the MLB roster. That’d be subtracted from what the Mets owe to him. In 727 career plate appearances against left-handed pitching, Ruf is a .271/.368/.519 hitter (142 wRC+).