2025 stats: 160 G, 686 PA, .225 / .318 / .421, 30 HR, 87 RBI, 111 OPS+ (108 wRC+), .321 wOBA, 3.6 bWAR, 5 OAA (90th percentile)
Matt Chapman launched a Pierce Johnson curveball into the left field seats for a walk-off two run shot against the Braves on June 7th. Oracle Park went bezerk as Chapman rounded the bases and stomped on home plate as his teammates mobbed him. Willy Adames led the celebratory charge: first one over the railing as the baseball took flight, first one at the plate, first one with the cooler for the obligatory Gatorade soaking.
Adames had gone 0-for-3 that day with two strikeouts. The Giants were ten games above .500 at that point. They had just secured the series win against the Braves and won their fourth straight one-run game in a row, and in that stretch, their starting shortstop, who had just signed the biggest contract in franchise history, didn’t have a knock to his name. Hitless against San Diego, hitless against the Braves — Adames’s batting average had dropped to .193. He was slugging just .303 with a well-below league average 67 wRC+. He had dropped from his natural number-2 spot in the order to fifth, often sixth. Nearly 300 plate appearances into his Giants career, he had hit just 5 homers in the orange-and-black.
Adames had set a preseason goal to play in 162 games, but to a certain point that became an impossibility. Call it the pressure of high-expectations, the adrenaline and nerves of joining a new team — the early season slump had lingered longer than expected. It was fine up to a certain point. Adames was contributing in other ways, doing all he could to endear himself to the fans. He had the walk-off hit in the home opener, served as the dugout hype man, Matt Williams’s shadow waving in a runner around third — but a months-long slump inevitably takes its toll. Frustration cracked through the happy veneer. Lack of production from an integral offensive piece strained the rotation and bullpen, and the team would pay a price for all of those one-run games. The Giants winning despite Adames wasn’t what Buster Posey, or Adames, or any of us really, had envisioned.
So Bob Melvin, in one of his savvier moves, told Adames to take a seat. It wasn’t a benching, just a mandatory reclining. He didn’t take the field with the Giants for the first time since becoming one in the series finale against the Braves. The following Monday was a scheduled offday — Adames could put his feet up for two whole days to relax, reset, to not think about baseball before returning for a series in Denver. The abbreviated and forced sabbatical worked better than anybody expected. Adames drove in Jung Hoo Lee on a sacrifice fly in the 1st. He launched his first homer in nearly a month to tie the game in the 5th. He’d hit another through that thin mountain air the next day, and then somehow launched 24 more to end a 21 year franchise drought.
In his 407 plate appearances after his day off, he’d hit .248 with a .504 slugging and a 135 wRC+. His ISO more than doubled (.111 to .256). The barrel found the baseball at a much higher clip and was making contact out in front of the plate. Quicker swings allowed him to jump on fastballs, even demolishing elevated heaters designed to exploit his upper-cut swing. The rising tide of his offense lifted his defense as well. Purple leather flashed up the middle. He perfected the spin-and-spike throw over to first, the mile-wide grin after as he cantered his way back to his position from shallow centerfield.
The final two-thirds of the season were ascendent, but not so much as to fully bleach out the stain of those lost months. Adames’s final batting line on the season still bares some of the scars. The power numbers especially never recovered after the initial failure to launch. April and May were a pair of cement shoes, keeping what could’ve been a career year firmly grounded. His .740 OPS was more than 50 points lower than in 2024. His 111 OPS+ is around his current career average. Adames ended up swiping a dozen bases (the second most of his career) but never threatened to repeat on his 20 SB – 20 HR season with Milwaukee. I imagine base path aggressiveness was an early casualty of the slump as well (not that Melvin’s group was ever going to run with abandon, despite many of them talking up a big running game during Spring Training).
Disappointing might be an apt way to ultimately describe Adames’s first year as a Giant, but it wasn’t a disappointment. For the majority of the season, he was the guy. The backwards bit is that his hot streaks never quite matched with the team’s. He wasn’t really the player we were talking about when the Giants were vibing; and when he was vibing, no one could stomach the Giants. In July, when Adames batted .337 with a 1.096 OPS and 21 runs batted-in, the team went on a downward spiral, going 9-for-15 on the month, including a devastating losing stretch that turned them into sellers at the trade-deadline.
I want to say the second-half Adames is the one we’ll see in 2026. I hope… I pray… Slumps are inevitable, but next year, they won’t be as excruciatingly prolonged. He’s always said he’s a slow-starter, but he won’t need as long as a runway to launch next year. He’ll have a normal, low-key offseason. He’ll be familiar with his surroundings. And he’ll be motivated to come out hot. You can bet that prolonged slump still bothers him, like an itch in the middle of the back, just beyond his reach; an itch only a hot start can satisfyingly scratch. No knock to the parochial Willie Mac Award (or ending the club’s 30-HR drought), but I hope he has eyes on a greater prize.
A first All-Star selection will certainly be a good place to start.
