{"id":185584,"date":"2025-08-29T21:26:30","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185584\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T21:26:30","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:26:30","slug":"casey-schmitts-small-improvement-could-mean-big-things-for-the-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/185584\/","title":{"rendered":"Casey Schmitt\u2019s small improvement could mean big things for the Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of ways to enjoy a prospect\u2019s career, and San Francisco Giants fans know this. Once upon a time the organization was luckier than most at turning prospects into MLB stars. Giants fans didn\u2019t just watch one of the most classic prospect progressions of all time; they watched several different kinds of them, all at the same time, each of them perfect in its own way.<\/p>\n

The Giants saw a pitcher burn fast and bright, winning awards along the way (Tim Lincecum), and they saw a pitcher burn long and slow, racking up 200-inning seasons without ever getting a top-five Cy Young finish (Matt Cain). They had a prospect jump to the majors after starting the season in High A (Pablo Sandoval), and he was in the World Series just a couple of seasons later. They had a hometown hero (Brandon Crawford) and his goofy reciprocal (Brandon Belt) combine for nearly 3,000 games in a Giants uniform. And then there was the keystone that held the whole arch in place, the catcher, a top prospect at the most difficult position in sports who managed to arrive in the majors fully formed (H\u00e9ctor S\u00e1nchez).<\/p>\n

The Buster Posey career arc is probably as close to a perfect outcome for a prospect as possible. There was never a slump long enough to question his ability to thrive in the majors. He was successful right away, and he led the team to multiple championships. He signed an extension long before anyone had to worry about him leaving, and he\u2019ll be the first Giants Hall of Famer who didn\u2019t play for another team since Mel Ott. Heck, his Giants storyline is still going, albeit in a much different way.<\/p>\n

The point is that there are a lot of different ways that homegrown players can make Giants baseball more watchable, and there\u2019s a chance that you\u2019re watching one of these transformations before your very eyes. Casey Schmitt is making the transition from one-time prospect to proven major leaguer, and he\u2019s doing it in an incredibly satisfying way: He\u2019s improving his plate discipline just enough. His swing decisions have moved from \u201cappalling\u201d to \u201cinconsistent,\u201d and that\u2019s not meant to sound like damning with faint praise. It\u2019s an incredibly difficult leap for a player to make, and it doesn\u2019t happen nearly as often as you want it to.<\/p>\n

First, some support for the claim that Schmitt\u2019s plate discipline has moved from unsustainable to almost decent-ish. Here\u2019s how often he\u2019s chased pitches outside of the strike zone over his career:<\/p>\n\n

Season<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

O-Swing%<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/tr>\n\n\n

2023<\/p>\n<\/td>\n\n

39.5<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n\n

2024<\/p>\n<\/td>\n\n

35.5<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n\n

2025<\/p>\n<\/td>\n\n

30.7<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

The average major-league hitter swings at pitches out of the strike zone about 28 percent of the time, so keep that in mind. Schmitt hasn\u2019t turned into Juan Soto. He\u2019s still an aggressive hitter. Except now it\u2019s the kind of aggressiveness that shouldn\u2019t prevent him from being a productive hitter, and that\u2019s a monumental difference. In his first two seasons, he was the same kind of aggressive that has washed hundreds of hitters out of professional baseball.<\/p>\n

You remember these prospects. They\u2019re the ones with the tools or the personalities or the draft status. They\u2019re the big-bonus international players or the first-round picks, seemingly so close to realizing their potential, if they could only manage to do one thing:\u00a0Stop swinging at pitches they can\u2019t hit.<\/p>\n

It sounds so simple, like it\u2019s a matter of free will or a player\u2019s resolve. A custom wristband that reads \u201cRemember: Don\u2019t swing at crap\u201d would help batters prepare before every pitch. Prohibitively aggressive hitters don\u2019t think they\u2019re swinging at crap. They think they\u2019re swinging at a big, meaty fastball right down the middle, or a slow, lazy breaking ball, only to realize that they were rather mistaken. And at the risk of oversimplification, this happens over and over again until they\u2019re out of baseball. They simply can\u2019t recognize the spin fast enough. They\u2019re downloading the answer to \u201cfastball or change?\u201d on a 56k modem when their competition has broadband.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In his first two seasons, Schmitt was aggressive to the point of not being a playable hitter. (Ross Cameron \/ USA Today)<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of aggressive that Schmitt was in his first two seasons, and it didn\u2019t bode well. It\u2019s a common malady for players, and it turns All-Stars into utility players. It turns utility players into minor leaguers, and it turns minor leaguers into bench coaches. The Chicago Cubs being in town is a good excuse to remember that brief moment when Alexander Canario looked like he was going to be a player the Giants regretted trading. He\u2019s been DFA\u2019d and acquired for cash multiple times since then, and he\u2019s currently on the Pittsburgh Pirates, who are currently saying the same thing as everyone else: \u201cGee whiz, just imagine if he could lay off those sliders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe he\u2019ll get there. But you can remember the players who didn\u2019t. Scores and scores of them, some of them had enough going for them to become major-league starters or even become All-Stars and get nine-figure contracts<\/a>. You weren\u2019t expecting them to turn into Eddie Stanky<\/a>; you just wanted them to not be\u00a0so bad at swinging at pitches they couldn\u2019t hit. And time and time again, they couldn\u2019t do it. Because it\u2019s hard. For some hitters, it might be physically impossible. The neurons aren\u2019t connected to the hip bone, or what have you, and they can\u2019t tell a ball from a strike as fast as they need to.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why it\u2019s such a big deal for Schmitt to show signs of improvement here. It suggests that his propensity for swinging at pitches he couldn\u2019t hit was an approach problem, at least in part. It was less about not seeing the spinning seams of a slider and more about having an aggressive approach because it worked for him in college and the minors. After enough failure in the majors, he got tired of it and reworked his approach. The results are encouraging.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re still early into the \u201cnew\u201d Casey Schmitt, and there\u2019s always the potential of the league making an adjustment that he\u2019ll need to respond to. Still, even if there\u2019s no more improvement, and Schmitt continues to swing at more bad pitches than the average hitter, this can all work out splendidly. Schmitt has an excellent swing, both aesthetically and empirically<\/a>, and once he gets familiar with the defensive nuances of second base, it\u2019s not hard to see him becoming an everyday player there.<\/p>\n

If he gets there, he\u2019ll be that rarest of players: The player who actually stopped swinging at\u00a0everything and became the player who only swung at\u00a0most of the things. It\u2019s all you\u2019ve wanted from scores of prospects in the past. Here\u2019s your best chance in years.<\/p>\n

(Photo: Kevin C. Cox \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are a lot of ways to enjoy a prospect\u2019s career, and San Francisco Giants fans know this.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":185585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[1266,1275,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-185584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-san-francisco-giants","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115114173211050950","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}