SAN FRANCISCO — When LaMonte Wade Jr. made his Giants debut in 2021, Buster Posey was in the dugout. Posey was there for all of the late-game heroics that year, and when Wade won the Willie Mac Award in September, he joined other past winners for the on-field ceremony. Posey considers the two friends, which made their short meeting late Tuesday night a difficult one.
With Dominic Smith on the way, the Giants parted ways with Wade, a breakout star four seasons ago, but one of the worst everyday players in the big leagues this season. But they didn’t stop there.
Catcher Andrew Knizner, a 30-year-old who was picked up late last month and had just eight games with Triple-A, also was added, taking the spot of Sam Huff, who was DFA’d along with Wade. Outfielder Daniel Johnson was in Mexico at the start of the season. On Wednesday, he swapped roster spots with infielder Christian Koss and started in right field over slumping veteran Mike Yastrzemski.
The Wade move alone would have felt significant given his time with the organization, but this was more than that. It felt like a message being sent by a front office that knows this pitching staff is good enough to reach the MLB playoffs and make some noise there if the offense can just make the modest jump from two to four runs per game.
“It’s been a rough go the last two and a half weeks,” Posey said Wednesday in an interview with NBC Sports Bay Area. “I hope that for however long I end up doing this, I hope it’s never easy to have to tell players that you’re taking a job away from them — whether it’s optioning them or not — it’s not an enjoyable thing to do. But the way we’re going right now, we’ve got to change some things up. We’ve got to hopefully get some different looks from some different hitters and get this thing going.”
As Posey sat in the dugout Wednesday afternoon, he talked of how the only experience he can personally rely on is his time as a player. But he also leans on former Giants general managers Brian Sabean and Bobby Evans, the latter of whom is back with the organization. Current general manager Zack Minasian was part of plenty of roster flurries the last few seasons.
Farhan Zaidi seemingly would put out a press release like this once a month. But this is new to Posey. He can no longer control a slump with his bat or a few pointed words in a hitters’ meeting. Now, it’s with the transaction wire, which was busy Wednesday after three weeks of historically poor production.
“For me, the easy thing to point to is early in the year it felt like were doing a really good job of moving runners when we needed to. We were hitting and scoring runs with runners in scoring position, popping a homer here and there,” Posey said. “[Now], it’s a little bit of everything. I’ve been on teams where the offense has struggled. Sometimes it’s one game and you get going, a couple of games when you get going, and we’re talking about how good the offense is in three weeks. I hope next time time I talk to you, that’s what we’re talking about.”
That spark has been missing for weeks, which led to moves that sent a message, and not just to a fan base that has grown appropriately disgruntled. This is a message to the team’s core players, too. Had any of them come through more often in recent weeks, Wednesday’s series of moves might not have gone down the same way. Koss and Huff haven’t jumped off the page, but they seemed to get caught up in a push to make big changes.
For Wade, this day has been telegraphed for several weeks. He had two rough months, but it goes deeper than that. Since the start of the second half in 2024, he is hitting .188 with just six homers. The Giants would have needed to make a move there even if Smith had not come available over the weekend, although Posey said he wasn’t quite sure what that would have looked like.
“It’s hard to say. There might have been something else that we were looking at at that point,” he said. “There might have been more at-bats for [Casey] Schmitt or [Jerar] Encarnacion or [Wilmer] Flores, but it’s hard to say.”
Posey is hopeful that Wade gets an opportunity elsewhere, and he will. There’s a lot at stake for the 31-year-old who is about to hit free agency for the first time, but he’s healthy and teams are always looking for change-of-scenery candidates this time of year. The Giants have one of their own now, and on Wednesday, Dominic Smith went right into the lineup at first base, hitting fifth, one spot ahead of slumping shortstop Willy Adames.
The Giants never imagined being at this point, but there’s also a silver lining as they look forward. They made the moves at a time when they’re just half a game out of a playoff spot, nearly entirely thanks to what might be the deepest pitching staff in baseball. The pitching Posey has seen in recent weeks called for urgency, and on Wednesday, the shakeup finally arrived. It wasn’t hard to view that as a message to the other half of the clubhouse.
“It’s time to go,” Posey said. “I think we all believe we’re better than we’ve been with the bats the last two to three weeks. It’s time to go.”
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