Giants Add a Slugging Right Fielder. No, Not That Slugging Right Fielder.

On Tuesday evening, a thrill swept through the winter meetings. The rumors were true – the San Francisco Giants were in agreement with an American League right fielder on a multi-year deal. Yes, San Francisco, it’s time to welcome a new slugging right-handed hitter to town: Mitch Haniger signed a three-year, $43.5 million deal to become a Giant, with an opt out after year two.

Oh, you were expecting Aaron Judge? That didn’t quite pan out, though the Giants are reportedly still in pursuit of another hitter in free agency. But Haniger is a first course, and he fits the Giants quite well whether they look for another outfielder or pivot to the infield for help.

At season’s end, the San Francisco outfield was predominantly a lefty affair. Joc Pederson appeared in the outfield in 120 games. Mike Yastrzemski played the outfield in 147 of his own. LaMonte Wade Jr. missed a lot of time with injury, but rotated between seemingly every position in the field when he was healthy, including both left and right. The Giants theoretically love to mix and match based on the opposition, but they did a lot of running out a squad of lefties last year.

Haniger fits snugly into that mix for several reasons. First, let’s be honest: Pederson is at his best when he doesn’t have to play defense. His patriotic lollipops tell a consistent tale: dark red for most aspects of hitting, deep blue for most parts of fielding. When he accepted the qualifying offer, the team’s first priority became finding enough outfielders that Pederson could become a full-time DH.

Haniger isn’t one of the very best defenders in baseball, but he’s roughly average in an outfield corner – likely left field in San Francisco given Oracle Park’s expansive right field dimensions. He’s played the majority of his major league career in right, so he could play there as well, but my guess is that the Giants know Haniger is okay playing left field given that he signed while the team was still pursuing Judge.

That’s not the main attraction here, though. The Giants signed Haniger to hit, not to field. He’s well-suited to Oracle, a park that you probably think of as a pitcher’s park. That’s no longer the case. Per Statcast’s park factors, it plays exactly average overall, and our own park factors peg it similarly. It’s better than that for righties – though of note, it’s not an easy place to hit homers for hitters of either handedness.

If the Giants end up signing an infielder in free agency, their outfield rotation feels straightforward. Haniger and Yastrzemski will play most often, with Wade and Pederson playing frequently but not always. With Austin Slater available when he’s most useful, everything lines up fairly well to give Haniger all the playing time he can handle.

“All the playing time he can handle” isn’t the same as every single day. The Giants have emphasized rotations and keeping players fresh in recent years; only one Giant (Wilmer Flores) reached 600 PA, and Yastrzemski was the only other hitter to manage even 550. Some of that is due to injury, but it’s also purposeful: when they won 107 games in 2021, not a single player hit that 550 PA mark. Haniger will get plenty of days off, even if he’s the best player in the outfield.

The Giants are a bit more inventive than simply choosing based on handedness. If they were, they probably wouldn’t have signed Haniger to a deal of this size while they were still pursuing Judge. But as Robert Orr noted earlier this year, the Giants varied their lineups for plenty of other reasons, based on the opposing pitcher. That gives them room to use Haniger against righties selectively, putting him in advantageous matchups while still playing him plenty.

Of note, Haniger’s natural fly-ball tendency means he’s had better numbers against low pitches than high ones throughout his career. Slater, on the other hand, feasts on high pitches. Wade is at his best against sinker/changeup righties. Haniger is the best of the three overall, even against right-handed pitching, at least in my opinion, but giving him some rest against pitchers who Wade and Slater profile well against will make the whole rotation tick without it feeling like anyone isn’t getting enough playing time.

All of this assumes Haniger can stay healthy, which has been a struggle throughout his career. Even without the benefit of creative lineup construction, he’s been excellent in his major league career; he was worth 3 WAR per 600 plate appearances in his time on the Mariners. Unfortunately, he’s only topped 100 games played twice, and he missed the entire 2020 season with injury to boot.

If Haniger is healthy, this deal will likely work out well for the Giants. He provides a lot of what they were missing in 2022; their lineup struggled with left-handed opposition at times, and they were short an outfield defender or two. He’ll provide both of those things, and while it’s hard to hit home runs by the bay, his dead pull power from the right side is exactly the kind of profile to punch through the marine layer and deposit balls in the stands.

It’s difficult to forecast health. Haniger seems to have angered a deity with a vested interest in vexing those who anger it. He’s missed time with maladies ranging from minor to major. In 2022 alone, he missed time with a bad case of COVID-19, a high ankle sprain, and a back injury. I won’t even get into the variety of ailments that caused him to miss nearly two consecutive years earlier in his career. Suffice it to say they were both painful and long-lasting. The Giants were clearly comfortable with his medicals, and he finished 2022 strong, but that feels like the easiest way this deal can go sour; a thumping bat can only help your lineup when it’s in the lineup.

Haniger’s contract is interestingly structured. He’ll receive $11 million in 2023, $6 million of which is a signing bonus. He’ll then get $17 million in 2024, and $15.5 million in 2025 unless he opts out. I’m not sure what the exact thinking behind that structure is, or why 2024 has the largest payout, but I assume the signing bonus aspect has something to do with taxes, while the higher salary in year three saves the Giants a bit of money if Haniger opts out.

Given that he’s entering his age-32 season, I don’t think an opt out is particularly likely. This feels like his one big score; it will roughly quadruple his career earnings. The contract is larger than I expected, but there was truly no other free agent who could have given the Giants what Haniger offers them when healthy.

If the team was looking for a right-handed player who can credibly play the outfield, Judge was an obvious solution, and one they pursued. After that, things get dicey quickly. J.D. Martinez makes Pederson look like Byron Buxton, so he wasn’t a fit. Jurickson Profar is a switch hitter, but hits meaningfully better from the left side. Brandon Drury isn’t an outfielder. Andrew Benintendi and Michael Conforto are lefties. For what San Francisco needed, it was Haniger or the trade market.

Viewed in isolation, this won’t move the needle enough for the Giants. They’re surely not done with free agency, though; the talk of them pursuing Aaron Judge was hardly idle speculation, and they’re rumored to have offered him upwards of $350 million in an attempt to lure him back to his native northern California (for what it’s worth, Haniger is a Bay Area native too, hailing from Mountain View in the south bay). That’s not on the table anymore after Judge returned to the Yankees, but that doesn’t end San Francisco’s offseason. Even with Haniger in the fold, they’re projected for a meaningful decrease in salary, and there are plenty of fish in the sea, albeit none as magnificent a catch as Judge.

If you think the team will add in a number of other places, Haniger is a nice complementary piece. That, along with the team’s ability to get the most out of players who excel against one type of pitch or another, makes me like this deal, unless they sit the rest of free agency out on the offensive side of the ball. The injury history makes me wary. As far as I’m concerned, it will all come down to whether he’ll be able to stay on the field, something I don’t feel comfortable predicting, but I can see why the Giants pursued Haniger to put the puzzle pieces together.