David Villar was supposed to be one of the best stories of 2023 for the Giants. Instead, he’s clinging to a roster spot 36 games into the season.
After being talked up by the coaching staff more than any other player in spring training, Villar lost the starting third baseman job early in the season to the red hot J.D. Davis. Villar was moved to second base with Thairo Estrada having to cover shortstop, but the emergence of Casey Schmitt seems to have knocked him out of that spot as well.
Now Villar’s short-term future with the big-league club is in question. The 26-year-old is slashing just .149/.242/.322, a far cry from the .787 OPS he posted last season.
Former Giants pitcher Shawn Estes joined KNBR on Thursday morning to discuss Villar’s future, and agreed it might be time for him to head back down to Triple-A.
“It looks like he’s fallen into that same pattern he fell into the first time he got called up, where he’s not seeing spin on the breaking ball, he’s chasing,” Estes said. “I think what happens is that when you know there’s a weakness you have as a hitter, and you know that you’re struggling with a certain shape of pitch, but you also forget what your strengths are. And that is, ‘if I get a fastball, I need to hammer it if it’s a mistake. So I need to be on the fastball but I also need to be able to adjust to the breaking ball. But oh wait, I can’t hit the breaking ball if I’m not looking for it right now.’
“So you get caught in between. And you hear that a lot with hitting coaches, but people don’t know what that means. Well that’s exactly what it means. It means you’re caught in between the fastball and the slider and can’t hit both of them. Because you definitely know and you’re vulnerable to an off-speed pitch. So you feel like you have to go up and look for that pitch.
“It’s a tough spot to be in, and you almost have to get back to the basics. And sometimes you need to go back to the minor leagues, to kind of work through that. It’s tough at the big-league level because you have to produce. If you go into a prolonged slump and you have options, you start to put some pressure on yourself to produce. And that makes it even worse, you can’t even relax when you get into the box.”
How quickly it takes Brandon Crawford to return from injury and get back to an everyday level will likely determine how much rope Villar gets. If Crawford goes back to playing a solid shortstop, the Giants will have more than enough infield options with Estrada, Davis, Schmitt, Wilmer Flores and LaMonte Wade.
“That’s the thing right now, he’s just swinging and missing a lot,” Estes continued. “He’s chasing out of the zone. You’ve heard this organization preach doing damage with pitches in the zone. Not swinging at pitches out of the zone. It’s a lot easier said than done, and if you can’t do it at the big-league level then they’re going to try and find somebody who does.
“I think a softer landing spot right now would be in Triple-A, where he can go work on those things and get his confidence back.”
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