Is David Villar knocking at the door?

I mean, yeah, but is it a really loud knock?

Photo Credit: Kirk Nawrotzky | Richmond Flying Squirrels

BREAKING NEWS:

Steven Rissotto @StevenRissotto

Gabe Kapler said the organization is aware of David Villar's outstanding play in Triple-A. Ron Wotus, now a special assistant with the #SFGiants, has been down to evaluate him. Kapler considers him a "good fit" among other third base options. Villar has 14 HRs and a 1.118 OPS.

I exaggerate. It’s really not that big of an update. Teams are hyper aware of what their prospects are doing, and when a player is leading his Triple A league in…..[checks Stats Review]….EVERYTHING, you can bet the major league staff is going to be aware. Sending Ron Wotus down to evaluate him is certainly a note of heightened intrigue, however (and might point to the Giants’ beginning to evaluate David Villar’s 3b defensive potential seriously). But, of course, Gabe Kapler doesn’t need too many Special Assistants making the trek up I-80 to get accurate scouting reports, since Evan Longoria, Tommy La Stella, LaMonte Wade, Jr., and more are right in his home locker room with, no doubt, a full head of knowledge on Villar’s strong points and weaknesses. The salient point is that there’s a difference between “aware” and “get a uniform ready, Murph.”

So, the questions keep coming up: will the Giants bring up Villar? When will the Giants bring up Villar? WHY HAVEN’T THE GIANTS BROUGHT UP VILLAR YET, FOR GOD’S SAKE!?!?!?!

That’s straight from my Inbox, by the way! But it’s an obvious question when the big league club is going through a listless, lackluster stretch, while the twitter feed seems to include some daily version of this:

Sacramento River Cats @RiverCats

🚨BACK TO BACK🚨 David Villar smacks one to left! 😱 #clawsup

It’s a question in two parts, really. The first part is, how well is Villar really doing? The second part is, how does he fit the team’s needs.

Obviously, the numbers [checks Stats Review one more time] … give us a pretty loud answer to the first question. Villar currently ranks 1st in the PCL in HRs, Slugging Percentage, OPS, Isolated Slugging, wRC+, and RBI, and he’s top 10 in both walks and walk rate. Looking below the hood, one thing that’s interesting about Villar is that he isn’t generating huge raw power numbers. His maximum exit velocity so far this year is just 108.9 — that’s not a number that would place him high on the EV leaderboards in MLB. Mike Yastrzemski, for instance, has a max EV this year of 109.2, which is good enough to land in just the 61st percentile of big league players this year.

I didn’t pick Yaz’s name by chance, however, as there are other similarities in batted ball profile between the two. Also like Yaz, though Villar isn’t getting to upper echelon raw EV numbers this year, he’s been extremely consistent at getting to excellent ones. Over 86 batted ball events so far this year, Villar has 26 that exceed 100 mph and 40 that are over 95 mph — Statcast’s official dividing line for balls considered to be “Hard Hit.” Villar’s average EV on the year is 89.6, but there’s a growing sense in the industry that Average EV is less useful a metric, since it includes miss hits, and that something like a player’s 90th percentile EV is a much better indicator of a player’s ability to get to his power. For Villar, that 90th percentile number this year is 104.3 mph — barely 4.5 mph lower than his max. In other words, Villar is getting close to his maximum ability to hit the ball hard a tremendous amount of the time. Like Yaz, who is in just the 61st percentile in Max EV but in the 96th percentile of average EV, Villar is doing a good job of maxing out his raw power in games through a highly disciplined approach that focuses on hunting pitches he can crush.

(As an aside, less meaningful, but very funny, is the fact that Villar has hit four balls this year slower than 50 mph — and three of them have been hits!)

The Giants’ organizational hitting philosophy under Farhan Zaidi is “doing damage or walk” — in batting practice, you’ll often see players wearing T-shirts that say exactly that, along with other motivational phrases like “Control the time between pitches.” Villar is being very effective at either doing damage or walking. Forty-four of his 157 PA so far this year have resulted in either a walk or an extra-base hit, good for 28% of his trips to the plate. If you want to be more process driven and less results driven, 41% of his PA have resulted in either a walk or a hard hit ball (again using the 95 mph metric). That’s a lot!

The downside to all of this is a slightly elevated bit of swing and miss — but even that is not an exaggerated flaw (as we’ve seen with some other hitters in the system). Villar’s 27.4% K rate is 15th in the league among qualified hitters, but it’s not terribly out of line with the league average rate of 23%. Similarly, his swinging strike percentage (13.7%) is in the PCL’s Top 20, but it doesn’t seem egregious. The overall offensive profile really does look quite similar to the Zaidi-Giants’ greatest garbage bin reclamation job, Yaz, whose Baseball Savant page right now looks like this:

Now, there are big caveats that need to be applied here before we push that similarity too far — don’t go buying Villar City Connect jerseys just yet! Villar’s impressive exit velocities are coming with a different ball than is being used in the major leagues — he’s not getting the deadened ball with the humidor mush effect like major leaguers are. And he’s getting to play in the full panoply of offensive funhouses that the PCL offers, and taking advantage of them to the hilt — on the road this year (where he’s only played in Reno, Albuquerque, and El Paso), Villar has hit a Bondian .349/.449/.864, with 10 home runs in 17 games played. Sadly, the Giants don’t seem to have either Albuquerque or El Paso on the schedule so far as I can tell [checks again…..nope!], so I wouldn’t be writing Villar’s NL stat line off that profile just yet.

But let’s caveat the caveat too (oh, I caveat myself into infinity, don’t you worry!). Sacramento has played just three road series this year. Villar has actually played more home games (21) than road games so far, and he’s still leading the league in slugging. It’s worth pointing out that there are many, many players in the PCL, who get to enjoy those Surface of the Moon environments all the danged time! And normally, those are the guys cranking up the leaderboards, not anyone playing in Sacramento (or Tacoma or Oklahoma City…you get it).

So, yes, the context matters (as has always been true of the PCL), and yes, you can expect struggles in the transition because the jump from Triple A to MLB is far larger than any other leap in pro ball (when you succeed in a minor league, you move up; when you succeed in the major leagues, you stay there and keep on whomping it year after year, sharpening your skills against the other greatest 750 or so players in the world. The two environments are not remotely similar!). But still, there’s no doubt that Villar has worked hard to craft himself into the kind of offensive player the Giants like, and that work is paying off handsomely in on the field production. He’s boosted his walk rate every year of his career to its current elite level, and worked hard on lowering his chase rate, until he’s become one of the best in the upper minors at avoiding chasing out of the zone.

And let’s never forget, he is a hitter capable of turning pitchers into huddled piles of goo, desperately regretting their life choices:

So let’s answer our first question: he’s not likely to slug .700 in the National League, but he’s doing really well at turning himself into the best version of his offensive self that he can be. Defensively, he’s had a strong season at 3b, and is doing a better job of reducing the inconsistencies that plagued him in Richmond last season, resulting in a league high in errors. It’s possible that he’s more of a Wilmer Flores than an Evan Longoria, but he’s good raw material for Kai Correa and the coaching staff of the Giants to coach up into a steady defender.

At that brings us to the second question — how will David Villar fit on the Giants’ roster? And that question is a MUCH stickier wicket.

Certainly, when everybody is healthy, he doesn’t fit. At all. That’s clear. We saw that last week when Luis Gonzalez was sent back to Sacramento. The Giants have a 13-man position player roster, and when those 13 guys are healthy, nobody else fits in. Ah but there’s a catch! Everybody is NEVER healthy! As we speak, the Giants are planning on building a back patio for their IL to fit everybody in comfortably.

In Villar’s case though, the specific roster fit is a little narrower. He’s a RH power and patience corner INF. Immediately, that means so long as both Longoria and Flores are present and healthy on the roster, there probably isn’t a place for Villar. Yes, Giants’ Twitter responds to this comment by screaming for Longoria’s release, but let’s dispense with that nonsense right away. One year ago today, Longoria was one of the players spurring the Giants remarkable success, and even when he hasn’t been at his best offensively, he’s been a stabilizing presence for the Giants’ defense during his tenure. He’s played exactly 11 games this year, rough ones admittedly, but there’s certainly reason to believe (slash hope) that he might get back to the better, healthier version of himself that we saw last spring at some point before this year is done.

So, let’s just step past that small obstruction, perhaps do a small breathing exercise to force away the anger that the last week of Giants’ baseball has instilled on us all, and admit to ourselves that our fan-based propensity for over-reaction probably makes us ill-suited to run a big league roster. If the day ever comes that Longoria is DFA’d it will undoubtedly mean that the season has gone very, VERY far off the rails.

The stickier issue, to my mind, is the presence of Kevin Padlo (and yes, you folks in the back, I can clearly hear you hooting: DFA! DFA! DFA! Let’s all just sit down a moment and enjoy some quiet reflection time, shall we?). When looking at the way Zaidi and Scott Harris construct the 40-man roster, it’s become obvious that we can’t just think about the individual player, we have to think about the way the roster fits together. Try as I might, I can’t think of a way that both Villar and Padlo belong on the same 2022 Giants’ 40-man. They are essentially duplicative profiles: power/patience RH corner bats with options. That’s a good depth profile to have on a 40-man (we’ve seen the need several times already this year), but there’s certainly no real reason to have two of them.

And one thing we know for sure about the way the Giants view these two players: on April 26, when a drastic roster need was present, they went out of their organization and brought in Padlo to fill it. Villar, at the time, was hitting .286/.403/.571 with 5 HRs and a 16% walk rate — not quite the other-worldly numbers we’re seeing from him so far, but certainly an impressive start to the year. What’s more, he was right here! In the organization, 90 miles away and easy to access. Still, the Giants chose to bypass that option, and send the ever-popular “cash considerations” to Seattle acquire Padlo, who was, at the time, hitting .173/.318/.327 with Tacoma.

I don’t mean to make too much of that — it was an extreme contingency situation, and it’s quite possible that the Giants simply preferred a little more experience. That Padlo had, with over 600 PA at the Triple A level and a short 10 game experience in the majors in 2021. It could be that, given an immediate need, Padlo looked like a nice quick-term solution, and he continues to be a nice depth piece for short-term exigencies.

But we still must grapple with the fact that one month ago, the Giants preferred Padlo to Villar in their evaluation process. This, of course, came on the heels of their choice not to add Villar to the 40-man in November, exposing him to a Rule 5 draft that ultimately never happened (quite fortunately, perhaps).

At some point, for Villar to get that hoped for call, the Giants are going to have to look at their roster and think: “we now prefer Villar to Padlo.” Or, events will need to play out that make room for both of them on the roster at the same time — say, the calendar flips over to 2023, when both Longoria and Flores are likely to be gone.

So, when might we be seeing David Villar don the vanilla and orange? When the equation changes — look for some, or all, of these things that might tilt the roster balance in Villar’s favor:

• a major injury for Longoria (and let’s be clear, I’m not desiring any of these things, this is just scenario-casting). Short stays on the 10-day IL probably don’t do the trick (with Flores, Padlo, and La Stella around to fill in). But another injury like the one Longo suffered last year when he ran into Crawford? One that brings the 3b situation into open question for a couple of months? That could be a different matter

• continued poor results for Padlo. Again, I’m not rooting for bad things to befall any of these people, but as Zaidi has repeatedly said, opportunities at the big league level don’t last long, and if they’re not seized, teams will move on. How long is “not long” in this case? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• the Giants’ season completely goes in the tank and they turn their sights to next year. This isn’t happening in May. It’s not happening in June either, and with the expanded playoffs (and the large sucking sound you hear coming from the lower half of the National League), it’s pretty hard to imagine it happening in July. But in a worse case scenario (DEFINITELY not rooting for that!), yep, roster overhaul begins to happen.

• we see Villar take some turns in the OF. While Villar and Padlo would seem to be the roster equivalent of “two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time” (side note: this is not actually a law of physics, where, actually, two bodies can do pretty much any weird thing you might dare to think of, including yes, occupy the same space at the same time), the Giants were recently forced to move on from Luke Williams, another RH hitter who provided depth at a number of positions. Williams was, of course, much more multi-dimensional, filling in at SS when needed, as well as the outfield. Villar won’t be spelling Brandon Crawford any time soon, but an appearance in LF at some point might signal a desire to get a little creative with his usage.

Any or all of these things could change the situation just enough to give Villar some wiggle room onto the roster. For now though, the Giants have quite intentionally skipped over the opportunity to add him to the 40-man roster twice in the past six months, and we have to tease out something of their internal evaluations in those two moves (or non-moves).

There is, of course, one more scenario I didn’t cover up there — Villar just keeps mashing and mashing, enough so as to change the Giants’ mind about him, forcing his way onto the roster, just the way they want their minor leaguers to do it. Zaidi has said (in reference to Heliot Ramos) that the Giants want their prospects to kick the door down.

David Villar has given the door some mighty kicks. It might not be fully open, but it’s got some cracks in it for sure. Who knows for sure which blow will be mighty enough to break the status quo. For now, there’s not a spot on the roster for Villar, but baseball is never static for long…

Sacramento River Cats @RiverCats

106 mph off the bat, 431 ft.