Giants Select Casey Schmitt, Designate Darin Ruf For Assignment

11:02am: The Giants announced that they’ve selected Schmitt’s contract. In a corresponding move, they reinstated first baseman/outfielder Darin Ruf from the injured list and designated him for assignment. Outfielder Cal Stevenson was also optioned to Sacramento.

11:00am: The Giants will select the contract of infield prospect Casey Schmitt prior to tonight’s game, reports Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area. The 2020 second-round pick will be making his Major League debut.

Schmitt, 24, has gotten out to a .313/.352/.410 start in Triple-A Sacrmento, striking out at a 19.3% clip against a more tepid 5.5% walk rate. For the season’s first few weeks, Schmitt was hitting for average but doing little else, walking at only a 3.6% clip with just a .367 slugging percentage. He’s picked up the pace of late, however, hitting .327/.393/.473 with a homer, five doubles, three stolen bases, an 8.2% walk rate and just a 13.1% strikeout rate over his past 14 games and 55 plate appearances.

While Schmitt has played primarily shortstop so far in 2023, the bulk of his minor league work has come at third base. In all, he has 512 career innings at shortstop and 1223 innings at the hot corner. The Giants have also played him at second base three times this month — the first three appearances of his career at that position — likely in an effort to increase his versatility and his utility on the big league roster.

The Giants have received outstanding production from infielders Thairo Estrada (.344/.394/.534) and J.D. Davis (.287/.360/.515), but with Brandon Crawford shelved by a calf strain (and struggling even when healthy), the infield has been thinned out. Brett Wisely and David Villar have both gotten looks at second base, with Estrada sliding over to shortstop in place of Crawford, but neither has hit well at all in 2023. Schmitt can give the Giants an option at either middle-infield slot, with Estrada handling the other, and hopefully provide a spark to the lineup in the process.

Scouting reports on Schmitt peg him as a plus defender on the left side of the infield, so it stands to reason that he can handle whichever of shortstop, second base or third base the Giants ask of him on a given day. What remains to be seen is whether this proves to be a short-term call-up until Crawford returns or whether Schmitt will get the chance to play his way into a more permanent role with the club. Given the team’s 15-19 start, it’s sensible to take a look at Schmitt and adjust the roster around him if he adapts well at the big league level. If he’s indeed in the Majors for good, he’d be on track to reach arbitration as a likely Super Two player following the 2024 season and reach free agency following the 2029 season — though future optional assignments can of course alter both trajectories.

As for Ruf, the 36-year-old’s return to the Giants will prove quite brief. Released by the Mets earlier this year, he quickly re-signed with the Giants and appeared in nine games before landing on the injured list due to a wrist injury. In 27 plate appearances prior to that IL stint, Ruf posted a solid .261/.370/.348 batting line.

The veteran Ruf was an outstanding find for the Giants in his return from a productive three-year run in the KBO, batting .248/.358/.455 in 726 plate appearances with San Francisco from 2020 through the 2022 trade deadline, when he was traded to the Giants in exchange for the aforementioned Davis and three others. It proved to be a disastrous trade for the Mets, as Davis immediately began hitting in San Francisco, while Ruf’s bat cratered in Queens; he hit just .152/.216/.197 in 74 plate appearances with the Mets last year and didn’t appear in a single game in 2023 before being cut loose.

The Giants will  have a week to trade Ruf, place him on outright waiver or place him on release waivers. He has enough service time to reject an outright assignment and still retain his full $3MM salary. The Mets are on the hook for that sum as part of last summer’s trade, so any team that picks Ruf up will only be required to pay him the prorated league minimum for any time spent on the MLB roster. That’d be subtracted from what the Mets owe to him. In 727 career plate appearances against left-handed pitching, Ruf is a .271/.368/.519 hitter (142 wRC+).