Losing Willy Adames Costs The Giants A Third Baseman, Not A Shortstop

Casey Schmitt started twenty-one consecutive games at third base for San Francisco in July, which is the longest anybody other than Matt Chapman has held the position this season. He has not played since July 27. Four days after that he had surgery on his left knee, which the Giants described as a debridement of the lateral meniscus, and MLB's own injury page gives his expected return as 2027.

Chapman has not played since June 30. He had bilateral core muscle surgery in Philadelphia with Dr. William Meyers, began rehabilitation on August 14, and the same page gives him the same expected return.

Between them those two men made 106 of San Francisco's 134 starts at third base. Neither will make another one this year, and the fifty-nine days since Chapman last played have been spent handing the position around.

Six players have started a game there in 2026. Chapman has 82 and Schmitt 24. Christian Koss has 18, Buddy Kennedy 6, Shay Whitcomb 3 and Osleivis Basabe 1. The two most recent names on that list were claimed off another club's waiver wire this month, Kennedy from Seattle on August 2 and Whitcomb from Houston on August 13.

That is the tidy version, and the lineup cards tell it differently. The job does not turn over when a third baseman gets hurt. It turns over when the shortstop does.

The job turns over at shortstop#

Koss took third base on July 28, the day after Schmitt's last game, and he has been the club's answer there ever since. He is also the club's answer at shortstop, and the two cannot be true on the same afternoon.

He has started nine games at shortstop since July 1. On the first of them, July 1 itself, Schmitt played third. Adames then missed four games from August 14 with a lower back strain, and Koss played shortstop in all four while Kennedy played third. Adames returned on August 19 and Koss went back to third for five games. Adames slid into home at Fenway Park on August 23 and hurt his left elbow, and Koss has started at shortstop in every game since, with third base going to Whitcomb on August 24, 25 and 27 and to Kennedy on August 26.

Nine shortstop starts, nine different afternoons on which the Giants needed somebody to play third base who was not their third baseman. The position is not vacant because the men who play it keep getting hurt. It is vacant because the one man who can cover both keeps being needed at the harder one.

The elbow that decides it#

Adames received a platelet-rich plasma injection in his sprained left elbow on Thursday, per Henry Schulman of MLB.com. A second opinion from Dr. Keith Meister in Dallas confirmed a moderate sprain of the ulnar collateral ligament and did not produce a surgery recommendation, and the ligament is in his non-throwing arm. Those are the two encouraging facts available.

The timeline is the discouraging one, and the club has published it two ways on the same day. Tony Vitello said Adames would rest the arm for three or four weeks after the injection. The Giants' injury page puts the minimum recovery at four weeks. Four weeks from Thursday is September 24, and San Francisco's last scheduled game is September 27.

Vitello, to Schulman, sounded like a manager reading a calendar rather than a prognosis: "If you're going to abide by that timeline, you just look at the calendar and see where that puts you. He could press to come back the last week of the year, maybe, at best. I don't know how reasonable or realistic that is, but it's also somewhat pointless to talk about at this point because we'll have to see how that rest serves him." Asked whether Adames might return as a designated hitter, Vitello said possibly, but that "there's other guys that need to do that too and get some at-bats."

The club's own depth chart on Friday morning listed three shortstops. Koss is the first of them. The other two are Adames and Schmitt, both on the 10-day injured list. Koss is also the second name on the same page's third-base list, one line under Whitcomb.

What the arrangement hits like#

Koss is batting .207/.254/.252 in 120 plate appearances. He has 23 hits, five of them doubles and none of them anything larger; he has not hit a home run this year. Whitcomb is at .135/.158/.405 in 39 plate appearances across two clubs, a line built on three home runs among five hits.

Between them they have drawn six walks in 159 plate appearances, which is 3.8 percent. Chapman and Adames drew 74 in 857, or 8.6 percent. Strikeouts are not where the two pairs part company: Koss is at 25.8 percent, Chapman finished at 23.0 and Adames at 27.5. The whole of the difference sits in what happens on the pitches nobody swings at.

Thirty-nine plate appearances is not a hitter, and Whitcomb's minor league season argues the other way. In 355 plate appearances between Sugar Land and Sacramento this year he hit .273/.335/.414 and walked 30 times, an 8.5 percent rate. His entire major league record is 61 games and 117 plate appearances spread across two seasons, six walks and 34 strikeouts, which is not enough to settle which of those two hitters the Giants claimed. It is the sort of question a club with twenty-eight games and no standings to protect is unusually well placed to answer.

Kennedy is the reason to wonder whether it intends to. He arrived on the same kind of claim, started six games at third over twenty-five days, went 4 for 33 with all four hits singles, and was designated for assignment on Thursday. That is a quick audition and a quicker verdict.

Twenty-eight games#

San Francisco is 55-79, twenty-five games behind Los Angeles in the National League West, with an elimination number of four. The mathematical part of the season will be over inside the week. Rosters expand to twenty-eight on September 1, which gives the club room to look at people it has not looked at. The two men who made 106 of its starts at third base are both rehabilitating from operations, and the man who made 121 of them at shortstop has an expected return the club lists as undetermined.

What is left is twenty-eight games and a position that has belonged to five different men since June 30. Whitcomb has started three of them. Basabe has started one. Koss has started at three infield positions this season and pitched two innings besides. The lineup cards in September will say whether the Giants use the month to find out what any of those three is, or write down whoever is upright and wait for the two who are not.

Sources: Every start-by-position count, every batting line and both rosters read from the MLB Stats API for teamId 137 on August 28, 2026, between 5:25 and 5:55 a.m. Pacific, with starting positions taken from the first entry in each player's fielding record in the official box score of all 134 regular-season games. The transaction log, the active roster and the club depth chart read at MLB.com's Giants pages the same morning. Adames's injection, the Meister second opinion, the Vitello quotations and the three-to-four-week estimate from Henry Schulman, MLB.com, August 27, 2026. The four-week minimum, Chapman's surgery and rehabilitation dates and Schmitt's knee surgery and expected returns from MLB.com's running Giants injuries and roster moves page, last updated August 27, 2026. Standings and elimination number from the MLB Stats API, August 27, 2026.