Home of the Slater Tater
2024 stats (w/Giants): 43 G, 112 PA, .200/ .330/ .266, .056 ISO, 76 wRC+
Austin Slater’s run as the longest-tenured San Francisco Giant ended in 2024 with his mid-July trade to Cincinnati. A confluence of frequent injuries, burgeoning youth movement, and changing organizational emphasis sounded his death knell. For some it was a sad day (read my eulogy here), and for everyone, an expected one.
He had run into a wall covering center for Jung Hoo Lee in the first inning of a game against the Reds in early May. The subsequent concussion foreshadowed future pain to come. Two days later the same fence felled Lee.
Slater didn’t return to the line-up until June 5th, and made 18 more appearances with the Giants as an off-and-on pinch-hitter, platoon, lead-off man, and corner outfielder. His last at-bat as a Giant ended with a strikeout in Cleveland. His last hit came a day earlier. His last extra base hit and RBI against Los Angeles on June 30th. His last homer (also first of the year) and multi-hit game came against the Angels on the 16th. The last time Slater sent us all home smiling, mirroring the wide grin that burst from behind the wiry curtain of his mustache, came on the 10th, in the 10th inning against Houston.
A long goodbye peppered with signs of the end. A career .229 hitter with a well-below league average 83 wRC+ against right-handed pitching, Slater left San Francisco batting .286 facing his same-side foes. Small sample size alert! But his 149 wRC+ against righties and .884 OPS (in 27 PA) led the Giants at the time of his departure. Meanwhile in the split-advantage he had built his career on, Slater hit on the interstate with a 52 wRC+ — the lowest of his career, and first time he had posted a wRC+ below league average against southpaws since 2018.
A head-scratching reversal, doubly frustrating given he chose to tease a mid-career renaissance against an arm no one needed him to do well against. Slater’s value to Bob Melvin, the practicality of playing him, hinged on a certain level of consistency in a very specific context.
This specialty is why I’m spending time on a part-time set-piece like Slater, who is already half-a-year gone in terms of the calendar, and a century, spiritually, removed from franchise relevance. But since 2019, Slater posted a 125 wRC+ against lefties, a point better than Matt Chapman. And in those last six seasons, nobody in the Major Leagues had more plate appearances as a pinch hitter (175), nor did any other player — other than Ji-Man Choi (who had more than 100 fewer PAs) — match Slater’s clout with a 1.002 OPS and 177 wRC+.
Slater was a unique figure of resonance in a role typically defined by transience. A platoon play, a bench piece, outfield depth — his talents in one area were balanced out by his deficits in others. Like many things in life, it was Slater’s limitations that made him intriguing, and those limitations will only be interesting to a few. He’s a parochial player, but as I wrote in July, that’s exactly why he’s worth the spilled ink. In the field of Giantology, dissertations will be written about the Slater years, his successes and failures representative of those surreal times…that we’re hopefully, maybe, possibly, no longer mired in?
Though I hope he finds success as a member of the White Sox… San Francisco will always be Slater’s home. If he was to ever open up a novelty restaurant — probably called something like Slater’s Tater, home of the original “Slater Tater Tot Plate” — it’d be somewhere on the Peninsula, somewhere like Burlingame.