Should the Giants try to sign Jurickson Profar?

2024 was a career year for the veteran San Diego outfielder, and he continues to make headlines in the postseason. Should San Francisco try to get in on the fun and sign Profar when he becomes a free agent in the off-season’?

Three weeks into February, Jurickson Profar didn’t have a Major League contract. Not a particularly unique predicament given the off-season’s market, but Profar’s situation was fundamentally different from the marquee free agents like Matt Chapman or Blake Snell.

There were no multi-year deals, player friendly clauses, or crooked number figures to debate over. The 31-year-old wasn’t wheelin’ and dealin’, shopping around his talents, or playing offers off each other. Profar’s phone remained silent all winter. It wasn’t until after pitchers and catchers reported to camp that A.J. Preller signed the switch-hitting veteran to a one-year, one-million dollar contract. A move that didn’t cause many waves; at the time, receiving mild praise for shrewdly bolstering the Padres bench and not much more. Analysis that couldn’t have been more off the mark as Profar went on to basically do everything for the San Diego Padres this season but come off the bench. He logged 668 plate appearances (a career high), 1203 innings in left field while playing in all but four of San Diego’s 162 games. While that kind of day-in and day-out reliability and durability is already well worth the million dollar price tag, the pennies for Profar proved to be arguably the off-season’s best signing because of his production.

A 4.3 fWAR, a 139 wRC+, a .280/ .380/.459 along with 158 hits, 85 RBI, 24 home runs and 76 BB were all career highs. His .839 OPS was the 11th highest in baseball, especially thanks to his disciplined at-bats: few players showed off Profar’s eye and contact skills at the plate. His 11% BB-rate was just a hair below his 15% K-rate and ranked in the 90th percentile in terms of Chase and Whiff rates.

There’s the numbers to fawn over, then there’s the vibes. Watching Profar isn’t watching an inscrutable baseball savant. He’s inserted himself in the heart of the Padres line-up this year, but he’s inhabited the hearts of fans since he joined them in 2020. He leads the league in smiles by a long shot, though he’s far from docile or dopey on the field. The emotion shows perspective. A once highly-touted prospect who broke into the Majors at 19 in 2012 only to find himself stuck in the mud and spinning his wheels on the Texas farm a disappointing year later. At the age when you want and expect life to move fast, things slowed. It wasn’t until 2018 when he was 25 that he established himself as an everyday player in the Majors. A working stiff though, not a superstar. His highest fWAR before this season was 2.4 in 2022. His lowest was -1.6 last season. For most of his career, Profar has been a roster place-holder, or deemed even “irrelevant” if you are LA catcher Will Smith (which is perhaps the absolute douchiest thing you can say about another human being—Smith later apologized). Given his career arc, the energy, the swagger, the competitiveness that Profar plays with makes perfect sense.

As a fan of the buttoned-up, much-reserved San Francisco Giants, of course, this kind of stylistic display from a division rival knuckles the grouch in all of us, inciting us to our keyboards to type out an out-of-breath tract on the right way to the play game… But golly, is it fun to watch Profar dish it out against LA.

Since we’re all temporarily members of the Pad Squad for this division series, we can embrace the troll, and vicariously lunge into a crowd, pocket a home run ball, deke a former MVP, and razz a stadium full of hostile (and entitled) fans.

The aforementioned is why new President of Baseball Operations, Buster Posey, and us Giants fans, would be tickled by the thought of pursuing Profar this off-season.

Years have passed since the Giants have silenced an LA crowd, not since Mike Tauchman robbed Albert Pujols’s potential game-ending homer, or when Gavin Lux’s game-tying drive died on the warning track. San Francisco isn’t in desperate need of outfielders, but they absolutely need another bat in the lineup, an overhaul on vibes, and a winter hot stove win for a numb fan base. They need the wind to start blowing again, and Jurickson Profar could be that element.

The fit has potential. Profar’s ability to hit the ball from both sides of the plate and experience at multiple defensive positions gives line-up flexibility. He’s never been a seam-buster. His cuts don’t go for distance, but they’ve started boasting some serious pop. His 44.4% Hard-Hit rate is the highest mark of his career by ten percentage points. That kind of consistent and loud contact would play well in Oracle’s spacious gaps. Doubles would abound. Disciplined at-bats and balls in play, oh my!

(Viewer discretion advised: skip through the first 40 seconds of this video, unless you want to relive some lamentable April moments…)

The offense is the draw, and for some fans that’s all they care about right now. Fair enough—because he’s not that fast and has never been a “glove-guy”.

Profar came up as an infielder in the Rangers organization but has been pushed into the outfield corners and first base with San Diego—a better fit for him. FanGraphs all-encompassing defensive measurement (aptly named “Defense”) rated him in the negative double-digits in each of the last two seasons. He posted a -6 Outs Above Average and -6 Fielding Run Value in left this year.

Less than great numbers, though clearly serviceable since he kept getting trotted out there every half-inning for 140 games. Still, I personally am not interested in taking on another defensive liability after this past year. Profar’s ability to cover a corner is a plus, but, if on the Giants roster, his services as a first baseman could be of more use. He has 466 innings of experience at the position, which isn’t a ton and it isn’t nothing, and has been deemed statistically non-descript there—which is ironically a positive for first. The fact that he has more than 3,000 innings in the infield eases some of the grounder anxiety some newbies like Jerar Encarnacion or Bryce Eldridge might inspire.

Obviously, the roster ramifications for current players of this speculative signing should be considered. Mike Yastrzemski or LaMonte Wade Jr., who are still arbitration eligible, would see some of their relevance decrease at the very least. With Michael Conforto entering free agency, Profar’s presence wouldn’t necessitate parting ways with either of them—he could be a platoon with Yaz or Wade when a lefty is on the hill, and DH against righties with Encarnacion punches against southpaws. (Ah, shoot, I forgot about Wilmer…)

If the Giants want him, they’ll obviously find space on the shelf for him, though I’m skeptical if he’ll be a real consideration. Profar is going to be 32 next February. Any contract he signs in the off-season will certainly be longer than a year and will ultimately facilitate some level of decline as he merges into the right-lane of his mid-thirties. Looking at it from Posey’s perspective, there’s splashier and more sure-thing signings to focus on in his inaugural off-season.

Chances are Profar’s performance this year is not predictive but climactic. A last hurrah, the result of clubhouse chemistry capturing lightning in a bottle, rather than anything more sustainable. Profar doesn’t appear to be the kind of player who can copy-and-paste this type of play in any environment. Perhaps past disappointments bogged him down in Texas. He signed a one-year, 7-point-something million deal with Colorado in 2023 after three seasons in San Diego and posted a 74 wRC+ over 111 games before they released him. In his return to the Padres, he hit .295 with a 119 wRC+ in 14 games. San Diego is the Fountain of Youth. A vacuum-sealed container protected against the withering weather of time. Gut feeling: Take him out of So-Cal and he shrivels up like an orange peel left in the sun.

Jurickson Profar is a man having a moment, and the Giants, along with 28 other teams, missed out on it. Trying to recreate or sustain that spark might work, or it could just as likely fail. Part of Profar’s current draw is the feel-good narrative, the surprise of it all, yes—but more coldly: it’s the cost-effectiveness. He’s good…and he’s cheap.

Not anymore.