Daniel Susac started his major league career like a player who had arrived for good. Then the bat cooled, and the SF Giants are left with a catcher who has struggled for most of the last couple of months while staying trapped by Rule 5 roster rules.
That is why Susac is being searched now. He went 11-for-23 to open his career, a burst that suggested the Giants might have found offense at a position they wanted to improve. Instead, he has posted a.487 OPS in 106 plate appearances since that start, and his line now sits at.250/.297/.319 with zero home runs, 15 RBI and six runs in 130 plate appearances.
The early optimism mattered because the Giants were looking for more offense from the catcher position. Susac was acquired in the offseason in a trade with the Minnesota Twins after he had been selected away from the A's in the Rule 5 draft, a move that carried an immediate roster cost. Under those rules, he must remain on the active roster or be offered back to the A's, so a bad stretch is not just a slump. It is a roster problem.
That problem has gotten harder to ignore because Susac’s downturn did not happen in a clean run of games. He had two stints on the injured list while the slump was going on, which makes the current numbers even harder to separate from availability. His production since that fast start has settled into a 4.6 percent walk rate, a 23.1 percent strikeout rate and a.069 ISO, the kind of profile that leaves little margin when the bat is not carrying the load.
The Giants did not enter the season without other hopes at catcher. Eric Haase got off to a strong start, and Jesús Rodríguez’s bat showed some promise. But Patrick Bailey was shipped to the Cleveland Guardians as part of the club’s push to get more offense into the lineup from the catcher position, and that is where the friction lives now: the organization moved to create offense behind the plate, yet the player in the spot most constrained by Rule 5 rules has lost momentum just as the margin for patience has narrowed.
Whether the Giants keep Susac on the active roster or offer him back to the A's is the question left hanging over the position. For now, the numbers say the hot start was real, the slump is real, and the roster trap is real too.
