The Giants’ Casey Schmitt, rounding the bases after hitting a two-run home run on May 5 against the San Diego Padres at Oracle Park, is posting career highs in batting average (.293), on-base percentage (.337) and slugging percentage (.529) this season.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Casey Schmitt might have the perfect temperament for baseball, especially for bouncing around the field and even taking on the San Francisco Giants’ designated hitter role, too, at a young age — never an easy task.
His teammates, coaches and friends universally describe Schmitt as a goofball, a fun, loosey-goosey type who’s quick with a joke and never seems in a bad mood. These are ideal traits for the nonstop grind of the majors, and for the never-ending failure that defines hitting, in particular. And at 27, Schmitt, finally with a firm regular role, is coming into his own while providing one of San Francisco’s few bright spots of the season.
“Casey doesn’t take himself too seriously,” third baseman Matt Chapman said. “Sometimes I think that’s a superpower.”
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Schmitt entered Friday leading the team in homers (nine), RBIs (22) and, among players with more than 15 games, OPS (.866) and OPS+ (146). Were Luis Arraez not doing his hit-up-a-storm thing coupled with newly standout defense at second, Schmitt might be the team’s top All-Star candidate, had he a firm position.
A lot of Schmitt’s success is, of course, sheer ability. He always has been a tremendous fielder, though mostly at third until the Giants signed Chapman before the 2024 season. Schmitt hit, and hit for power, at San Diego State and in the minors. He was even a good closer in college. He combines his skills with an ability to keep things from getting to him, at least not much or for long.
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“I just keep that confidence in myself. I’m not dwelling on past days or past mistakes,” Schmitt said. “Every day is a new day for me, and I try to just keep it as simple as that. (Last week) I struck out four times against the Dodgers, but I’m not worried about what happened in the past.”
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This mindset was something Schmitt had to learn.
“I’ve been through a lot,” he said. “I think that’s maybe why I don’t let things bother me too much: Life’s fast. You can never know what will happen.”
The Giants’ Casey Schmitt hits a two-run homer in the first inning on May 5 against the San Diego Padres at Oracle Park.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
When Schmitt was 4, his older brother, Nick, then 9, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and required surgery; the tumor was benign and Nick Schmitt is now married with a family and is a firefighter driver/engineer in Riverside County. Still, it was a scary time for the family, and several years later, in 2007, came another such ordeal: Schmitt’s dad, Dan, fell off a ladder and incurred a serious brain injury.
“He almost died,” said Schmitt, who was 8 at the time. “He was carrying tiles up the ladder, the ladder went out and he fell head first; they didn’t think he was going to make it. He was in a coma for a while.”
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Over the course of the next year-plus, Dan Schmitt “had to learn how to walk, talk, feed himself, like the whole nine yards,” said Schmitt’s mom, Tina.
“My job was to get back to 100%, so I was at therapy five days a week, eight hours a day,” said Dan Schmitt, a former San Diego child abuse-homicide detective who was by then working in the district attorney’s office.
The injury was so severe, his dad didn’t know who he was, Casey Schmitt said, and he struggled to remember much from before the accident. After his intensive rehab, though, he was able to go back to work. More tough stuff for a kid to go through, but the power of hard work was a firm lesson; Schmitt’s so known for his work ethic with the Giants that as a minor leaguer, coaches often had to tell him to dial it back.
When Schmitt was 10, his 20-year-old cousin, Michael, died of cancer, and in the past five years, Schmitt has lost three close friends; one to a fentanyl overdose, another to a car accident and, just before this spring, another to leukemia. “They were all my age,” Schmitt said.
“It’s been tough on all of us,” said Ben Ramirez, a former Mariners prospect who’s been Schmitt’s pal since middle school. “We were all on the same travel ball team. It’s really weird, it’s hard. It definitely reminds you that there are bigger things out there than baseball. You get your priorities in check.”
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Willy Adames hugs Casey Schmitt as he returns to the dugout after his solo home run against the Padres on May 4 at Oracle Park.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
On the baseball side, there were rough spots, too, starting with 2021, when while playing at Class-A San Jose, Schmitt was drilled by a fastball in the face, leaving him bloodied and with two black eyes; his nose was fractured “pretty badly,” he said, but in order to keep playing, he postponed surgery until after his season was done.
His parents were watching on TV and alarmed — he left the game under his own power but they had no further information. “We kept texting him, and he wouldn’t answer so we thought he passed out or something,” Tina Schmitt said. “He finally texted us a picture of what his face looked like — and it was really, really bad.”
Schmitt was back in the lineup four days later, but it took some effort and a lot of work with then minor-league instructor Pat Burrell. “Getting hit in the face was a low, it was a tough thing to get through, just getting back in there, but Pat helped me get through that,” Schmitt said.
“We did a lot of work in the cage, Casey was willing to put himself through a lot,” Burrell said. “Then he had wrist surgery and missed the rest of the year. When you go through trauma like that, it can creep back in at times, but he came back the next spring a different guy. Being able to find comfort when you get in that batter’s box is No. 1, and it can be a challenge, but Casey’s a better player because of it.”
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Over three levels, Schmitt hit .293 with 21 homers in 2022, and the next year, he earned his first call-up and figured he was on his way. Instead, he didn’t make the team out of spring training and bounced up and down four times, with his best position, third base, no longer an option.
“I was having a tough time mentally,” he said. “I didn’t even know if I wanted to keep playing — but I also just wanted to play so badly. I kept going. I kept showing up, and I’m proud of myself for that. Whenever I’m feeling down or struggling, I look back at those tough times that were dark and think about the fact that I’ve been through worse.”
Schmitt dedicated himself to getting familiar with every position possible. He has played everywhere in the infield for San Francisco and, in the past week with Heliot Ramos out, has picked up left field, too. Schmitt is up to 15 different gloves — minus the left-handed one he ordered off Amazon — and he could wind up one of the game’s great utility players, a la Ben Zobrist.
The Giants’ Casey Schmitt, fielding a groundball during spring training in February at Scottsdale (Ariz.) Stadium, has played every infield position as well as left field this season.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Schmitt’s teammates, though, including Platinum Glove third baseman Chapman, believe Schmitt will settle into one spot and will win Gold Gloves, wherever that might be.
“It’s hard to be the jack of all trades and play every single position and play it well and not really know what your role is sometimes,” Chapman said. “In my opinion, Casey is good enough to be an everyday player at one position — you know he’ll get the opportunity one way or another.”
Chapman, like most of the Giants players, considers Schmitt to be like a younger brother. “It’s like he’s 12 years old,” Chapman said. “He’s like a little kid — but he’s not dumb. He’s really smart. He just likes to see how much he can get away with.”
That always has been the case: Schmitt’s parents said he had a racket going as a kid, blackmailing his brother for his allowance and then using that money to pay others to do his chores, Tom Sawyer style.
“He’d go up and down the street and find a gardener to mow the lawn,” Tina Schmitt said. “When he was older, he would tell the cleaning lady, ‘If you scrub the pool for me, I’ll give you an extra 20 bucks.’ He was always finagling a way to get out of it.”
That left-handed glove wasn’t Schmitt’s first foray into the world of internet shopping. He brought four pairs of orange Nike cleats off eBay, and as a teen, Ramirez said, Schmitt regularly bought Z 1000 bats off an app, and they’d drive around San Diego picking them up.
His treasured Franklin batting gloves, though, met a sad end. “It was super rainy and they got wet, so Casey was like, ‘Well, we have a microwave,’ and put them in there,” Ramirez said. “We were like, ‘What are you doing?!’ then we all kind of got intrigued, like, ‘What’s going to happen?’
“He put them in for 30 seconds and when he pulled them out, they were like gloves for a toddler. They’d shrunk down to infant size. We were all just dying because they were miniature. Our stomachs hurt from laughing.”
The Giants’ Casey Schmitt celebrates a double against the St. Louis Cardinals last season at Oracle Park.
Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle
Things like that have endeared Schmitt to his teammates and coaches from the amateur ranks on, but there is so much more than meets the eye, Burrell said.
“He has funny little jokes that nobody other than him would tell, and you know there’s some corniness to it — at the end of the day he’s just a good guy,” Burrell said. “But he’s also grown so much from a maturity standpoint, from a plate-discipline standpoint. He’s made some incredible adjustments, really advanced.
“Casey’s been so resilient, he’s had more than his share of adversity, but he’s arrived. And it’s been an interesting road to get there.”