All of a sudden, key SF Giants strength has turned into a weakness

Early in the 2025 season, the SF Giants had the best fielding percentage in all of MLB. That has changed as they now rank 19th in fielding percentage which may suggest their defense is now a weakness rather than a strength.

Coming into the season, it seemed like the Giants were going to be a pretty good team defensively. They had two Gold Glovers in Matt Chapman at third base and Patrick Bailey at catcher with Willy Adames at shortstop who has been a very good defensive player in the past. Plus, getting a healthy Jung Hoo Lee back in center field seemed like it would be a big boon to their outfield defense.

SF Giants have struggled on defense in 2025 after a strong start

Unfortunately, the team has not been as strong defensively as one would have hoped. Adames has struggled at shortstop and has made eight errors on the season which is the second-most of any individual player.

Looking at advanced statistics, only Lee and Chapman have been above-average defenders for the Giants while the rest of the team has been either average or below average defensively.

Despite this, the Giants are not completely hopeless defensively. Chapman is still a Gold Glove caliber third baseman and Bailey has still been absolutely superb behind the plate both as a pitch framer and when it comes to throwing out runners attempting to steal.

As our own Jeff Young pointed out earlier this season, errors are not always the best metric to look at when judging a team defensively. Errors are ultimately subjective so they do not always capture how strong a team is on defense. They still have some value as some errors are obvious and any scorer would deem it to be an error, but they should not be the only metric factored into the equation.

Looking at things as a whole, the Giants probably average out to being an average team on defense. There is nothing wrong with that necessarily, although the blueprint laid out by Buster Posey heading into this season called for a team that was sound defensively, pitched well, and was able to win a lot of close games. Sometimes one error or misplayed ball can be the difference between a win or a loss.

Perhaps as the season goes on the Giants can tighten things up defensively. The stats may not look pretty overall, but they still have strong individual defenders who could make up for the faults of other players on the team.