SF Giants first base struggles finally make fans appreciate Brandon Belt

The SF Giants will celebrate Brandon Belt in a pre-game ceremony later today with the Miami Marlins in town. It is a good chance to reflect on his career, but also a reminder that he has been a tough player to replace.

SF Giants first base struggles finally make fans appreciate Brandon Belt

Fans know all too well about the Belt Wars that took place on social media in recent years. The debate centered around whether Belt was actually a good player and how analytics elevated his value.

The answer to that question is obvious. Belt was a very solid player for a long time. Analytics helped elevate his stock to some degree, but it is not as if those numbers ever suggested anything that was not tangible.

Belt's value is derived from qualities that began to have value when his career started back in 2011. Most notably, the ability to hit for power and reach base. That can be summed up by OPS, but even that number has been improved upon in recent years by OPS+ and wRC+.

Belt hit for a low average and struck out a lot. These are traits teams would typically associate with a below-average hitter not that long ago. He also did not hit for traditional power, as he eclipsed the 20-homer threshold just once in his career. It is fair to say that his home run totals were depressed by playing half of his games at Oracle Park.

The veteran first baseman did comfortably hit at least 15 home runs each year. He supplemented his slugging by hitting a lot of doubles and even some triples. Plus, he had some of the best plate discipline in the game, leading to a lot of walks and high on-base percentages. These are the stats that often correlated with Belt's value. It was not some unseen metric, but something you could see play out in the field.

This is all to say that Belt put together a nice career. In 13 major league seasons, he slashed .261/.357/.460 (125 wRC+ with a 12.4 percent walk rate, 24.5 percent strikeout rate, and .200 ISO. In his final year and lone season with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023, Belt put up an .858 OPS with 19 home runs and 43 RBI in 404 plate appearances. He expressed interest in continuing his career, but was baffled by the lack of interest. It has been over two years since he last played in a major league game, so his playing career has almost certainly concluded.

Meanwhile, the Giants have tried to find a replacement at first base since his tenure ended after the 2022 season. Wilmer Flores and LaMonte Wade Jr. were some of the players who succeeded him at first base in San Francisco.

The Giants hope that Bryce Eldridge can take some reps at first base in the near future. Rafael Devers will be a long-term fixture on the roster, including at first base. However, he has struggled for much of his Giants tenure. It turns out that replacing Belt is a hard thing to do.

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