San Francisco Giants: Three Hot Takes from Week 1

Hot Take 2: The Lack of Stolen Bases is an Issue

This hot take will continue the fire theme. As a team, the San Francisco Giants don’t exactly light the world on fire when it comes to base-stealing. Technically, they are fourth in team stolen bases thus far. However, they quickly fall from the top to nearly dead-last if you remove Eduardo Nunez and his two-steal explosion from Opening Day in Arizona.

Outside of Nunez, the only players with a steal attempt are Brandon Belt (safe) and Denard Span (out). This isn’t to say that we should expect the likes of Buster Posey or Johnny Cueto to rack up a dozen steals by June, but it certainly could be called concerning that speedy guys like Gorkys Hernandez, Brandon Crawford, and Hunter Pence have yet to attempt to snag a base on a weak-armed catcher here or there. The Giants have plenty of able-bodied runners, but seemingly few blazers on the base paths.

Digging deeper though, we see that maybe steals don’t matter all that much. History shows us that the 2014 World Series champion Giants ranked 29th of 30 teams with 56 steals. That’s a hilariously small amount. How few is that? The team they ultimately beat in the World Series that year, the Kansas City Royals, recorded a league-leading 153.

What do we take from this? Baseball is weird.