San Francisco Giants: Top 5 worst contracts heading into this offseason

1. Brandon Belt (5 years, $72.8 million)

This is just a bad deal.

The San Francisco Giants were looking for a lefty slugger to solidify the middle of their lineup, and they decided to give the job to Brandon Belt.

The problem is that Belt never became the slugger that the Giants wanted him to be. He’s had nine big league seasons and he’s yet to put together a 20-homerun campaign. That’s not going to get it done.

The Giants fell for the trap, though. Belt’s lone all-star season in 2016 got him a pretty hefty contract. But he’s declined steadily every single year since the ink dried.

This season, he’s put together a paltry .228 batting average with only 16 home runs. That’s not someone you should have hitting in the middle of the order; it’s definitely not someone you want $17 million a year dedicated to.

Any chance of being a platoon bat is limited by the fact that he hits equally good — or equally bad, more accurately — against both righties and lefties. There’s no clear fit for him on this team.

The most mind-numbing part of this contract is that, on top of the fact Belt never put together a season that warranted this kind of money, he has a partial no-trade clause in his contract.

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So, to go along with the fact that he’s got almost no trade value as a declining slugger-that-was-never-a-slugger in his 30’s, he can decide he wants to stay put if he wants to. What a nightmare.

For the next two seasons, the Giants will be paying $17.2 million a year for someone who will probably be batting sixth or lower in their lineup.

And to make matters even worse, he’s blocking a productive position that could get the Giants out of trouble with some of their other contracts. Buster Posey would be a clear candidate to hide at first base, but Belt’s bulky contract is blocking the way.

This isn’t a new idea whatsoever, but it’ll be a recurring topic as the Giants opt to keep Buster Posey around while finding a way to get Brandon Belt off of the roster. With Joey Bart on the horizon, the catcher spot will inevitably receive a changing of the guard.

And with it, the Giants will almost certainly choose Posey over Belt.

This is an all-around bad contract because it hasn’t paid the Giants back in any way. The Giants made an unnecessary gamble betting on a guy who snuck into a single all-star game because of a good half of a single season.

If anything, this contract, in retrospect, highlights how smooth sailing everything was for the front office was off of a trifecta of World Series bling. They figured that they made the right calls on guys like Crawford and Posey, so why not roll the dice on Belt?

There’s almost no hope that this contract gets moved unless the Giants tack on prospects so that an American League team uses Brandon Belt as some sort of designated hitter.

If no one bites, Belt may turn into an unceremonious cut one day.