Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images

It has been a good year for walks. Whatever you want to attribute it to – and trust me, I’ve done a lot of attributing – batters are drawing free passes more frequently than they have for a long time. Well, most batters. The San Francisco Giants didn’t get the memo. As a squad, the Giants have walked only 5.8% of the time this year. That’s last in baseball by a mile. The gap between them and the 29th-place Rockies is as large as the gap between the Rockies and the league average. What gives?

My investigation started with the 2025 Giants. Walk rate is a stable statistic on the whole. If you walk a lot in one year, you’re likely to walk a lot the next year. But the Giants were no slouches when it came to taking a free base in 2025. In fact, they had one of the highest team walk rates in baseball – 9.2%, fourth in the majors. In the second half of the year, they walked 8.7% of the time. The 10 Giants who batted most frequently had a combined 9.6% walk rate. Four of those players are no longer on the team, but they were actually hurting the average – the six remaining Giants who batted most frequently in 2025 posted an aggregate 10.2% walk rate.

Let’s start, then, with those six players:

As Keanu Reeves memorably put it: Whoa. These six have taken 61.5% of the Giants’ plate appearances this year. If they were walking at the clip they did last year, that would add a whopping three percentage points to the team’s overall walk rate, placing San Francisco squarely in the middle of the pack instead of historically low.

What can cause this kind of decline in walk rate? Simplistically, it’s probably some combination of three things: Getting pitched differently, chasing more, and making less contact (to end more at-bats with strikeouts), with chasing more the most important of the lot. I had to get a little creative to define “getting pitched differently,” but as you can see, while these six have experienced a little bit of everything this year, chase rate is driving their decrease in walks:

Another way of putting it: The Giants had the eighth-lowest chase rate in baseball last year. This season, they have the sixth highest. The only two Giants to decrease their chase rate from last year are Luis Arraez, who wasn’t on the team in ‘25, and Patrick Bailey, who isn’t on the team now.

Pretty much across the board, the Giants have adopted a more aggressive posture in 2026. In 2025, they had the third-lowest mark in a metric that I like using to approximate approach at the plate: swing rate at pitches in the shadow zone when ahead in the count. Those aren’t pitches that anyone wants to swing at – they’re pitcher’s pitches in hitter’s counts. Those swings are mostly byproducts of trying to hit something juicy and getting a less centrally located pitch than expected. If you swing at a lot more of these from one year to the next, it’s likely because you are trying to swing a lot more in general. This year, the Giants have posted the sixth-highest swing rate on those pitches, meaning they’re facing the pitcher on the pitcher’s terms more often than they used to.

There’s a confounding variable here: Pitchers aren’t giving the Giants much chance to walk, even when San Francisco hitters do manage to chase less often. No team has seen pitches over the heart of the plate at a higher rate this year. Teams are coming after Adames, Devers, Arraez, and Ramos over the heart of the plate at career-high marks. The Giants are chasing more often, and they’re getting force-fed strikes more often. Combine the two, and you’re going to see fewer walks.

This outcome doesn’t sound like a coincidence. The Giants talked a big game about playing a more contact-oriented style of baseball during the offseason. Their front office and fans were hardly the only team idealizing the Blue Jays’ contact skills in their high-octane playoff run (though I’d note that the Jays’ real skill was combining contact with power, not merely making contact). And indeed, swinging more often is a good way to put the ball in play more often. But it’s also a great way to walk less often, and the Giants have made a terrible tradeoff on this front. Their strikeout rate has declined by only 1.6 percentage points, while their walk rate is down 3.6 percentage points.

If you want to think about what this does to their overall game, converting it to wOBA is easy enough. Last year, that 5.2 percent of their plate appearances (1.6 plus 3.6) came with a blended wOBA of .486. They’ve replaced that 5.2 percent with balls in play – fewer strikeouts, fewer walks. The Giants’ wOBA on contact in 2025 was .351; it’s .354 this year. In other words, they replaced a mix of walks and strikeouts with a less valuable mix of batted balls. A 134-point wOBA gap is the difference between Aaron Judge and a solid regular – on only 1/20th of their plate appearances, in fairness.

The defenders of this contact-at-all-costs approach inevitably insist that wOBA undervalues all the incredibly exciting ancillary effects of putting the ball in play. You give your team an opportunity to run the bases. Runners can move more than just station to station. Balls in play can score runs where non-contact events can’t. The more baserunners on, the better a hit is compared to a walk. But there are two clear problems here: The Giants are poor baserunners, and also they don’t get on base.

Perhaps poor is too charitable. The Giants are 30th in baserunning runs this year, and that’s despite having fewer opportunities than average to lose value. Bailey, who is a catcher and also no longer on the team, is second on the squad in BsR. Arraez is the only baserunner worth even half a run above average. The Giants have the lowest stolen base success rate in the majors, and one of the lowest extra base advancement rates. They’re one of the slowest teams in baseball in the aggregate. It’s not clear that putting these guys in motion more often is a good thing.

Similarly, if there’s no one on base, a walk and a single are equally valuable. The Giants have no one on base a lot. They never walk! They’re one of the teams to bat most frequently with the bases empty this year. Some of that is because they play in a tough offensive environment, but as a counterpoint, this is the lowest team OBP for a Giants squad since Oracle Park (then Pac Bell Park) opened in 2000.

This team has plenty of power. In fact, many of Buster Posey’s moves since taking over as president of baseball operations have leaned into power specifically. Matt Chapman and Willy Adames, both of whom were Posey signings, are power-and-defense types. (While it’s true the Giants extended Chapman before Posey was hired, he is the one who negotiated with Chapman on their behalf, so I’m counting it here.) Devers, Posey’s biggest trade acquisition, is most notable for his colossal raw power. Daniel Susac, the team’s new starting catcher, is a power-over-OBP kind of guy. Harrison Bader, a winter addition, hits for power but doesn’t get on base.

Arraez is the one clear counterpoint to this strategy, and you can see the thinking here: Find a guy who gets on base a good deal (career .363 OBP) one way or another to pair with the boppers. I’ve previously argued that Arraez’s skills are geared more toward batting with runners on base, which is a separate issue, but the overall point is that the Giants seem to have constructed a lineup built largely around power, with a secondary emphasis on defense.

That feels to me like the wrong kind of team to lean into prioritizing contact – but the pitch-level data suggest that there’s been a team-wide change in approach. It’s not really a change in team composition. It’s not really a few hitters skewing the average. Across the board, the Giants are showing all the signs of a contact-first approach. They’re striking out and walking less frequently. They’re hitting for less power, hitting the ball hard less frequently, and hitting the ball on the ground more often when they make contact. They’re swinging more across the board, and yet they’re swinging and missing less often than last year. That last trend is more of a mixed bag, but in the aggregate, it sure looks like how I’d describe a contact-hitting approach. But now that I’ve had a few paragraphs to rant about what I think is some improper alignment of team construction and approach, let’s get back to the walks.

If they continue at this pace, the Giants are going to make some ignominious history. They’re walking 1.8 percentage points less frequently than the next-lowest team. The last time there was a gap of even 1 percentage point was 1939, when the Boston Bees walked 6.3% of the time and the Phillies walked 7.4% of the time. And shockingly, I think there’s some chance that things will continue at this pace.

If the season had started a month ago, the Giants would be last in baseball in walk rate, with a 6% mark. If the season had started two weeks ago, the Giants would be last in baseball in walk rate, with a 5.9% mark. If the season started last week, the Giants would only be third-last in walk rate – but with a 6.3% mark. They’re still one of the swing-happiest teams in baseball.

It’s a sign of how strange things are in San Francisco that Arraez has actually been one of the most patient Giants. As mentioned above, he’s chasing less this season than he did a year ago. He’s walking more than he has at any point since 2022. He’s actually second among frequent Giants batters in walk rate, which boggles my mind. He was 11th on the Padres in walk rate in 2025, 12th in ‘24, and 11th on the Marlins in ‘23.

But there’s one sign that augurs some positive regression, and I think that it will keep these Giants from going down in history as the team least capable of drawing a walk. Namely, San Francisco’s aggression is only half of the puzzle. The other half, which I nodded to above, is that opposing teams have been flooding the strike zone at the same time that the Giants are swinging more than ever. That strategy worked incredibly well at the start of the season; through the end of April, the Giants were scoring 3.3 runs per game, were last in baseball in home runs, and had posted the lowest ISO in the majors.

It’s not merely a matter of the weather heating up – this isn’t a hot time of year in San Francisco, as I can attest. But while the team still isn’t walking, the power hitting that the offense is built around has turned a corner. Over the last 30 days, the Giants are eighth in baseball in ISO and sixth in slugging percentage. Across the last two weeks, they’re second in baseball in both categories. They’re scoring four runs a game, no longer a dire level, particularly after accounting for park effects. Devers was dragging the offense down at the start of the season; in May, he’s 14th in baseball with a 162 wRC+. He’s done that with only a 6.4% walk rate, because opponents continue to challenge him aggressively, but I can’t imagine that will continue indefinitely.

The cat-and-mouse game of pitchers reacting to hitters reacting to pitchers doesn’t happen instantaneously. The Giants got comprehensively trounced offensively to start the season. Why would pitchers change what they were doing? But now the Giants have made an adjustment; with opposing teams flooding the zone, they’re hitting for power. Pitchers will likely counter by attacking less aggressively – which in turn will likely lead to higher walk and strikeout rates. That might result in the Giants swinging less as a whole – there are levels to this, in other words.

I’ll close this article with a confession: I’m rooting for my analysis to be wrong. I’m rooting for the Giants to set an all-time record for lowest walk rate in a year where the rules of the game changed and made walks more common. I’m definitely rooting for Arraez to lead the team in walks. I’m a fan of stories in baseball more so than teams at this point, and this story is one that greatly amuses me. But while it really does appear that a lot of the Giants’ shockingly low walk rate is driven by decisions the team is making, and therefore might continue to make, I think their batters are just doing too much damage to keep getting pitched the way they are now.