2026 Team Previews: San Francisco Giants
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 San Francisco Giants
Full Series Links and Explanation Page Here
Intro
Another one with no podcast attached. I apologize to the people who really prefer the pods, but we’ll be covering all of these guys in position preview podcasts leading up to draft season.
The Giants have long been really uninteresting for fantasy purposes. The park reduces offense, and they’ve been pretty platoon-heavy in recent years. They’ve been about a .500 team the last four years after that big 107-win season in 2021. They finished at 81-81 last season. I think they have some upside to build on that this year with a full year of Devers and no major losses on the roster. They’ve added Tyler Mahle and Adrian Houser to solidify the rotation a bit, but they haven’t made any huge moves in free agency to this point. But that could be coming.
Let’s break it all down. We’re focused more on standard fantasy leagues in this series, so I’m usually not looking at players who are outside of the top 400 or so in ADP (but there have been many exceptions so far).
Hitters
Rafael Devers
Age: 29
Pos: 1B
What a year it was for Devers. A bunch of drama with him after the Alex Bregman acquisition, and then a horrible start to the year with the bat, and then an unforeseen trade to San Francisco in the middle of June.
But when the dust settled, it was another solid year with the bat for Devers:
→ 729 PA, .252/.372/.479, 35 HR, 1 SB, 26% K%, 15.4% BB%
The guy ended up playing 163 games, becoming just the sixth player to do that since 1990 when I was born.
That volume plus his power turned into 109 RBI, a high number. He also scored 99 runs. It was a successful fantasy season for the man even with the lack of steals. For standard roto, we should point out that it wasn’t as successful as you might think. His .250 batting average was underwater from what you want, and the one steal does hurt your 5x5 value quite a bit. He was a negative in two of the five categories. That limits your overall value. Hf finished as the #8 first baseman on my player rater:
The thing we must talk about is the park factor. Oracle Park is probably the worst spot in the league for left-handed power, grading out with a 68 park factor for homers.
Fenyway isn’t phenomenal for lefties either, but you can see it’s a 20-point loss in run environment and power. The park has put up below-average home run per barrel rates every year in the last five.
There is plenty of room for doubles and triples out in that outfield, so you can still get some slugging percentage in that way, but the park takes away a lot of homers.
We should check the team splits with Devers, then!
→ BOS: 334 PA, .272/.401/.504, 22.8% K%, 16.8% BB%, 22.1 PA/HR
→ SFG: 395 PA, .236/.347/.460, 29.4% K%, 14.2% BB%, 19.7 PA/HR
That’s not what you would have expected. He hit homers at a better rate with the Giants. But the strikeout rate went through the roof, and everything else dropped because of that. Let’s do more splits, this time from the “advanced” numbers:
→ BOS: 48.9% Swing%, 24.2% Chase%, 70.4% Z-Cont%, .400 xwOBA, .276 xBA
→ SFG: 44.8% Swing%, 26.5% Chase%, 72.3% Z-Cont%, .354 xwOBA, .237 xBA
He was more patient overall, but chased more as a Giant. The quality of contact dropped a bit, but it was mostly about the added strikeouts.
Dever’s last five strikeout rates: 21.5% K%, 18.6%, 19.2%, 24.5%, 26.3%. We should be confident that he drops this back down to around 25% in 2026. What I’m not confident about is whether the strong home run rate repeats. The park is likely to catch up to him a bit on that front.
The other splits are interesting; he really struggled to hit lefties last year, particularly as a Giant. But the full season split is this:
For his career, he’s at a 99 wRC+ against lefties and a 140 against righties. So it’s not new that he’d do most of his damage with the platoon advantage.
Age shouldn’t be a worry. He’ll be 29 all year, so you’d have to say he’s still in his prime years.
I really try not to use early-round picks on guys I know won’t steal any bases. That’s always been the case with Devers. And now we have some concerns about the batting average not being great and the home run total ending up somewhere in the twenties. And he’s at a better (for fantasy purposes) position now as a first baseman. I’m down on Devers.
Projection
622 PA, 83 R, 26 HR, 80 RBI, 4 SB, .249/.355/.462
Ranking
Willy Adames
Age: 30
Pos: SS
Adames was a guy a lot of us were avoiding last year for similar reasons to what we just talked about with Devers. He went from Milwaukee to San Francisco, so we had serious doubts about a repeat of his 30-homer ways.
It took him 160 more games played and 685 plate appearances, but he got there with 30 bombs. As you can see above, that was the only thing he did well. A .225 batting average with a dozen steals.
If you’re the type that likes the second-half breakout guy, Adames is for you, because the time splits were severe. Here’s his 30-Day Rolling Roto Value from last year:
To look at it by month:
He was sitting there with just five homers at the end of May. But he hit a barrage of homers from June through the end of the year:
→ .236/.334/.477, 25 HR, 9 SB
You notice that even while he was swinging a hot power bat, the batting average was still poor at .236. He’s never been a good batting average guy, and seeing the stolen base attempt rate fall to 10% is discouraging as well.
I don’t think he can hit 40 bombs in San Francisco. Not that he needs to, but if you’re not giving us average or steals, we do kind of want you to be hitting a ton of bombs and driving in a ton of runs. He became the first Giants player to hit 30 homers since Barry Bonds.
Only one Giant has driven in 100+ runs since 2010 (Buster Posey in 2012). A lot of that has to do with roster construction, but the park matters, and it’s striking to see this stuff. It’s just not a great situation for a 30-homer, 90+ RBI season. I think Adames comes up short of both of those marks in 2026, and that makes him an unappealing fantasy bat in my book.
Projection
623 PA, 78 R, 25 HR, 77 RBI, 11 SB, .242/.326/.438
Ranking
Matt Chapman
Age: 32
Pos: 3B
Chapman did some of his best work in 2024 as a Giant. He blasted 27 homers and swiped 15 bags in that season with a .247 batting average. We didn’t project that to repeat, and it didn’t:
But still, you can do worse than 21 bombs and nine steals in 128 games. His OBP of .340 was strong with the 13.5% BB%, but he wasn’t a help in batting average.
Chapman has always been a better real-life player than fantasy player because of his elite third base defense. Some of the advanced numbers from last year:
→ 9.9% Brl%, .252 xBA, .352 xwOBA, 80.7% Z-Cont%, 40% GB%, 15% Air Pull%
It’s all just kinda “fine”. I don’t see any reason to be excited about the guy for fantasy purposes. The floor isn’t awful, but it’s not great, and the ceiling is pretty low and getting lower as he gets into his mid-thirties.
I think the best you can do with him is a .260 batting average with 25 homers and a dozen steals. That’s probably a 90th percentile outcome. Something like a .235 average with 18 homers and five steals is very possible as well.
This third base position is pretty rough after the first couple of tiers. Chapman is 3B11 in early drafts. That tells me quite a bit. I don’t think I’ll ahve him that high, and it makes me want to get into the 3B waters pretty early on in drafts.
ADP Ranks at 3B:
Projection
611 PA, 74 R, 21 HR, 79 RBI, 11 SB, .249/.342/.432
Ranking
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