We just debuted “McDeep Dive”, our new series that will spotlight one Giants player every day for a week. We’ll move backwards and forwards through time, look at on the field stuff, off the field stuff, and see if we can learn something new about them. Here’s part 2 of this week’s subject, Hunter Pence.
The Giants needed Hunter Pence for his bat, but he’s made some really nice plays with the glove over his Giants career. The original idea for this post was “Hunter Pence falls” because he’s shown a propensity for tumbling, but in the course of searching for that, I just came across a lot of great catches by his alien hand.
Here are some pretty straightforward ones before we get to the meaty stuff.
Now we get into the postseason win probability added-type plays which become etched into the baseball fan’s subconscious because of the national exposure.
[EDIT: I can’t get the catch from NLCS Game 5 against Pete Kozma to embed, so click here for that. Meanwhile...]
Of course, who could forget what he did to preserve Lincecum’s first no-hitter:
And how close he came to securing Petit’s perfect game:
The contrast here seems to be all about the jump and the fact that Eric Chavez is a ball flipping wizard.
Here’s what Pence said after the game:
Ahhhh felt like the dream where you just can't run fast enough!!! So close, great game Yas #clutch
— Hunter Pence (@hunterpence) September 7, 2013
He’s never lost his hustle, so you’d better believe we’ll see one or two more plays like this before it’s all said and done for him.