Tuesday BP: Duane Kuiper expects Brandon Belt will retire after this season

Good morning, baseball fans.

I hope you had a great weekend. The San Francisco Giants sure did, having swept the Philadelphia Phillies to snap a losing streak. This is being written before Monday night’s game, but with any luck, they carried that momentum into Los Angeles with them.

I was doing my usual reading as I was trying to figure out what to write about for today, and a sentence from a piece from Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area really jumped out at me. It was addressing a recent episode of the “Giants Talk” podcast in which Duane Kuiper discussed the difficulties going into the offseason this year. Kuiper said pretty frankly what has only been speculated about by others within and surrounding the organization:

“Like, which LaMonte Wade Jr. do we have, the one from 2021 or the one from 2022? You can actually say the same thing about [Mike Yastrzemski]. Brandon Belt, I think he’s going to retire. You’ve got [Brandon] Crawford back, which I’m glad [about], because even if Crawford doesn’t do the things he normally does offensively, he’s still going to anchor that defense, which you really have to have.”

That was a bit of a punch to the gut. I would assume this is more of an educated guess from Kuiper than any kind of inside information. Obviously Belt has said he’d like to continue playing and that it will depend on how helpful his season-ending knee surgery ends up being. But he’s 34 and has taken a lot of damage over the course of his career. Which is the same reason why Buster Posey chose to retire last year. Personally I can’t fault any player that chooses their future quality of life over squeezing out another painful season. But it’s always sad to think you might have seen a favorite player play their last game.

What time do the Giants play today?

The Giants play game two of three against the Los Angeles Dodgers tonight at 7:10 p.m. PT.