2026 will be here in a few days and everyone is making their New Year’s resolutions. The SF Giants should be no different. Aside from the ongoing offseason wish lists both realistic and nonrealistic for the roster, the Giants need to see some improvements in areas on the field regardless of the personnel. Here’s the New Year’s resolutions the Giants should have for their 2026 season…

3 New Year’s Resolutions for the SF Giants in 2026

Run more

There’s an old adage that “speed kills” and while baseball as a whole has seemed to embrace the bigger bases and taking advantage of the pitch clock to improve the base stealing aspect of the game, the Giants seem to be stuck in the last decade of station-to-station baseball.

Every year, regardless of coaching staff, like the stereotypical New Year’s practice of buying a gym membership, the running game seems to be a yearly topic of discussion in Scottsdale each spring. 2025 was no different as the Giants finished 29th in the league in both stolen bases per game and even stolen base attempts per game. The Giants even seem to have the fix in house. Leveraging the reigning back to back Gold Glove winner at catcher could boost the production on the base paths. If you can steal on a gold glover, chances are you can steal on other teams and gain the confidence to do it more often.

Improve defensively

Playing better defense has also seemed to fall into the category of yearly resolutions. It’s tough to see a team with two current Gold Glovers and a perennial Platinum Glover struggle so mightily in the field.

Ranking 24th in errors per game doesn’t bode well for backing up a pitching staff that tends to lean more on their defense than striking batters out (they ranked 16th in K/9). Patrick Bailey was the only player on the team with a DWAR over 1, while lineup fixtures like Heliot Ramos, Jung Hoo Lee, and Rafael Devers all finished in the negative. Newly acquired Willy Adames was ranked as the worst defensive shortstop in the league for the first half of the year, although he did improve as the season went on. Hopefully changes like the hiring or fielding guru Ron Washington will finally make this the year that a goal becomes reality.

Swing the bat more

Too often in 2025 it seemed as though the Giants were content to just take their walks and pass the RBI responsibility on to the next guy in the lineup. They ranked 6th in walks per game, however the patient approaches didn’t translate to hits (26th in the league), runs (17th), or really any damage at all (22nd in OPS).

At some point you have to show some aggressiveness and not wait for the guy behind you to do something. There’s plate discipline, and there’s hoping for a walk, and too often Giants hitters were guilty of the latter ending up with way too many strikeouts looking, and a final tally of over 8.5 strikeouts per game as a team. Good things happen when you put the ball in play and even though a team BABIP of .281 isn’t great, that number will naturally climb the more chances there are.

One of the keys to a good goal is something measurable. If the Giants can get into the top half of the league in baserunning, and get up to top ten territory in defense and putting the ball in play, then the team could make the playoffs, or be infinitely more entertaining. At the very least, the Giants would be able to claim something that most people can’t even say by February: they accomplished their 2026 New Year’s resolutions.