There have been plenty of late signings in free agency — as Cody Bellinger, J.D. Martinez, Blake Sell and Jordan Montgomery all finalized their spots for at least 2024 after spring training began — this cycle, but Brandon Belt, an All-Star in 2016 and two-time World Series champion with the Giants, remains unsigned.
And that has puzzled the 35-year-old first baseman, outfielder and designated hitter.
“It’s kind of baffled me a little bit,” Belt said Friday during an appearance on the “JD Bunkis Podcast” that aired on Sportsnet. “Honestly haven’t had hardly any calls at all that have gone past the point of teams saying, ‘Hey, we’re interested. That’s it, we’re just checking in.’ We haven’t even gotten down to talking about money with anybody or anything like that.
“I wish I had an answer for you. I just don’t.”
Belt, who spent the first 12 years of his career with the Giants, signed a one-year deal with the Blue Jays ahead of the 2023 season, and he hit .254 with an .858 OPS and .369 on-base percentage across 103 games — serving mostly as the designated hitter in a lineup that also included George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette.
He revealed in August that he contemplated retirement near the end of the 2022 season, undergoing season-ending arthroscopic surgery to address cartilage in his right knee, according to MLB.com, and fix an issue that’d lingered for seven years.
His future, at that point, depended on the result of — and recovery from — the surgery, Belt told NBC Sports at the time, but he ended up inking a deal with the Blue Jays, earning a spot in the top of their lineup and finding it “pretty easy” to figure out a free agency solution despite coming off the injury.
Belt said that was “kinda on the fence” about what he wanted to do for 2024 — not knowing if it was time to “hang it up,” he said on the podcast this week — but knew that he could still add to a lineup, though Belt acknowledged that he wouldn’t have accepted a non-guaranteed deal that contained just an invite to spring training.
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful or anything,” Belt said on the podcast. “It’s just that I feel like I have proven myself, especially over the past few years, that I don’t think I’m in that spot right now. … There was no reason for me to accept anything like that, and that’s not something I wanted to do.”
Outfielder and designated hitter Tommy Pham remains unsigned, too, and Montgomery — who won the World Series with the Rangers — didn’t sign until Tuesday, when he joined the Diamondbacks.
Martinez, who landed a one-year deal with the Mets, signed so late into spring training that he needed to start the season with minor-league at-bats before joining their regular lineup.
But Belt, based on how he described his reality, hasn’t even garnered much interest.
“I feel like I’m in my prime, I think, as far as like approach and what I want to do in the game,” Belt said, “and what my goals are when I go out to play every single night. So it sucks in that respect, but I don’t even know.
“I don’t really have a great answer for how I feel about it, either. It just hasn’t happened for me, and I don’t know how to really feel about it.”