Wilmer Flores came to bat Saturday for the 2,000th time as a San Francisco Giant. If he knew he’d be around so long, he would have invested in real estate.
“I signed a two-year deal with an option,” Flores explained, smiling. “They picked up my option, and then I signed a two-year deal with another option. So this is the option, this is my sixth year. Never bought.”
Flores is 33 now, with more than 11 years of major-league service, second on the Giants to Justin Verlander. That’s why they got the corner lockers by the showers in the visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium this weekend. Status symbols.
Not that Flores cares much about that. He tends to bat low in the order, and he drove in all the Giants’ runs in an 8-4 loss to the New York Yankees on Saturday. Flores — who also drilled his sixth home run, tied for the most in the majors — now has 19 RBIs. The last Giant with that many RBIs this early in the season was Barry Bonds in 2004.
Who else but Wilmer 💪 pic.twitter.com/oZOiX7wdIK
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) April 12, 2025
“Having that kind of production down there (with) the year that he’s had, you could be a little prickly about hitting in the seven hole,” manager Bob Melvin said. “He just wants to help his team.”
His team, more than any other, will soon be the Giants. Flores has played 556 games for the Giants, just 25 shy of his total with the Mets. The kid who famously teared up on the field in 2015, when he thought the Mets had traded him, is now a consummate Giant.
“He’s one of the best teammates I’ve ever been around,” said Giants starter Logan Webb, one of three players, with Tyler Rogers and Mike Yastrzemski, who have been with the team longer than Flores.
“He’s a professional. If he’s starting, if he’s coming off the bench, if he hasn’t played for 10 days, he’s the same guy. Guys see that and want to be around that. I think everyone in this clubhouse would vouch for him to be here the rest of his career.”
For Flores, the Giant years have given him the perspective and savvy he couldn’t have had with the Mets, who signed him the day after his 16th birthday in 2007. He reached the majors the day he turned 22 and spent most of 2014, his official rookie season, at a spot where he didn’t fit.
“I never wanted to play short,” Flores said. “Even when I was doing tryouts in Venezuela, the guy that ran the academy was like, ‘Oh, move to short, that’s where the money is.’ I was like, ‘I know there’s money with the starting pitchers, too, but I can’t throw!’”
Uneasy as he was at shortstop, Flores still started there for the Mets in the 2015 World Series. The chance to do it, he believes, is the cosmic reason his would-be trade to the Milwaukee Brewers collapsed on that late-July night when the fans knew before he did that the Mets were on the verge of a deal.
“After they gave me an ovation, I was wondering why,” Flores said. “I went in and checked my phone — I shouldn’t tell people this, but whatever — because I wanted to know, and not even the manager was telling me because he didn’t know either.
“So I went and checked my phone, and I saw on MLB, you know when they send you a notification about a trade? It was: ‘Zack Wheeler and Wilmer Flores for Carlos Gomez.’ It said the team has not confirmed, but I was like, ‘OK, I got traded.’ That was when I went back out on the field and got emotional after that because I just saw I got traded, but no one told me.”
The Mets backed out over medical concerns, and two nights later, Flores beat Washington with a walk-off home run, helping catapult the team to a postseason run that culminated with an unlikely pennant. It took a while for Flores to process it all.
“I didn’t realize how lucky I was,” he said. “It was Bartolo Colon’s first World Series, and he had never been in 20 years in the big leagues. But I realized all this after — like, years after. Because I was young. I thought, ‘Oh, this is the playoffs, we’re a good team, we’re going to be here every year.’”
Flores was the Mets’ last batter in their five-game loss to Kansas City, striking out looking on a down-and-in Wade Davis fastball that was probably a ball. In his next postseason series, six years later with the Giants, he made another final out on a much more egregious call: As the potential series-winning run against Max Scherzer and the Dodgers, Flores fanned on a check-swing that wasn’t.
“I watched it right after, and that’s it,” he said. “I try not to watch the negative things. Bad at-bats, no. I only watch the good swings.”
He’s had plenty of those with the Giants, who signed him for the 2020 season after a one-year interlude with Arizona. Flores won the coveted Willie Mac Award — named for Willie McCovey to signify the most inspirational Giant — in 2022, and then had his best season in 2023: .284/.355/.509, with a team-high 23 homers.
Flores was a shell of himself last season, which ended with surgery on Aug. 6 to remove dead tissue around the quadriceps tendon above his right knee. At the time of the operation, Flores was the league’s slowest player with the lowest exit velocity.
“My whole career it’s been like, I have to really be in pain for me not to play, because you just never know how long you’re going to do this,” Flores said. “If I can play 50 percent, I’ll play. But sometimes it’s not a smart thing to do.”
Flores, who exercised his option after the season, still ices his knee after games. But he can put weight on it again, he said. He trusts that his back leg will fire and give him the foundation he needs.
He’s back to being Wilmer, which means being clutch. Last Sunday, he beat Seattle with a pinch-hit single for his 13th career walk-off RBI, tying him with Bryce Harper for most among active players since he debuted in 2013. On Wednesday against Cincinnati, Flores lashed the first pitch of the bottom of the eighth for a game-tying homer in a Giants’ comeback.
Steady leadership underscored by reliable production — that’s Flores.
“I think it’s been lost in the game a little bit, how important veteran presence is,” Yastrzemski said. “He’s got a steady heartbeat, he’s calm. He has been in every situation you could possibly be in, so no moment’s too big or too small for him.”
Flores still uses the “Friends” theme as his walk-up music, just as he did with the Mets, in honor of the show that taught him English. The clap-clap-clap-clap endeared him to the fans in Flushing, but mostly, it seems, it was that tearful moment on the field.
His career will soon include more Giants games than Mets games. But the long-term San Francisco renter has a permanent home — metaphorically — in Flushing.
“Every year I’ve gone back, it’s awesome,” Flores said. “I know they really appreciate it when you show them that you care.”
(Photo of Wilmer Flores hitting a two-run single in the sixth inning of Saturday’s game at Yankee Stadium: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
