It’s 10 a.m. and Hunter Pence is, by his own admission, wicked tired. We’re standing in the SoMa outpost of SPRO, and he one-ups my latte order with his own: the double punch of a black coffee and an espresso.
“Today, for whatever reason, I like… just fuckin’ couldn’t wake up,” Pence says. He flashes an apologetic smile, but it reads more like an invitation: Let me be honest with you…
Star athletes are a curious bunch; you never really know whether you’ll get a pissed-off Michael Jordan type, or an unreadable caricature with a saccharine smile, or just someone who doesn’t want to talk to a reporter. Pence, the former right fielder beloved by fans as a “Forever Giant” despite his stints at other clubs, brings a different energy. He’s about as earnest as they get.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, considering Pence’s reputation as a genuine, energizing leader for the Giants with a penchant for motivational speeches and a relentless positivity at the plate. Pence played for the Giants between 2012 and 2018, and again for one last go in 2020. Early on, Giants’ third-base coach Tim Flannery liked Pence’s fire so much that he dubbed him “Full Throttle,” a nickname that stuck because of Pence’s obsessive study habits and aggression as a batter.
“Me and Tim are both a bit free-spirited, if you will. We both are really into the… energy of things, the emotion of things. Being detail-oriented, locked into hyperfocus, but also connecting with the spiritual essence and magic of baseball,” Pence tells me with a wave of his hands. “I was always calculating risk. But I was full-send.”
He’s still in full-send mode as a broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants. At the mic, he’s called nearly 40 games this season and picked up all manner of team-related tasks, from spring training in Arizona to pop-up events around the city. The Giants may not have made the postseason, but Pence still has a lot to do.
Despite growing up and playing baseball in Texas, Pence has had a home in SoMa since he was traded to the Giants from the Philadelphia Phillies in July 2012. The move was a shock to Pence then, but it laid the groundwork for dominance, with San Francisco winning the World Series that year and again in 2014, in no small part due to Pence’s presence.
Even before 2012, however, Pence had a crush on San Francisco, if only as a visitor. “I love mornings and coffee, and as a player, I would get up and walk around all of the cities I was in,” Pence tells me. “I still remember, when I was with the Astros in 2007, being on the team bus with Eric Munson — he’s DJing as we’re going across the Bay Bridge, with that view of Alcatraz and the city. It was majestic,” Pence says. “I could feel the creativity. The fashion was different here, the culture was different. I rode around in a cab in the fog and mist, and just thought, ‘I love it here.’”
That love affair never faded in the eight years that Pence played with the Giants, even as his batting average took a dive in the latter stretch. He left for the Texas Rangers in 2019, hoping to reverse the trend, and garnered the American League’s Comeback Player of the Year honors. Returning to the Giants for one last season in 2020, he struggled at the plate and ultimately chose to retire that September. He watched the season finale, against the San Diego Padres, from a boat in McCovey Cove.
Unsurprisingly, a guy nicknamed “Full Throttle” has to compete at something even in retirement, and Pence has honed in on, among other things, pickleball. He often plays with neighbors and friends on the courts in SoMa’s “East Cut” neighborhood. He lives with his wife, Lexi Pence, in a high-rise not far from Oracle Park. Pence is also happy he's found more time to get hands-on with his nonprofit Healthy Planet Project, planting trees, cleaning up trash, and educating young people around the Bay Area.
A dumb grin spreads across my face when Pence and I dig into his other passion: Magic: The Gathering. Pence wasn’t allowed to play the trading card strategy game as a child; his religious parents deemed it a “quote-unquote evil” influence on their son due to its dark fantasy vibes. “They traded me a VCR to throw away my Magic cards,” he recalls.
This is, in every sense of the phrase, nerd shit, and I love that a legendary Giant is debating the merits of deck construction and his preferred playing style. Pence once wore an Alpha-edition Black Lotus card in a protective case on a silver chain to the 2021 MLB All-Star Celebrity Softball Game, a truly if-you-know-you-know moment for MTG fans. That rare card is worth somewhere north of $400,000 these days, putting most players’ bling to shame.
The ol’ Full Throttle persona comes alive when Pence plays Magic and other games; he jokes that despite being a cheery “Mr. Light Guy” in real life, he loves the dark, overwhelming aggression of a Rakdos deck. That may mean absolutely nothing to you, but for me, it hints at the intensity of Pence’s drive in everything from baseball to video games to Dungeons and Dragons.
Even when the topic turns to the Giants’ less-than-stellar season, Pence’s enthusiasm is infectious. The club lost 97 games and landed a distant fourth in its division, some 35 wins behind the leading Los Angeles Dodgers.
For Pence, the sunk season is a “very beautiful blessing in disguise,” a line that could sound like coach-speak bullshit if not for the fact that Pence is right. A series of trades have left the Giants with a haul of young talent; Pence name-checks Bryce Eldridge and Jonah Cox as guys who are taking the next step. Josuar Gonzalez, who plays in the minors for the San Jose Giants, could be a “top five, maybe even No. 1 prospect” in the MLB next season, Pence speculates. Much-criticized manager Tony Vitello, meanwhile, is shedding his “kind of timid” start and looks ready to apply his intense, rah-rah style of coaching in year two, Pence adds.
“There’s going to be a massive wave of youth, energy, and excellence,” Pence says, and for the sake of Giants fans everywhere, I hope his analysis will bear fruit. (This is one hell of an admission for me, a Dodgers fan for the last 17 years, but any good rivalry needs to be less one-sided.)
It’s been a tough season off the field as well. I can’t recall the last time a fanbase was as pissed off as Giants supporters during the summer Pride Night fiasco, in which several players altered team-issued Pride-themed caps by writing Bible verses on them or, in one case, not wearing it at all. The so-called “protest” became national news, with Vice President JD Vance and even the Justice Department weighing in.
The issue is a sensitive one for anyone who represents the team, but Pence is forthcoming. He doesn’t have a solution for the controversy, per se, but can relate: Growing up in a restrictive, deeply Christian household left him with complicated feelings about faith and acceptance. Pence twists his lips into a slight grimace at my question about Pride Night, and emotion wells up when he talks about how troubling it is to see people in pain over players’ seeming rejection of queer joy.
“I don’t think there’s a way to just legislate the situation. I personally am kind of like… players are players. They’re going to do and say things the team cannot crack down or control,” Pence continues.
To me, there’s a parallel — if not a moral equivalence — to the times when Pence himself took on some controversy by being one of several players to kneel during the National Anthem to protest police brutality in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. “You’re there to play baseball, but sometimes things just strike you,” he says of the protest.
I respond with a thought experiment: Does this mean, then, that religious players have the right to highlight Christian views on a night to celebrate Pride?
Pence sighs. “That’s what they really believe. That’s how they were raised. That’s where they are at this moment. Everyone’s doing the best that they know how to do,” he says. “It does hurt. I have so many people I love and I don’t believe their nature is wrong. It hits close to home.”
The baseball offseason will now allow Pence to take a breath and dig into more personal projects, and his face lights up when I mention the Healthy Planet Project. Many athletes have charitable foundations, but Pence prefers to be as hands-on as possible; he’ll be in costume on Saturday, cleaning up Lake Merritt in Oakland with Lexi. (Pence wouldn’t tell me what his costume is, but expect something over-the-top; last year, he and Lexi were Labubus, complete with full face makeup.)
With our time almost up and Pence’s two beverages drained, we wrap our conversation and head to the Embarcadero for a few quick photos. As we walk, I keep prodding him about his DnD bonafides, and he drops a geeky scoop: His favorite character to play is a squat sorcerer named Bigglebobby Babinski.
Meandering through SoMa, we giggle as Pence keeps repeating the name “Bigglebobby” over and over. Clearly, the coffee and espresso worked. We’re both awake now.
“Sorry, I’m being weird,” he says. I assure him that he’s not. Pence is just a full-throttle guy, no matter the subject.
