Early days The Giants began as the second baseball club founded by millionaire
tobacconist John B. Day and veteran amateur baseball player
Jim Mutrie. The
Gothams, as the Giants were originally known, entered the
National League seven years after its 1876 formation, in
1883, while their other club, the
Metropolitans played in the rival
American Association (1882–1891). Nearly half of the original Gothams players were members of the disbanded
Troy Trojans in
upstate New York, whose place in the National League the Gothams inherited. While the
Metropolitans were initially the more successful club, after they won the
1884 AA championship, Day and Mutrie began moving star players to the NL Gothams, whose fortunes improved while the Metropolitans' afterwards slumped. It is said that after one particularly satisfying victory over the
Philadelphia Phillies, Mutrie (who was also the team's manager) stormed into the dressing room and exclaimed, "My big fellows! My giants!" From then on (
1885), the club was known as the Giants. However, more recent research has suggested that the
New York World was already widely using the Giants nickname throughout the 1885 season, before the legendary game was played. The team won its first National League
pennant in
1888, as well as a victory over the
St. Louis Browns in an early incarnation of the pre-modern-era
World Series. They repeated as champions
the next year with a pennant and world championship victory over
Brooklyn. The Giants' original home stadium, the
Polo Grounds, also dates from this early era. It had been built in 1876 as a pitch for playing polo, and was located north of
Central Park adjacent to Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 110th and 112th Streets, in
Harlem in upper
Manhattan. After their eviction from that first incarnation of the Polo Grounds after the 1888 season, they moved further uptown to various fields which they also named the "Polo Grounds" located between 155th and 159th Streets in
Harlem and
Washington Heights, playing at the famous Washington Heights location at the foot of
Coogan's Bluff until the end of the 1957 season, when they moved to
San Francisco. The Giants were a powerhouse in the late 1880s, winning their first two National League Pennants and World Championships in and . But nearly all of the Giants' stars jumped to the upstart newly organized rival loop, the
Players' League, whose New York franchise was also named
the Giants, in 1890. The new team even built a stadium next door to the NL Polo Grounds. With a decimated roster, the NL Giants finished a distant sixth. Attendance took a nosedive, and the financial strain affected Day's tobacco business as well. The Players' League dissolved after the single season, and Day sold a minority interest in his NL Giants to the defunct PL Giants' principal backer,
Edward Talcott. As a condition of the sale, Day had to fire Mutrie as manager. Although the Giants rebounded to third place in 1891, Day was forced to sell a controlling interest to Talcott at the end of the '91 season. In 1894, the Giants, as runner-up in the
National League, took part in the
1894 Temple Cup championship series against the
Baltimore Orioles, sweeping in four games and winning the first
Temple Cup. Four years later, Talcott sold the Giants to
Andrew Freedman, a real estate developer with ties to the
Tammany Hall, the political machine of the
Democratic Party that ran New York City. Freedman was one of the most detested owners in baseball history, getting into heated disputes with other owners, writers and his own players, most famously with star pitcher
Amos Rusie, author of the first Giants no-hitter. When Freedman offered Rusie only $2,500 for 1896, the disgruntled hurler sat out the entire season. Attendance fell off throughout the league without Rusie, prompting the other owners to chip in $50,000 to get him to return for 1897. Freedman even hired former owner Day as manager for part of the 1899 season.
The John McGraw era In 1902, after a series of disastrous moves that left the Giants games behind the front-runner, Freedman signed
John McGraw as player-manager, convincing him to jump in mid-season from the
Baltimore Orioles (1901–1902) of the fledgling
American League and bring with him several of his teammates. McGraw went on to manage the Giants for three decades until 1932, one of the longest and most successful tenures in professional sports. Hiring "Mr. McGraw", as his players referred to him, was one of Freedman's last significant moves as owner of the Giants, since after that 1902 season he was forced to sell his interest in the club to
John T. Brush. McGraw went on to manage the Giants to nine National League pennants (in 1904, 1905, and every year from 1911 to 1913) and three
World Series championships (in 1905, 1921, and 1922), with a tenth pennant and fourth world championship as Giants owner in 1933 under his handpicked player-manager successor,
Bill Terry. The Giants already had their share of stars beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, such as
"Smiling" Mickey Welch,
Roger Connor,
Tim Keefe,
Jim O'Rourke, and
John Montgomery Ward, the player-lawyer who formed the renegade
Players' League in 1890 to protest unfair player contracts. McGraw, a veteran of the infamous 1890s
Baltimore Orioles, in his three decades managing the Giants, McGraw managed star players including
Christy Mathewson,
"Iron Man" Joe McGinnity,
Jim Thorpe,
Red Ames,
Casey Stengel,
Art Nehf,
Edd Roush,
Rogers Hornsby,
Bill Terry and
Mel Ott. The Giants under McGraw famously snubbed their first modern
World Series chance in by refusing the invitation to play the
reigning world champion Boston Americans (
Red Sox) because McGraw considered the newly established
American League of 1901 as little more than a
minor league and disliked its firebrand president
Ban Johnson. He also resented his Giants' new intra-city rival
New York Highlanders, who almost won the pennant but lost to
Boston on the last day, and stuck by his refusal to play whoever won the 1904 AL pennant. The ensuing criticism resulted in Brush's taking the lead to formalize the rules and format of the World Series. The
Giants won the
1905 World Series over
Connie Mack's
Philadelphia Athletics, with
Christy Mathewson nearly winning the series single-handedly with a still-standing record three complete-game shutouts and 27 consecutive scoreless innings in that one World Series. The Giants then had several frustrating years. In 1908, they finished in a tie with the
Chicago Cubs due to a late-season home tie game with the Cubs resulting from the
Fred Merkle baserunning "boner". They lost the postseason replay of the tie game (ordered by NL president
Harry Pulliam) to the Cubs (after disgruntled Giants fans had set fire to the stands the morning of the game), who would go on to win their second (consecutive, and their last for the next 108 years) World Series. That post-season game was further darkened by a story that someone on the Giants had attempted to bribe umpire
Bill Klem. This could have been a disastrous scandal for baseball, but because Klem was honest and the Giants lost the duel between
Christy Mathewson and Mordecai "Three-Fingered" Brown 4–2, it faded over time. The Giants experienced a mixture of success and hard luck in the early 1910s, losing three straight World Series in 1911–1913 to the A's, Red Sox and A's again (two seasons later, both the Giants and the A's, decimated by the short-lived rival third loop, the
Federal League of 1914–1915, with the "jumping ship" signings of many of their stars, finished in last place). After losing the
1917 Series to the
Chicago White Sox (the last World Series win for the White Sox until 2005), the Giants played in four straight World Series in the early 1920s, winning the first two over their Polo Grounds tenants, the
Yankees, who had won the first two of their many pennants, led by their new young slugger
Babe Ruth, then losing to the
Yankees in after the original
Yankee Stadium had opened that May. They also lost in 1924, when the
Washington Senators won their only World Series while in D.C. From 1923 to 1927, the team held their spring training at
Payne Park in
Sarasota, Florida.
1930–1957: Five pennants in 28 seasons McGraw handed over the team to Bill Terry midway through the 1932 season. Terry served as manager for nine-and-a-half years, serving as player-manager until 1936. Under Terry, the Giants won three pennants, defeating the
Senators in the
1933 World Series but swept by the Yankees in consecutive fall classics, and . Aside from Terry himself, the other stars of the era were slugger
Mel Ott and southpaw hurler
Carl Hubbell. Known as "King Carl" and "The Meal Ticket", Hubbell gained fame in the first two innings of the
1934 All-Star Game (played at the Polo Grounds) by striking out five future AL Hall of Famers in a row:
Babe Ruth,
Lou Gehrig,
Jimmie Foxx,
Al Simmons and
Joe Cronin. Ott succeeded Terry as manager in 1942, but the war years proved to be difficult for the Giants. Midway during the 1948 season
Brooklyn Dodgers manager
Leo Durocher left as Dodgers skipper to manage the Giants, not without controversy. Not only was such a midseason managerial switch unprecedented, but Durocher had been accused of gambling in 1947 and subsequently suspended for that whole season by
Baseball Commissioner Albert "Happy" Chandler. Durocher's ensuing eight full seasons managing the Giants proved some of the most memorable for their fans, particularly because of the arrival of five-tool superstar
Willie Mays, their two pennants in 1951 and 1954, their unexpected sweep of the powerful (111–43)
Cleveland Indians in the
1954 World Series and arguably the two most famous plays in Giants history.
1951: The "Shot Heard 'Round the World" The "Shot Heard 'Round the World," or
Bobby Thomson's come-from-behind ninth-inning
walk-off home run that won the National League pennant for the Giants over their bitter rivals, the
Brooklyn Dodgers, in the deciding game of a three-game playoff series ended one of baseball's most memorable pennant races. The
Giants had been games behind the league-leading
Dodgers in August, but under Durocher's guidance and with a 16-game winning streak, got hot and caught the Dodgers to tie for the lead on the next-to-last day of the season.
Mays's catch and the 1954 Series in 1954 In Game 1 of the
1954 World Series at the Polo Grounds against the
Cleveland Indians, Willie Mays made "The Catch," a dramatic over-the-shoulder catch of a fly ball by
Vic Wertz after sprinting with his back to the plate on a dead run to deepest center field. At the time the game was tied 2–2 in the eighth inning, with men on first and second and nobody out. Mays caught the ball from the plate, whirled and threw the ball to the infield, keeping the lead runner,
Larry Doby, from scoring. Doby advanced to third on the play, and then new pitcher
Marv Grissom walked
Dale Mitchell to load the bases. Grissom then struck out
Dave Pope looking and got
Jim Hegan to fly out to left fielder
Monte Irvin to end the inning. Grissom got out of another jam in the ninth when 1953
AL MVP Al Rosen flew out to Irvin with two outs and two on. In the tenth, Grissom faced more trouble, but got
Hall of Fame pitcher
Bob Lemon to line out with runners on the corners and 2 outs, preserving the tie game. In the bottom of the tenth, Willie Mays drew a 1 out walk and stole second base, thus prompting Lemon to intentionally walk
Hank Thompson. And with runners on first and second with one out, pinch hitter
Dusty Rhodes hit a walk off home run that just squeaked over the right field wall at an estimated . The underdog Giants went on to sweep the series in four straight, despite the Indians'
American League 111–43 regular season. The
1954 World Series title would be their last appearance in the World Series as the
New York Giants, with the team moving to San Francisco to start the 1958 season.
New York Giants of the 1950s In addition to
Bobby Thomson and
Willie Mays, other memorable
New York Giants of the 1950s include
Hall of Fame manager
Leo Durocher, coach
Herman Franks, Hall of Fame outfielder
Monte Irvin, outfielder and runner-up for the 1954 NL batting championship (won by Willie Mays)
Don Mueller, Hall of Fame
knuckleball relief pitcher
Hoyt Wilhelm, starting pitchers
Larry Jansen,
Sal Maglie,
Jim Hearn,
Marv Grissom,
Dave Koslo,
Don Liddle,
Max Lanier,
Rubén Gómez,
Al Worthington, and
Johnny Antonelli, catcher
Wes Westrum, catchers
Ray Katt and
Sal Yvars, shortstop
Alvin Dark, third baseman
Hank Thompson, first baseman
Whitey Lockman, second basemen
Davey Williams and
Eddie Stanky, outfielder-pitcher
Clint Hartung and utility men
Johnny Mize,
Bill Rigney,
Daryl Spencer,
Bobby Hofman,
Joey Amalfitano,
Tookie Gilbert, and 1954 Series hero
Dusty Rhodes, among others. In the late 1950s and after the move to San Francisco two Hall of Fame first basemen,
Orlando Cepeda and
Willie McCovey, joined the team.
1957: Move to California The Giants' final three years in New York City were unmemorable. They stumbled to third place the year after their World Series win, and attendance fell off precipitously. Even before then, the Polo Grounds had become an albatross around the team. It had not been well maintained since the 1940s, and any renovations would have been hindered by the fact that the Giants did not own the parcel of land on which it stood. The Polo Grounds had almost no parking, and the neighborhood around it had become less desirable. While seeking a new stadium to replace the crumbling Polo Grounds, the Giants began to contemplate a move from New York, initially considering
Metropolitan Stadium in
Bloomington, Minnesota, which was home to their top farm team, the
Minneapolis Millers. Under the rules of the time, the Giants' ownership of the Millers gave them priority rights to a major league team in the area (the Senators wound up there as the
Minnesota Twins in 1961). At this time, the Giants were approached by
San Francisco mayor
George Christopher. Despite objections from shareholders such as
Joan Whitney Payson, majority owner
Horace Stoneham entered into negotiations with San Francisco officials around the same time the Dodgers' owner
Walter O'Malley was courting the city of Los Angeles. O'Malley had been told that the Dodgers would not be allowed to move to Los Angeles unless a second team moved to California as well. He pushed Stoneham toward moving, and so in the summer of 1957 both the Giants and
Brooklyn Dodgers announced their moves to California, ending the three-team golden age of baseball in New York City. New York would remain a one-team town with the
New York Yankees until 1962, when former Giants minority owner
Joan Whitney Payson founded the
New York Mets and brought National League baseball back to the city (as part of MLB's first wave of expansion). Mets chairman
M. Donald Grant had represented Payson on the Giants board, and as such had been the only board member to vote against the Giants' move to California. The "NY" script on the Giants' caps and the orange trim on their uniforms, along with the blue background used by the Dodgers, would be adopted by the Mets, honoring their New York NL forebears with a blend of Giants orange and Dodgers blue. ==Rivalries==