As we prepare to watch the San Francisco Giants embark on its 144th season in franchise history, it’s important to keep in mind one very important fact: the team has never had five consecutive losing seasons. That makes a lot of sense for a franchise that has won more games than any other team in the sport’s history and it’s one of the reasons why the Giants are iconic. To lose this distinction would be to knock out one of the franchise’s main identifying features. Orange and Black and winning. On
the other hand, will anybody care if this streak ends?
The Giants’ last winning season was 2021, and as close as they’ve come since with the first two .500 finishes in franchise history, they haven’t had a winning season. There’s so much emphasis on making it into a heavily compromised tournament that sometimes it seems like the straightforward notion of winning more games than losing gets lost in the shuffle. This run of 2022-2025 marks just the third time in team history that they’ve hit the four straight years without a winning season mark. The other times:
1899-1902 (60-90, 60-78, 52-85, 48-88)
1974-1977 (72-90, 80-81, 74-88, 75-87)
2005-2008 (75-87, 76-85, 71-91, 72-90)
We might also be in the midst of the worst 10-year stretch (758-760) in franchise history, but that’s an examination for another day. For today, let’s just stick to the vaunted history that Buster Posey, Zack Minasian, Tony Vitello, and the players not only have inherited but are, effectively, tasked with living up to after 27,722 games played since 1883. Oh sure, there’s no Willie Mays, John McGraw, or Barry Bonds to carry the load and make the floor 82 wins, but that’s also not a tremendously high bar to clear… at least not for a team like the Giants. Not traditionally, at least.
Think about it. The Yankees and the Dodgers have had 5 or more losing seasons a couple of times way back in their franchise history. Teams like the Red Sox, Mets, and Phillies are known for their losing. These are all crown jewel franchises for the sport and yet none of them have managed to avoid extended misery for their fans. The Giants certainly don’t enjoy the media fawning that these other teams do (partially because of this decade-long malaise) but that’s okay, because they have the history behind them.
Unless it all ends this season. The team is under a good amount of pressure to perform and setup what’s supposed to be The San Francisco Century once the Athletics vamoose to Vegas and so dealing with that naturally deals with the history involved here. And before fans rush in to preemptively dismiss any concerns about this historical track record of not having five consecutive losing seasons — and those people exist today and will grow in number if a losing season comes to pass — I say that this distinction is something that’s to be celebrated. No, not with a lavish ceremony, but simply as something that’s valued. Four seasons might seem like an arbitrary cutoff, but I think of it this way: a high school student might not see the Giants win a lot of games, but on either side of their high school experience, they could have a lot of memories from winning moments.
It’s not an accomplishment that requires comparison to the Yankees or Dodgers (besides, the Dodgers have already won the rivalry with the Giants and look setup to overtake them in total wins within the next few seasons), because the losing streak mark stands on its own as a team accomplishment. It’s a marker of the Giants’ winning ways. It is pretty cool, though, that as dominant as the Yankees and Dodgers have been throughout their histories, the Giants have managed to do something they haven’t.
That is the kind of history to keep in mind as you predict the season and consider everything they did in the offseason. The roster is rife with “fingers crossed” guys and situations and that sort of variability has worked out for the team in the past — usually because the team had Barry Bonds in the lineup — but it also means that it could be an experiment that blows up in the faces of the front office personnel.
On a somewhat more positive note: it’s also a talisman for the season, if you’re a more superstitious fan. The team has bounced back from 2-year, 3-year and 4-year stretches of losing to have surprise seasons or sustained success. Is there some sort of baseball forcefield that won’t allow the Giants to be losers for five years? Some sort of luck from the Baseball Gods that have been granted to our favorite squadron? And, will that luck mean that Luis Arraez works out at second base and the California Lottery bullpen pays out? Or, will we find out that all the luck got used up in the offseason when the team picked up two new investors to help fund Mission Rock? We’ll find out in 162 games. Though, I hope we have a better sense of how it’s going to break much sooner than that.
Much like the 49ers were defined by their “first to five and undefeated” Super Bowl narrative until they weren’t, the Giants have something to lose from a reputational standpoint if this season turns out like most have over the past decade.
No pressure, Buster.
