Last year, the Dodgers and Padres opened the Major League Baseball season a couple of weeks before everybody else by playing a series in Japan. The year before that, the league scheduled all 30 teams to play on the same Opening Day for the first time since 1968. In 2026, MLB will have an Opening Night, and the matchup they’ve chosen for this primetime spotlight has our favorite squadron hosting the New York Yankees at Oracle Park.
It feels very strange for the Giants to get tossed this sort of bone,
as the franchise has done less than nothing for the better part of a decade to make them seem like appointment viewing or interesting to the casual baseball fan in any meaningful way. I think that’s the power of Rafael Devers, though. He’s a name East Coasters recognize and as putrid as the team’s performance has been in the regular season, the Giants are still a famous enough franchise that they with a former Red Sox star taking on the vaunted Yankees hits the advertising sweet spot.
MLB has announced their 2026 schedule this afternoon. Yankees-Giants will be a “standalone” marquee event on Wednesday, March 25th, “the earliest scheduled traditional Opening Day in MLB history.” That gives Buster Posey and Zack Minasian even less time to execute what figures to be a thorough and exhausting plan to improve the Giants from a 75-win team to a 78/79-win one .
You can go take a look at the Giants’ full schedule on their site or just glance at what Susan Slusser posted to social media:
Yankees, @Padres, Mets, Phillies, @Orioles, @Reds is a tough start, and even if we consider a three-game set in Washington to play the lowly Nationals an easy series, the opening month ends with the Dodgers, Marlins (the Death Fog!), and the Phillies in Philadelphia. May gets a tiny bit easier, but not at first, as the first six are against the Rays in Tampa Bay and then back to Oracle to host the Padres. And, it’s not like they’ve been great against the Pirates recently, and they’ll get them next before a road trip for four in Dodger Stadium followed by three in Sacramento and then three in Arizona — that’s an obnoxious 10-game road trip from a travel perspective.
Somehow, the Giants will be playing the Athletics six times in 2026, which feels wrong. The easiest month on the schedule, just based on 2025 results might be September, when the Giants will play 12 games against Pirates, Cardinals, and Twins. The other 12? The Mets, Padres, and Dodgers.
Obviously, it’s tough to look at a schedule a year out and make any sort of predictions. The Giants did well against a tough schedule the first few months of the season, but they’ve been bad in July & August against teams that were supposed to be better than them anyway. The Giants have a lot of work to do to make on-paper projections more theory than reality.
I declare the recent Yankees-Giants matchups to be Weird, though obviously one-sided. The Yankees have not lost a game at Oracle Park since 2007, sweeping the Giants in San Francisco in both 2019 & 2024. The Giants faced the Yankees on Opening Day back in 2023, and it didn’t go that well for ol’ Logan Webb. That was the first game after the Arson Judge offseason and the Giants limped out of Yankee Stadium having been shutout twice in three games. But the Giants won the series in New York back in April. I’ll still give the Yankees the edge since they’re 16-8 in this interleague series, and it makes perfect sense that the Giants would lose a nationally televised game — the lone game of the night only adding insult to injury, but not being too much different from their Sunday Night Baseball appearances.
Still, it’s cool that the Giants will formally kickoff the 2026 season.
Some other quirks from the new schedule:
- Because of the Wednesday standalone game, the Giants will get the first Sunday (March 29th) of the regular season off.
- No scheduled day-night doubleheaders (bummer).
- Their longest stretches of continuous play are 13 games: May (8th-20th), May/June (29th-10th), July/August (24th-5th), and August (18th-30th)
- May into June goes Coors Field, American Family Field, Wrigley Field, which I’d ordinarily consider to be a brutal gauntlet of flyball madness; but, the Park Factors for the latter two parks has them as low run-scoring environments on par with Oracle Park; so, adjust your expectations accordingly (unless you’re way more up on this stuff than I am and already have).
- Whether or not the Cubs extend Kyle Tucker, I suspect they’ll be a tough team next year, just given the Pete Crow-Armstrong, Seiya Suzuki, etc. of it all, so a June Swoon looks to be fait accompli. That’s a heavy helping of Brewers, Cubs, Cubs again, Atlanta, the Marlins in Miami (usually a tough visit!), then the A’s in SF followed by a rematch with Atlanta before going on the road to Arizona, then Colorado, then they get the Blue Jays after all that. Maybe the Blue Jays won’t have the same lineup as they do this year (currently, 5th in runs scored)…?
With year-round interleague, there’s not many places to get well, and since the Giants are ending 2025 closer to the bottom third of the sport, it’s hard to look at matchups against the Rockies and White Sox as outs. Still, I suppose it’s fun to imagine the Giants winning 90 games in 2026 and foiling a lot of best laid plans by perennial postseason teams.
