The San Francisco Giants began in 1883 as the New York Gothams, soon renamed the Giants, and became the National League’s New York power under John McGraw. Christy Mathewson’s fadeaway, the 1905 World Series, and later the 1921–22 titles against the Yankees made the Polo Grounds a cathedral of inside baseball. Mel Ott, Bill Terry, and Carl Hubbell’s screwball carried the club through the 1930s, including the 1933 championship. Willie Mays arrived in 1951, the same year Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World” won the pennant. After the 1957 season, Horace Stoneham moved the Giants to San Francisco, ending New York’s NL era alongside the Dodgers’ departure.

Seals Stadium and then Candlestick Park hosted Mays’s West Coast prime, including “The Catch” already in the past (1954 World Series in New York) and a new chapter of wind, cold, and greatness. The 1962 club lost a seven-game World Series to the Yankees. Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Orlando Cepeda, and later Will Clark and the 1989 pennant — a Bay Area World Series interrupted by earthquake — built a California identity. Barry Bonds’s 2001 season of 73 home runs and his 762-career total, still the official records, made the early 2000s both spectacular and controversial in the steroid era. Bonds never won a ring in San Francisco.

Oracle Park (then Pacific Bell Park) opened in 2000 on the China Basin waterfront, with McCovey Cove turning splash hits into kayak lore. The 2010, 2012, and 2014 Giants won three World Series in five years, an even-year dynasty built on pitching, defense, and October luck: Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner’s 2014 postseason, Buster Posey, Pablo Sandoval, and a parade of role players. Those titles, after Bonds’s ringless peak, re-centered the franchise on championships rather than records. The 2021 club’s 107 wins, then a loss to the Dodgers in the NLDS, added another almost to a long list.

Eight World Series championships, a New York-to-San Francisco migration, Mays’s all-around genius, Bonds’s complicated records, and three titles in the 2010s give the Giants a history as large as any National League club. They are McGraw’s tough New York, Mays’s basket catch, a windy Stick, and a waterfront park where even-year magic once felt like a law of October. From the Polo Grounds to Oracle Park, the Giants have been baseball’s most successfully transplanted original — still wearing the same name, on the other ocean.