A Giant History : The Franchise Has Won 19 National League Pennants and Five World Series Titles

They are the team of Christy Mathewson and John McGraw, Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal. They began playing in the Polo Grounds and carried baseball west to windy Candlestick Park.

They were champions in New York before the Yankees. Bobby Thomson gave them the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff and Mays carried them from Manhattan to San Francisco, where they will stay after the National League on Tuesday rejected a proposed sale to a group that wanted to move the team to St. Petersburg, Fla.

No franchise has more Hall of Famers than the Giants.

The club has won 19 National League pennants and five World Series. It supplied the game with some of its grandest sights--Mays’ catch, Thomson’s homer, Hubbell’s strikeouts--and perhaps its greatest sound: Russ Hodges screaming, “The Giants win the pennant!”

There was Fred Merkle’s boner on the bases and Fred Snodgrass’ dropped fly ball. There was Marichal clubbing John Roseboro with a bat and Leo Durocher kicking dirt on the umpire--any umpire.

There was the Earthquake World Series and the World Series That Never Was.

Great players. Great teams.

Bad finances.

On either coast, the history of baseball’s Giants hasn’t changed much since the franchise was formed in 1883.

And no team has produced as many great players. In all, 47 players who have worn the Giants uniform are in Cooperstown.

The Giants actually got their name quite by accident, a little more than three years after John B. Day of New York City purchased the Troy, N.Y., franchise in the National League and shifted the team to New York.

The city had been without an NL franchise since 1876, when the original club was expelled from the league for failure to fulfill its schedule requirements.

Day hired John Mutrie as his manager and also acquired several leading stars of the Troy team, including first baseman Roger Connor and pitcher Mickey Welch, both Hall of Famers.

By 1888, Mutrie had built the team to championship caliber, playing in the first Polo Grounds. Legend has it that he inadvertently gave the team its nickname by supposedly exclaiming, “My big boys, my giants,” after a series of stirring victories.

New York won the NL pennant in 1888 and 1889 and engaged in an unofficial “World Series” with the champions of the American Assn., then the big-league rival of the NL.

By the mid-1890s, with Day no longer the owner, the team began to decline and fell on financially hard times. At one point, interest in the club was owned by three other NL teams.

In 1902, after John T. Brush took over ownership, McGraw, the manager, was lured away from the failing Baltimore franchise in the upstart American League. He began a rebuilding process that resulted in pennants in 1904 and 1905, largely fueled by the strong right arm of Mathewson.

McGraw’s refusal to play a World Series in 1904 led to the institution of the modern World Series under the so called “Brush rules,” named for the team owner. Those rules have generally governed the conduct of the series ever since.

McGraw did not want to play the AL champs in 1904 since there was a good chance the pennant would be won by Clark Griffith’s New York Highlanders, who weren’t eliminated until the last day of the season by Boston.

The Giants did not wish to provide a stage to give publicity to their rivals in the “outlaw” AL.

Under McGraw, the Giants won pennants in 1911-13, 1917 and 1921-24, becoming the first team to win four straight pennants in either league.

The Stoneham family, which sold the club to Bob Lurie in 1976, took over control in 1918 when Charles Stoneham purchased the club from Harry Hempstead.

McGraw eventually retired due to ill health in 1932 and was succeeded by Hall of Fame first baseman Bill Terry, who managed the club to pennants in 1933, ’36 and ’37.

After Terry’s retirement, another Hall of Famer, Ott, became the manager. His 1947 Giants set a National League record of 221 home runs but struggled to finish fourth and owner Horace Stoneham reluctantly dismissed the mild- mannered Ott in favor of the fiery Durocher, who came over from the hated Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948.

The move paid big dividends as the Giants won pennants in 1951 and ’54.

Thomson’s dramatic ninth-inning home run in the third game of the 1951 pennant playoff against the Dodgers capped the most dramatic comeback in baseball history--the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff--as the Giants won 37 of their last 44 games to erase a 13 1/2-game deficit.

In 1954, the Giants swept Cleveland for their last World Series championship, a victory highlighted by Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch in front of the center field steps on a drive by Vic Wertz. After that, though, the Giants again began to decline and attendance dropped below 700,000 by 1956.

The National League gave both the Giants and Dodgers permission to move to the West Coast in 1957, and Stoneham announced in August his team was moving.

The Giants opened the 1958 season playing in the home park of the former Pacific Coach League team, the San Francisco Seals.

In 1960, the Giants moved into Candlestick Park, now the second-oldest stadium in the National League behind only Chicago’s fabled Wrigley Field, built in 1914.

Within two years, the Giants won their first pennant in San Francisco, beating the Dodgers, now of Los Angeles, in a three-game playoff. But they lost the World Series in seven games to the Yankees, the final out coming when New York second baseman Bobby Richardson snared a line drive by Hall of Famer McCovey to preserve a 1-0 win in Game 7.

San Francisco also got to the 1989 Series, losing the earthquake-interrupted battle of the Bays in four games to Oakland.

San Francisco and Candlestick had their problems, though.

Almost from the beginning, it was considered a bad place for baseball. The cold, swirling winds were infamous--even before pitcher Stu Miller was blown off the mound in the 1961 All-Star game. The conditions, combined with poor access by public transportation, created frequent attendance problems.

Lurie wanted to continue owning the Giants, and wanted to keep them in San Francisco, but promised they would not stay in Candlestick beyond 1994.