The Giants Go West: The Tale of When the Giants Left New York and How It Changed Baseball

There was a time when New York had three championship-caliber baseball teams. ... and then the Giants broke their fans' hearts by moving west to San Francisco.

New York is a two-team town Giants-Jets, Knicks-Nets, Yankees-Mets but it hasn’t always been. In the Golden Age of Baseball, New York had three teams, all championship-caliber, in the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers.

Since 1883, the New York Giants had played ball in Manhattan (and in the Polo Grounds since 1911), but the stadium was getting old, and the city was changing. In 1957, Horace Stoneham decided to move the team west along with the Brooklyn Dodgers, absolutely gutting New York baseball fans.

The Giants moved and prospered, but the fans they left behind have been reckoning their love for a home team 3,000 miles away.

SI Vault: Alas Poor Giants (1957)

SI Vault: The Lonely Horace Stoneham (1958)