© Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
The San Francisco Giants will begin the 2020 season in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, the full schedule for the heavily abbreviated 60-game season was revealed, with the Giants opening against the Dodgers on July 23rd at 7 p.m. PT.
That was all well and good as part of the initial announcement of mostly division rival-oriented games to kick off a season which still hangs, precariously, in the balance. That is especially obvious as the Giants saw two more members of the organization test positive for COVID-19, the team announced earlier in the day.
Still, the season figures to be played, at least in part at this juncture, and now, there is a schedule to purvey how MLB sees that season playing out. For Giants fans, there will be a fair amount of resentment at this next fact.
The Giants will play the Dodgers 10 times. Seven of those games will be in Los Angeles. Three will be in San Francisco. For those of you math buffs out there, that’s 11.67 percent of the season played in Los Angeles. That entire spate of seven games will be within the Giants’ first 17 games.
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— SFGiants (@SFGiants) July 6, 2020
Here’s a breakdown of the games:
Dodgers: 7 away, 3 home
Rockies: 6 away, 4 home
Diamondbacks: 3 away, 7 home
Padres: 3 away, 3 home
A’s: 3 away, 3 home
Angels: 2 away, 2 home
Mariners: 2 away, 2 home
Rangers: 3 home
Astros: 3 away
Rather than breaking those 10-game sets into equal doses of five at home and five away between division opponents, MLB opted for the stranger option, per usual, forcing these uneven splits and having, in some cases, teams travel to a new city for a two-game series. Again, this is in the country where a global pandemic is raging the hardest.
Only those 10-game sets, the most crucial games in this abbreviated season, were the unevenly distributed ones. Each team will face their division opponents in spates of six or seven games on the road and three or four at home or vice versa, with those seven games split into four- or three-game series. The rest, aside from a pair of interleague series which consist of three games (either fully away or at home), are split evenly into three and three or two and two on the road and at home.
The following is from the Giants:
The San Francisco Giants released their 60-game schedule for the 2020 season today, which will feature the Giants opening the season on Thursday, July 23 at Los Angeles-NL for a four game series. It will mark the 10th time in Club history that the Giants will open the season against the Dodgers in Los Angeles and the 11th-consecutive year that San Francisco opens their season on the road.
Due to Major League Baseball’s efforts to limit travel during the 2020 season, the Giants will only play against the National League West and American League West. The Giants will play each of their National League West Division rivals 10 times – the Arizona Diamondbacks (7 home/3 away), the Colorado Rockies (6 away/4 home), the Los Angeles Dodgers (7 away/3 home) and San Diego Padres (6 home/4 away).
The Giants’ Interleague schedule will feature 20 games against the American League West including visits to Houston (August 10-12), Los Angeles-AL (August 17-18), Seattle (September 15-16) and Oakland (September 18-20). The Giants will host Texas (July 31-August 2), Oakland (August 14-16), Los Angeles-AL (August 19-20) and Seattle (September 8-9).
The Giants will have five road trips with the longest being a 10-game, three-city trip to Colorado (August 3-6), Los Angeles-NL (August 7-9) and Houston (August 10-12). Their shortest road trip will be a two-game series against the Angels (August 17-18). San Francisco will play 11 home games over 14 days from August 14-27.
San Francisco’s final regular-season homestand is a seven-game set against Colorado (September 21-24) and San Diego (September 25-27).