The Giants had the recipe to winning at Oracle Park. Suddenly, it disappeared

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For most of a quarter century, the Giants prided themselves on securing home-field advantage, defending their home turf, and taking advantage of the elements, dimensions, and atmosphere at their downtown ballpark. Every season brought a different team, good and bad. But almost always, the Giants played winning baseball at home.

In their first 25 years at Third and King, the Giants posted 20 winning records. Above .500 an impressive 80% of the time.

This season, not so much. The Giants are 30-33 at Oracle Park with three homestands remaining. After an impressive showing in Milwaukee, where the Giants took two of three from the majors’ premier team, they’ll open a home series Tuesday night against the Cubs.

Losing at their own domicile has been so constant that the Giants haven’t won consecutive home games in six weeks.

“The home part is really hard to explain,” hitting coach Pat Burrell said. “I'd like to think being at home is an advantage for us. It doesn't seem that way currently. We've talked about it with the guys. We have to make this a homefield advantage. We have to embrace this ballpark. And for whatever reason, it just hasn't been that way. Now, we've been hot at home this year, too, right? So it’s part of the ebbs and flows of the season, but it's hard not to ignore some of the staggering stuff.”

The difference between this season and the past five losing seasons (2005, 2007, 2008, 2017, 2019) is that the 2025 Giants actually were an extremely good home team at the start. In their first five homestands, covering 33 games, they played .667 ball (22-11).

However, since then, over the past four homestands, 30 games, it has been a nose dive. They played at a .267 clip (8-22) and were historically bad in one ugly stretch, going 1-15.

“It’s difficult to be a successful team if you don’t win the majority of your games played at home,” general manager Zack Minasian said. “I still go back to pitching and defending and playing clean baseball in a low-run scoring environment as just being extremely important to the outcome of the game.”

Those three ingredients were the recipe to many a successful Giants season, no matter how little the offense might have contributed. But the offense has been especially anemic in recent home games.

The pitching, the strength of the team early in the season, contributed to the home woes of late, too. 

The breakdown …

The first five homestands – at the plate: .243/.316/.382 (4.09 runs per game); on the mound: 2.78 ERA, .240 opponents’ batting average.

The last four homestands – at the plate: .219/.292/.336 (2.97 runs per game); on the mound: 4.37 ERA, .266 opponents’ batting average.

“The ballpark hasn't snuck up on anybody,” Burrell said. “I mean, it's been there for 25 years. And it's actually gotten smaller. So I don't think that's a factor. I mean, is it tougher to score runs in San Francisco? Yes. Are there a lot of home runs there? No. That has nothing to do with winning. So we’ve got to do a better job embracing our ballpark, period.

“We can be productive without hitting homers. I think the industry says otherwise these days, but I still believe that to be true. Other teams are coming in here with the same conditions. Look, it’s fair on both sides. So we have to find some answers to those questions.”

Perhaps it would help to loosen up a bit. Relax. Feel confident. Focus on contact, two-strike approaches, using the gaps. Get ’em on, get ’em over, get ’em in. Keep the line moving. All those things that play into smart and winning baseball at Oracle Park. As manager Bob Melvin said, “We’re playing a little tight there right now. Nobody feels great about it. What we’ve done at home is unacceptable.”

Minasian emphasized the importance of “focusing on things we can control. Things like effort and preparation and being really good at those things and believing that they will equate to wins.”

The Giants are coming off one of their most prolific weekends of the season, beating the Brewers 7-1 and 4-3 after dropping Friday night’s opener 5-4, wasting two Willy Adames home runs in his return to Milwaukee. It was three straight well-played games in which right fielder Luis Matos provided inspiration by going 6-for-11 with two homers.

Now it’s about maintaining that momentum in San Francisco.

Justin Verlander gets the start Tuesday night. Two of his last three outings at home, he combined to throw 12 innings of one-run ball. The 42-year-old right-hander’s latest home start was his best of the year, two hits over seven scoreless innings.

“All I can talk about is from my own personal perspective, and for me, you’ve just got to wipe the board clean,” he said. “There’s no point in sitting here dwelling and saying, ‘Oh, we didn’t play well at home, why didn’t it go so well?’ You either lay down and take it or stand up and fight. Like this whole season, I’ve been fighting to try to find it. I hope our team does the same thing and this next homestand is different.”

The 1-15 stretch was especially bothersome, the team’s worst at home since 1901, the franchise’s 19th year in existence, back when the Giants were housed at the Polo Grounds in New York.

Stunningly, over this latest 16-game plunge, the Giants were held to one or no runs 10 times. They scored just 32 runs in the 16 games and hit .203 with a .266 on-base percentage and .299 slugging percentage. The runners-in-scoring-position stat, a sore point all season, was 18-for-114.

Yet fans keep showing up. The Giants’ average attendance is 36,224, ranking seventh in the majors, and large crowds continue to provide encouragement despite all the losing. 

“That’s why we do it,” Minasian said of performing for fans. “When you look at the support, it’s been awesome. The engagement, it’s exciting. As a front office, you feel a civic responsibility to play really good baseball, play exciting baseball – like Buster (Posey) said when he got hired, creating memories. That hasn’t changed, and hopefully they keep coming and we play better baseball because that’s what they deserve.”

Since 2000, the year the Giants’ yard opened, they’ve been among the winningest home teams in the majors – 1,137-906, a .557 winning percentage, the sixth-highest among the 30 teams. Only the Yankees, Dodgers, Cardinals, Braves and Red Sox have fared better.

The 2003 team, Felipe Alou’s first at the helm, was the lone time in their ballpark history the Giants won at a .700 clip (.704). Other years the Giants were dominant at home: 2000 (.679), 2021 (.667), 2009 (.642), 2002 (.617). The only World Series team to play at least .600 ball at home was in 2010 (.605).

Along the way, there were countless memories, starting with the Barry Bonds home run records and milestones, the Matt Cain perfect game and other assorted no-hitters, the Kenny Lofton pennant-clinching single, the Travis Ishikawa pennant-clinching homer, and the Pablo Sandoval three-homer World Series game.

Beyond the Bonds years, the Giants won games and championships with pitching and defense and just enough offense – the type that didn’t always rely on power but did the little things to generate runs, especially at home. It’s no coincidence that hitters acquired in the draft and in trades under Posey, who’s trying to bring the Giants back to glory, tend to have high contact rates. The type that could fit in nicely one day at quirky Oracle Park.

The Giants have five weeks to get it together. They’re five games under .500. Three under .500 at home. They’ve got three homestands and 18 home dates to go. To create more memories, albeit the right kind.