San Francisco Giants 2023 schedule: The good, the bad and the ugly

On March 30, 2023, the Giants will open the season against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Even beyond the typical pomp and circumstance of Opening Day, the game will have the attention of the baseball world. A former Yankee will be back in his old stomping grounds, now wearing the orange-and-black cap of the Giants. As the fans give him a standing ovation for everything he meant to the Yankees organization, he’ll take that cap off and tip it. He’ll want to do it just once, but the cheers just keep coming, so he’ll have to do it several times, turning around to make sure he’s acknowledging fans in every section.

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It’s true. Thairo Estrada is returning to Yankee Stadium for the first game of the 2023 season. But this is not the only quirk of the 2023 MLB schedule, which was released Wednesday and features a new, balanced format. There are positives and there are negatives to this format, so let’s explore them through the prism of someone who cares only about the Giants.

You.

Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly of the 2023 Giants schedule.

The #SFGiants 2023 schedule has been announced 🗓 pic.twitter.com/cEHng3HCxd

— SFGiants (@SFGiants) August 24, 2022

The Good

We’ll get to the obvious perks of seeing every team at least once in a season (Shohei Ohtani! Vladimir Guerrero Jr.! Matt Moore!), but let’s start with the best change of all: a more reasonable travel schedule. The marathon road trip has been nearly eliminated, and regardless of how you feel about all of the other changes, this one should make up for all the negatives.

On May 22, the Giants will play in Minnesota to begin a three-game series. Two days later, they’ll fly to Milwaukee for a four-game series.

On July 14, immediately following the All-Star break, the Giants start a 10-game road trip that takes them through Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Washington.

On Sept. 14, they’ll play in Colorado for a four-game set, take a day off and then play two games against the Diamondbacks and four against the Dodgers.

Those are the only road trips longer than six games.

This is a remarkable quality-of-life improvement for everyone. Players, coaches, broadcasters, clubhouse managers, executives, everyone. There will be a couple of trips where the travel is made worse because of geography — there’s a six-game trip that takes the Giants from San Diego to Chicago without a day off between — but the difference between a week on the road and two weeks on the road is substantial. It’s not just twice as hard; the grind becomes exponential.

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This won’t be an advantage for any single team, at least not in any way that we’ll be able to measure. But the quality of play should improve, even if only slightly. Rested players are better players, by definition, and so are happier players. Mostly, I’m happy for the people who aren’t players but have to travel to 81 games every year. There will still be long stretches without a day off (there are 14 consecutive games in April, bouncing between Detroit, Miami and San Francisco, so it’s not all gravy), but the murder excursions are gone. The new CBA got them most of the way gone, but now they’re even closer to extinction.

With that going for it, the new, balanced schedule is already a success. But, yes, now you get to see Ohtani, Guerrero, Mike Trout, Aaron Judge (on the Red Sox for maximum chaos) and all of the other players you might get to watch once every three years, if that, under the old schedule setup. Baseball will never be a star-driven game, but there is still appeal to fresh faces and different players.

I’m fascinated by Adley Rutschman. How good does he look behind the plate? Is he really the next Buster Posey? Better? I could turn on MLB.tv and watch an Orioles game, I suppose, but it’s so much easier to not do that. I’ve been not watching the Orioles my whole life, and it’s worked out.

If he’s playing the Giants, though, I’ll get that look. And I’ll get to check out Julio Rodríguez and more Sandy Alcantara and … you get the idea. There are also old friends to reunite with, from Kevin Gausman to Matt Duffy. What a delight.

Just as important as the players you are seeing, however, are the players you aren’t seeing. At the risk of being rude and dismissive, I would like to formally announce that I have maxed out my Ryan McMahon quota for this lifetime. Nothing against him. Fine player. Stellar defender. But I have listened to every track on the Ryan McMahon album and taken a frame-by-frame look at every scene in the Ryan McMahon movie. It was not unpleasant, and I recommend the entire Ryan McMahon experience if you have the time, but I’d like to move on now. Eighteen games against the Rockies are simply too many.

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I’m happy the Diamondbacks have new, talented players like Alek Thomas, but I also know that with an unbalanced schedule, I’d get sick of him in about three weeks. So while I’m excited about all of the players who will come in and out of the Giants’ orbit, I’m more excited about the absence of monotony. Just the mere mention of the Yankees allows me to embed this video:

It’s not as if I was fired up to watch the Giants play the Tigers this week, but it was just different enough. It was an excuse to show Sergio Romo striking out Miguel Cabrera a few times, and it was a chance to watch Riley Greene baseball it up a little bit. The Tigers are the Tigers, but they’re also not the Diamondbacks.

Mostly, though, the schedule is a gift because of the short, reasonable road trips.

The Bad

The other side to those short, reasonable road trips? More quick homestands. There’s something about the freedom that comes with a nearly two-week engagement at Oracle Park, with options to go on back-to-back weekends.

There’s more travel for the Giants in terms of miles flown, too. Every trip that’s not taken to San Diego is a trip that’s likelier to be several hours and a couple of time zones away, and that’s not nearly as much fun for anyone involved. Still, the travel schedules were wildly unfair from team to team with the unbalanced schedules. At least everyone is hopping from time zone to time zone just as much now.

Wow, it seems like there’s far more good than bad! Well, that settles …

The Ugly

April 10 (home)
April 11
April 12

June 16 (road)
June 17
June 18

Sept. 21 (road)
Sept. 22
Sept. 23
Sept. 24

Sept. 29 (home)
Sept. 30
Oct. 1

There you go. There are all the Giants-Dodgers games for next year. Don’t spend them all in one place.

To be fair, it would appear as if Major League Baseball tried to make the best out of this, and it’s notable that September is filled with intra-division games. If the Dodgers lose 90 games and are out of the postseason picture (hey, could happen) and it’s the Giants and Padres fighting it out for the NL West, there will be marquee matchups to look forward to.

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But it is an official position of this author that Giants-Dodgers games are good. They are fun. They are the spice, and they must flow. And fewer Giants-Dodgers games is a drag, even if they’re replaced with Giants-Yankees and more Giants-Cardinals or whatever. If I had to rank the effects, positive and negative together, this is the biggest needle-mover of the bunch. Three lousy Giants-Dodgers games from the second week of the season until late September! That’s appalling!

On the other hand, have you watched a Giants-Dodgers game lately? Goodness. No thanks. We’re speaking in theoretical terms right now, because in practical terms they’ve been some of the most unwatchable baseball games in recent memory. Turns out the Dodgers are good, and it can only help the Giants to play the Rangers more instead.

The ugly is truly ugly, though. And if it’s a deciding factor for you, I will not judge. I’m excited about less Diamondbacks and Rockies, and there will be a time when I’ll be very excited about not seeing the Padres as much — they will return to baseball purgatory one day, for it is their true nature — but fewer Dodgers games is as close as we get to a deal breaker.

As is, the 2023 schedule seems fresh. More variety. More quirks, more chances for teams to become inexplicably intertwined, more chances for players you’ve heard of to make-or-break the only team you actually care about.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better. Your mileage might vary, but the overall mileage of all the teams shouldn’t. Just that makes this an improvement.

(File photo of the Giants’ 2016 visit to Yankee Stadium: Rob Tringali / SportsChrome / Getty Images)

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