A look at the Giants' best (and worst) spring training records since 1958

New York Times

10-03-2025

The San Francisco Giants are the best team in baseball.
Don't take my word for it. It's right there on mlb.com/standings, which shows the Giants leading the world with a .769 winning percentage this spring training. Over a 162-game season, that kind of winning percentage would translate to a 125-win season, and while I'm not sure if that would be good enough to win the NL West, it would sure make the Dodgers sweat a little bit.
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Of course, you know that spring standings aren't to be trusted. You know they're useless. If you're not sure about this truism, check any box score from this spring, and you'll probably find a last name you don't recognize. It's OK to be optimistic every spring, but maybe don't trust the results of a game that was decided in the eighth inning on a three-run triple from X. Fergulo. In 2017, the Giants had a .543 winning percentage in spring with a little help from Jimmy Rollins, and that sure didn't tell us much.
It's still a lot cooler to follow a team with a winning record in spring training than the other way around. It keeps out the intrusive thoughts. So let's compare the Giants' Cactus League winning percentages to how they did in the regular season. Let's find out for ourselves whether the best springs led to the best seasons and vice versa.
If nothing else, maybe this article will show up in Google searches for 'history of Giants spring training records' or 'Cactus League records Giants year by year' and help some poor soul out. This article has the Giants' spring records since they moved to San Francisco in 1958, after all, and I had to dig through a lot of Arizona newspapers from the '50s and '60s to compile it:
It was a bright cold day in March, and the clocks were striking thirteen. That was the opening of 1984 (the baseball season), when the Giants looked like a real baseball team in spring training. They went 18-9 that spring, and it was possible for fans to convince themselves that the Giants were back. They had contended until the last week of the 1982 season, and they were just a little under .500 in 1983. It was possible that the '83 season was the outlier, and now there was an entire month of fake baseball to support that theory.
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It was disinformation of the highest order. The Giants would immediately faceplant at the start of the '84 season, with a 7-16 April, and their May wasn't much better. Manager Frank Robinson was fired when the team was 22 games below .500 and 22 games back, and while they'd draft No. 22 with the pick they got from all that losing, they would lose 100 games for the first and only time in franchise history in 1985. The spring training record wasn't just useless; it was deceptive and cruel. It was the last good baseball the Giants would offer for the next two years, to the point where they wouldn't even have a single winning month until 1986.
The pitching was suspect, but the Giants were supposed to hit. The San Francisco Examiner's NL West preview started the Giants' capsule with 'This could be the best all-around hitting team in the league.' Even after they lost on Opening Day, the opposing pitcher said, 'This is the best hitting lineup the Giants have had in a long time.' And, to be fair, the offense was OK that year, with a 100 OPS+, but the team was not OK overall.
The 1997 Giants were supposed to be a fluke. They won the division, sure, but they did it while being outscored on the season, and they were helped by a lot of performances that weren't likely to be repeated. Jeff Kent wasn't going to have that kind of season again, and neither was J.T. Snow. Barry Bonds was already 32, so who knew how many good seasons he had left in him? Everyone was waiting for the Giants to stumble.
And they did. In March, at least, when they finished with a 9-21 record. Kent didn't want to hear about it.
'Defending champions, we lose four, maybe five guys, and we're back (in the projected standings) with the Diamondbacks? That's stupid. Plain ignorant.'
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He wasn't wrong. The Giants contended all year, and while they technically didn't make the postseason, they did play a 163rd game. They made the sort-of postseason with an 89-74 record, and the difference between their regular-season winning percentage and spring winning percentage is still the biggest gap in franchise history.
Let's zoom in on this era:
Every year for a decade, the Giants were worse in the spring than they were in the regular season. The common thread was Bonds, who arrived six days after the mandatory reporting date every year and slept in his clubhouse recliner for a month. At least, that's how I remember the newspapers reporting it back then. But when the season started, they were ready to go. Let this be a lesson. Clubhouse BarcaLoungers for all.
Pretty good. Pretty danged good.
2010 spring WP%: .657
2012: .545
2014: .586
Meaningless? Almost certainly. Spring records aren't very useful because of how many minor leaguers and NRIs play, but take a look at the Opening Day lineup in 2010 to remember how many changes there can be with the actual big leaguers a team is expecting to count on.
Still, while spring records are useless, spring vibes very much aren't. A team can definitely pick up on how their teammates and coaches are feeling, and a winning spring can't hurt the collective optimism. If you're looking to read too much into Cactus League standings, consider how much continuity the Giants have compared to last spring, and how all this spring winning isn't doing anything to dispel the idea of a cohesive roster.
In which 'truly awful' is defined as the teams with 90 losses or more in the regular season:
1974 spring WP%: .550
1979: .538
1984: .667
1985: .500
1992: .581
1996: .375
2007: .469
2008: .281
2017: .543
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That's three springs where the losing started early and gave fans a heads up, and six where the team was good-to-great in the Cactus League before falling into a tar pit that regular season. Forget what I wrote up there about spring vibes. Sometimes they're fake.
Here's something I can't make sense of, and I've spent a long time trying. I've written paragraphs and deleted them, only to write them and delete them again. This feels like it means something, but I don't know what.
The Giants played 1,817 exhibition games between 1958 and 2024. Their winning percentage in those games was .517.
The Giants played 10,595 regular-season games between 1958 and 2024. Their winning percentage in those games was .517.
Is this a sign that, given enough of a sample, spring records are actually uncannily accurate? Is it just a coincidence? Or are the Giants the official .517 team of Major League Baseball and always have been? I'm going with the coincidence explanation, but it's enough to make me pause at least.
The Giants are having a good spring, at least in terms of wins and losses. Sometimes that carries over into the regular season. Sometimes it doesn't. It's more fun to follow than a team having a lousy spring, though, and at least it's inspired an article that can help game Google results for 'Giants spring training history' or 'Giants Cactus League records all time.' Might as well get cocky and throw a 'Taylor Swift tickets face value' in there for good measure. Heck, it might work. Spring is when you get to be optimistic and try new things.
Right now, the Giants are trying this crazy new thing called 'winning.' It hasn't not worked yet this year, so maybe it'll keep going.