San Jose Giants

The San Jose Giants are a Minor League Baseball team in the California League, serving as the Single-A affiliate for the San Francisco Giants. Based in San Jose, California, the team plays at Excite Ballpark.

Games

The game-day experience at a San Jose Giants game leans into baseball’s older traditions. Fans sit close to the field, general admission tickets are available, and players sign autographs before each game. The outfield walls are covered with advertisements, reminiscent of 1920s and 1930s ballparks. The original scoreboard displayed only basic data—runs, strikes, balls, and outs—and was updated in 2005 with lights to show the count (three for strikes, four for balls) instead of numbers.

An out-of-town scoreboard for other California League games was manually operated with hand-hung number cards. In 2006, the main scoreboard was replaced with a 21-by-15-foot video screen costing $500,000, and the out-of-town board was retired. Between innings, fans enjoy games and entertainment like kids’ air guitar, a child footrace around the bases, or throwing a baseball at a truck’s headlights for prizes. The team introduced a mascot, Gigante, in 2006; before that, the San Francisco Giants’ mascot Lou Seal made occasional appearances.

Krazy George, a well-known Bay Area fan, was a regular at San Jose Giants games and also attended MLB, NFL, NHL, and NCAA football events in the region.

History

San Jose has hosted several minor league teams over the years, including the San Jose Red Sox from 1947 to 1958. The current franchise began as the San Jose Bees, joining the California League in 1962 as an affiliate of the expansion Los Angeles Angels. The Bees later became a Kansas City Royals affiliate (1970–1974) and a Cleveland Indians affiliate (1975–1976).

Many Royals players from the 1970s and 1980s—such as George Brett, Amos Otis, and Dennis Leonard—played in San Jose. The Sacramento Solons then leased the San Jose affiliate for two seasons, renaming them the San Jose Missions, playing in the Pacific Coast League as an affiliate of the Oakland Athletics and Seattle Mariners. In 1982, the club became the San Jose Expos, affiliated with the Montreal Expos, but that partnership ended after one year, and the team returned to the Bees name as an independent club.

As an independent team, the Bees could sign players from Nippon Professional Baseball; the Seibu Lions loaned several players, including Norio Tanabe and Kimiyasu Kudo. The 1986 Bees featured five former Major Leaguers—Steve Howe, Mike Norris, Ken Reitz, Todd Cruz, and Daryl Sconiers—who had struggled with drugs and alcohol and were effectively blacklisted by Major League Baseball. This mix of disgraced former stars and Japanese imports drew coverage from publications like The Times, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

San Jose Giants (1988–present)

In 1987, a group led by Winston H. Cox bought the team. The current affiliation with the San Francisco Giants began in 1988. Since then, the San Jose Giants have been one of the California League’s most successful teams, winning league championships in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2021, and most recently in 2025. In both 2005 and 2007, they came back from a 0–2 deficit in the best-of-five series to win three straight games at home against the Lake Elsinore Storm.

(The 2001 championship was declared a co-championship with the Storm after the final series was canceled due to the September 11 attacks.) The team has also won the Northern Division title eight times and had the best record of any Class A minor league team in the 1990s. Attendance has increased in 14 of the last 17 years. The 2008 season saw a second-highest team record attendance of 183,788.

The San Jose Giants have developed more than 190 major league players, including Buster Posey, Tim Lincecum, Jonathan Sánchez, Matt Cain, Brian Horwitz, Noah Lowry, Merkin Valdez, Chad Zerbe, Russ Ortiz, Bill Mueller, Doug Mirabelli, Rod Beck, Joe Nathan, Francisco Liriano, Shawn Estes, Emmanuel Burriss, Andrés Torres, Pablo Sandoval, Madison Bumgarner, and Adam Duvall.

In 2021, as part of Major League Baseball’s restructuring of Minor League Baseball, the Giants were placed in the Low-A West at the Low-A classification. In 2022, the Low-A West was renamed the California League, the circuit’s historical name, and reclassified as a Single-A league.