The San Francisco Giants Changed the Name of Their Ballpark

Well folks, it may not have been the big free agent splash you were looking for, but the San Francisco Giants did something.

The San Francisco Giants shall no longer play in AT&T Park. Henceforth, they will play in Oracle Park.

The deal will be for 20 years and, according to Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle, could bring in more money than the AT&T deal did. So that is good. But let’s get to why it’s bad.

That beautiful yard, quite arguably the most beautiful in all of baseball, will forever be AT&T Park in my heart. It was named AT&T Park when Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run, when Matt Cain tossed a perfect game, and of course when the Giants won three world championships in a span of five years.

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Those are memories that will last a lifetime. So in 50 years when it’s named, I don’t know, Zuckerberg Field or whatever, I think we’ll all remember it as AT&T Park. The days it bore the name of a massive conglomerate will forever be remembered as the golden days of the San Francisco Giants.

In a symbolic way, it truly does represent the end of an era. AT&T, a company that can be traced back to Alexander Graham Bell, is being replaced by Oracle, a sleek, new (relatively speaking; it was founded in 1977) Silicon Valley-based company. It’s not hard to see AT&T as Brian Sabean and Oracle as Farhan Zaidi.

But it’s fitting that the name is being changed. The Giants are currently in a state of limbo, stuck between thinking about seriously competing or opting for a rebuild instead. It is a new era, and a stadium name change represents that (though obviously to a much lesser extent) just as new management or new players do.

It will be weird to see the park without AT&T plastered all over the place. I’m sure we’ll adjust over time, but maybe it will be how it is with the Sears Tower in Chicago. It’s really called the Willis Tower but everyone just calls it the Sears because that’s what it was named for so long.

Who knows? But with an offseason as boring as this one, I intend to squeeze as much content out of this name change as I can. Goodbye AT&T Park, thanks for the memories.