SF Giants schedule features seven games at Dodger Stadium?!

The 2020 SF Giants schedule was announced.

We need to talk about the San Francisco Giants‘ 2020 schedule.

Monday night, in a television production, MLB announced the 60-game schedules for its 2020 season. (If there actually is a 2020 season, but that’s a question for another time.)

We’d had a little warning ahead of time on Twitter from SF Chronicle writer Henry Schulman that we weren’t going to like it. It didn’t take long to see why.

SF Giants 2020 schedule

Beginning with Opening Day, the Giants play SEVEN games at Dodger Stadium in LA but only three against the Dodgers at Oracle Park?

Take the crowd out of it. Take the fact the Giants aren’t expected to even scratch the surface of playoff contention in 2020 out of it.

This still hardly seems fair.

My first thought was that a 10-game schedule breaks down to three series: four games, three games, and three games. That’s simple. Someone’s going to be the odd team out.

My next thought was that it might be difficult to break the four-game series into a pair of two gamers.

Then I looked a little closer at the schedule, only to have Aug. 17-20 jump out at me. The Giants fly to Los Angeles for a pair of games against the Angels, before flying back to San Francisco to host the Angels for two more.

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison: those are the only four games against the Angels scheduled for the season.

But it does make you question how hard it would have been to work out schedules where each team hosts its division rivals for five games and visits them for five.

I guess that might just be overcomplicating things a step too far.

In the end, it is what it is — and it might just be academic if the continued COVID-19 outbreak forces the season off track. We’ll just need to beat the Dodgers in LA. That can be fun, too.

Other highlights of the SF Giants’ 2020 schedule:

After the initial opening series in LA (oh, hey, another chance to split the four-game series fairly), the Giants get a day off. They’ll have seven altogether.

The Giants host the Athletics for a three-game set in mid-August and travel to Oakland for three games in mid-September.

The Giants host the Padres for six games and the Diamondbacks for seven.

There are a pair of three-series road trips, including Aug 3-12 (at Colorado, Dodgers, Houston, followed by an off day) and Sept. 10-20 (at the Padres, Mariners, and A’s, but at least they can sleep in their own beds for that.)

The team closes out the season at home with four games against the Rockies and three against the Padres.

So, looking at it all, what do you think the 2020 record will look like? (Or, do you even think they’ll have one?)