The Giants Vote to Leave New York for San Francisco

On August 19, 1957, New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham announced that the club's board of directors had voted 8-1 in favor of moving the franchise to San Francisco. The lone dissenting vote came from M. Donald Grant, who would later become chairman of the expansion New York Mets. With that single boardroom decision, a franchise that had called New York home since 1883 severed its roots and headed west.

Stoneham had watched attendance at the Polo Grounds decline throughout the 1950s. The ballpark sat in upper Manhattan, increasingly difficult to reach by car and surrounded by a neighborhood in transition. In 1957, the Giants drew barely 653,000 fans, a dismal figure for a major league club in the nation's largest city. "Kids are still interested," Stoneham told reporters at the press conference, "but you don't see many of their parents at games."

The Giants were not moving alone. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley had been angling for a new stadium in Brooklyn and, when New York City refused to cooperate, began negotiations with Los Angeles. O'Malley encouraged Stoneham to bring the Giants west too, preserving the rivalry and giving the National League a two-team West Coast presence. The Dodgers' relocation to Los Angeles and the Giants' move to San Francisco became a package deal that reshaped the geography of professional baseball.

The departure gutted New York's National League identity. The Polo Grounds had hosted some of the sport's most famous moments, from Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World to Willie Mays's over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series. The city would not have another National League team until the Mets arrived in 1962.

San Francisco welcomed the Giants with enthusiasm. The team played its first season at Seals Stadium in 1958 before moving to Candlestick Park in 1960. But the vote on August 19, 1957, remains one of baseball's most consequential decisions, the day a New York institution became a California franchise.