What it means
Say the Giants in Scottsdale and nobody thinks of New York football. The word means the San Francisco Giants, the big-league club that has spent every spring since 1984 at Scottsdale Stadium, the brick ballpark at Osborn Road and Drinkwater Boulevard, two blocks from the bars of Old Town. “The Giants are in town” is a March sentence. It means full hotels, orange-and-black patios, a crowd at the practice fields by nine, and a 1:05 first pitch on a Tuesday.
The team’s year-round home is 750 miles away, which is the odd part. Scottsdale has no major-league franchise of its own, so the city’s baseball identity is a tenant’s, borrowed for five weeks and returned in April. Giants fans travel in numbers no other Cactus League team matches, and over four decades many bought second homes here. The spring training event guide covers the games; the field manual covers how to do a day well.
Where you’ll meet it
At the stadium, obviously, and at the little park beyond its wall, Stadium Left Field Day Park; on the walls of the Pink Pony, the steakhouse where ballplayers have eaten since the Orioles; in Old Town happy hours after a day game; and in the Charros’ red vests at every gate, since the Scottsdale Charros run the hospitality and have since the Giants arrived.
Where the word came from
The Giants brought the name from New York, where it had belonged to the National League club since the 1880s, and brought the club to Arizona in 1947. That spring Bill Veeck took his Cleveland Indians to Tucson, partly to get his Black players out of segregated Florida, and persuaded Giants owner Horace Stoneham to train in Phoenix so the two clubs could play each other. The Giants played at the original Phoenix Municipal Stadium and, apart from one Florida spring in 1951, stayed in Phoenix for 35 years. The franchise moved to San Francisco in 1958 and kept its Arizona camp.
Scottsdale, meanwhile, had a wooden ballpark built by volunteers in 1956 and a string of tenants: the Orioles, the Red Sox, the Cubs from 1967 to 1978, the A’s from 1979 to 1983. In 1984 the Giants and A’s swapped parks, Oakland going to Phoenix Municipal and San Francisco coming to Scottsdale, and the Giants never left. The Charros’ own history and the San Francisco Chronicle put the move in 1982; the stadium’s history, the Cactus League and this site say 1984, treating the earlier date as the negotiation rather than the first camp.
The team nearly left once. By 1989 the 3,000-seat wooden stadium was the smallest in the league and owner Bob Lurie was shopping for stadiums on both coasts. On November 7, 1989, Scottsdale voters approved an $8.4 million bond to tear the old park down and build a modern one; the same night San Francisco voters rejected a downtown ballpark for the same team. The new Scottsdale Stadium, designed by HOK Sport, the firm then finishing Camden Yards, opened on March 12, 1992 with room for about 12,000, and the Giants became a fixture rather than a tenant. A $23.1 million renovation in 2006 added clubhouse space; a larger one from 2019, backed by up to $35 million in city hotel taxes, extended the lease to 2044.
What it is not
The Giants are not Scottsdale’s team the way the D-backs are the Valley’s team; they are a spring tenant with a long lease. The Scottsdale Stadium club you see in October is the Scottsdale Scorpions of the Arizona Fall League, a prospect team that shares the park, and the Giants’ own prospects play there in summer as the Arizona Complex League Giants.
The fine print
A few numbers settle most arguments. Scottsdale Stadium holds about 12,000, including the lawn. The 1992 rebuild cost about $7 million and took less than a year. The Giants’ spring tenancy, counted from 1984, passed forty years in 2024, which makes it one of the longest continuous team-and-city pairings in the Cactus League. The stadium also hosted three games of the 2006 World Baseball Classic.
The 1982-or-1984 question is the record’s one real hole, and it matters because the Charros and the Chronicle are not careless sources. The likeliest reconciliation is that the Giants committed to Scottsdale in 1982 and first trained there in 1984, after the A’s completed their move; no document this site could open says so outright. The Charros guide carries the same caveat.
Culturally the word has shifted. In the 1980s “the Giants” in Scottsdale meant a few thousand retirees on wooden bleachers. The three World Series titles of 2010, 2012 and 2014 and the rise of Giants-Dodgers as a destination weekend turned the spring camp into an event that fills the city’s hotels, and the orange-and-black pilgrimage is now part of what the budget guide means when it says visitors pay for the parks. The city, which owns the stadium, renewed the relationship through 2044 on exactly that logic.