San Francisco Giants vs. New York Giants: One Name, Two Teams
The football team borrowed its name from a baseball club that later moved west, and the paperwork still shows it.
On Sunday, September 27, 2026, a search for "Giants game today" had two honest answers. The San Francisco Giants closed their season at home against the Dodgers, and the New York Giants hosted the Tennessee Titans. I suspect a fair number of people clicked the wrong one. So we went back to how one nickname ended up on two major-league teams in two sports, and the story turns out to be a borrowing that was never returned.
The baseball club had it first
The baseball Giants began in 1883 as the New York Gothams. The popular legend credits manager Jim Mutrie with renaming them after a win, shouting about his big fellows. SABR's biography of Mutrie is firmer and less romantic. A game report in The World on April 14, 1885 is what gave the club its permanent nickname, possibly written by the sportswriter P. J. Donahue, and within weeks "Giants" was in common use.
SABR adds that no 19th-century account shows Mutrie naming anybody. He claimed the credit more than thirty years later. I like the newspaper version better, honestly, because it means a baseball dynasty got its name from a hurried game story with no byline.
Then football borrowed it
In 1925 Tim Mara bought New York's NFL franchise for a reported $500, according to the football Giants' own history page. In 1963 he became one of the 17 charter members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which is a long way from a $500 purchase. He named the team after the baseball club, in part, as Wikipedia puts it, to piggyback on an established brand. The two teams even shared a home. The football Giants played at the Polo Grounds, the baseball Giants' park, from 1925 through 1955.
Mara's first season nearly sank him. What saved it was a late home game when the Chicago Bears arrived with Red Grange and more than 70,000 people showed up at the Polo Grounds. The team's history page says that crowd convinced Mara pro football could work.
| San Francisco Giants | New York Giants | |
|---|---|---|
| Sport and league | Baseball, National League | Football, NFL |
| Started | 1883, as the New York Gothams | 1925 |
| Where the name came from | A New York newspaper report, April 1885 | Borrowed from the baseball club |
| Shared home | Polo Grounds, until 1957 | Polo Grounds, 1925 to 1955 |
| Colors | Black, orange and white | Dark blue, red and white |
| Home today | Oracle Park, San Francisco | MetLife Stadium, New Jersey |
The name that outlived the reason for it
To avoid confusion with the baseball team, the football club incorporated in 1929 as the New York National League Football Company, Inc. In 1937 it became New York Football Giants, Inc. Then the baseball Giants left for San Francisco after the 1957 season.
The football team kept the name anyway. It still uses New York Football Giants as its corporate name, per Wikipedia's team entry, which means a legal label invented to tell two neighbors apart has now outlasted the neighbor's stay by nearly seventy years. Even the tabloid nickname "Jints" came over from the baseball team.
Telling them apart on a busy Sunday
The quickest tell is the calendar. Baseball's regular season runs through the spring and summer and ends in late September; football fills the fall. The two overlap for only a few weeks each year, which is exactly when searches like today's get tangled.
- Black and orange, a ballpark on the bay: San Francisco, baseball.
- Blue and red, a stadium in East Rutherford: New York, football.
- If someone says "Football Giants," they are using a name that only exists because the baseball team came first.
My favorite part of the whole tangle is how polite it is. One team asked to share a name and a building. The other said yes, then moved 2,900 miles away (approximate, by road), and nobody ever bothered to give the name back.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
