Giants

The Giants arrive at the current season still measured against the run that closed in 2014, when Bruce Bochy's team collected a third World Series in five years. That title count now stands at eight, five of them won in New York, and the gap between the two eras says as much about the club as either number alone: after the 1954 championship, San Francisco waited fifty-six years for the next one, losing finals in 1962, 1989 and 2002.

The franchise started in 1883 as the New York Gothams, became the Giants two years later, and stayed in New York until Horace Stoneham moved the club to San Francisco in 1958, a decision made alongside the Dodgers' departure for Los Angeles. Willie Mays crossed both eras, debuting in 1951 and making "The Catch" in the 1954 Series; Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" belongs to that same New York season. Monte Irvin, in 1949, was among the first Black players to put on a Giants uniform.

The modern title run had its own cast — Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner and Tim Lincecum among the names who came up through the farm system to win it — but it was built, as much as anything, on the club shaking off a drought that had outlasted several generations of players before it.

No rivalry in the sport's history carries the weight of the one left behind in New York: Giants against Dodgers, a fight that started in Brooklyn and Manhattan and simply followed both clubs to the West Coast, still renewed every time San Francisco and Los Angeles meet.