The Bay Bridge Series: What Is Left of It, and What the Record Actually Says

One hundred and sixty regular season games since 1997 and two games separate them. Here is the whole record, the four buildings it was played in, and why 2024 was the last real one.

Somebody asked me in July whether the A's still play the Giants. Not as a joke. He's a Giants fan, he's been to maybe fifteen games at Oracle in his life, and he genuinely did not know.

They do.

They played six times in 2026. Three of them were in Sacramento.

That's where this thing is now, so before it disappears entirely, somebody should write down the whole record of it, and what the numbers actually say instead of what everybody remembers.

The name came from a bridge and a Series nobody finished on time

The Bay Bridge Series is what people called it in October 1989, when the Giants and the A's met in the World Series and you could, in theory, drive from one ballpark to the other in twenty minutes.

The A's won it in four games. Game 1 was 5-0 at the Coliseum. Game 2 was 5-1, same place. Then the Giants got home to Candlestick and lost 13-7 and 9-6, and that was that.

Except that's the tidy version, and anyone who was here knows the dates don't run the way a four game sweep should. Game 2 was October 15. Game 3 was October 27.

Twelve days.

Loma Prieta hit at 5:04 in the afternoon on October 17, about half an hour before first pitch, with both teams at Candlestick and a full house already in the building. Sixty three people died in the Bay Area that evening. The Series didn't restart for almost two weeks, and when it did nobody had much appetite for it.

So the one time these two teams met with everything on the line, the baseball is not what anybody remembers. That's the rivalry in a sentence. It has never quite been allowed to be a rivalry.

What the regular season record actually says

Interleague play started in 1997, which is when they began meeting every year in games that counted. Everything below comes from the official schedule and final score of every one of those games.

What this table is and is not. It covers the regular season from 1997 to 2026 and nothing else. It is not an all time record between these two clubs, because the Giants and the Athletics have existed in the same league structure since 1968 without playing each other outside the World Series, and because the only postseason meeting they have ever had is the one in 1989 that is described above and deliberately left out of the totals. If you see a bigger number somewhere else, it is counting something different.

Home and away, same source: the Giants are 45-35 in games at their own ballpark and 36-44 in games at the A's, which across 160 meetings is about as close as a rivalry gets.

One hundred and sixty games over thirty seasons and there are two games in it. I've had this argument at barbecues with people who were certain the A's owned us, and other people equally certain we owned them, and the answer is that neither happened. It has been a coin flip for three decades.

The swings inside it are the fun part. The A's won five of six in 2007. We won five of six in 2009, then did it again in 2015, then again in 2025. Nobody ever built anything out of those runs because the teams were almost never good in the same summer.

Eleven ballparks, and only four buildings

The venue column in that table looks like more places than it is. The Coliseum shows up as the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum, then Network Associates, then McAfee, then Oakland, then O.co, then Oakland again, because the naming rights turned over five times while the concrete stayed exactly as miserable as it always was. Candlestick spent its last Bay Bridge years as 3Com Park. The Giants' place in China Basin has been PacBell, SBC, AT&T and now Oracle.

Four buildings, really. Candlestick until 1999. The Coliseum until 2024. The park in China Basin from 2000 on. And now, since 2025, Sutter Health Park in West Sacramento, which is a Triple A ballpark ninety minutes up the causeway from a city that used to have a team.

2024 was the last real one

This is the part I want on the record, because it happened quietly and I don't think most people noticed it at all.

The last Bay Bridge Series where both halves were actually played in the Bay Area was 2024. Two games at the Coliseum, two at Oracle, split down the middle. Then the A's left, and in 2025 the away half moved to Sacramento.

You can still call the June games at Oracle a Bay Bridge Series if you want. The other three are a road trip to a minor league park in another county. In 2026 the Giants took the Sacramento leg two games to one in May, then took two of three at Oracle in June and the season four to two. Fine. It doesn't feel like anything.

There's one more of these. The A's play 2027 in Sacramento, and then it's Opening Day 2028 in Las Vegas. After that the Bay Bridge Series is a Giants road trip to Nevada, which is a thing you can schedule and not a thing you can name after a bridge.

Why it never got to be what it should have been

My honest read isn't a flattering one for either franchise. The two teams were rarely good at the same time. The A's had 2001 through 2003 and 2012 through 2014 and 2018 through 2020, and we were bad through most of that. We had 2010, 2012 and 2014, and they were selling off in a couple of those. The one year both were genuinely in it was 1989, and an earthquake took that.

Six games a year is also not enough to build anything on. The Dodgers are on our schedule thirteen times and I feel it in my stomach by the third one. Six interleague games in May and June, with both clubs pointed at different Octobers, never hardened into hatred. It was always more of a family argument.

And then one side moved out. You can't have a rivalry with a team that has no city, and the Bay Area has now watched enough of its teams leave that we should probably stop being surprised.

How to read the table above

The season series column is who won more games that year, not a playoff result, and the Giants and A's have never met in the postseason except in 1989. Games with a split show a 3-3 or a 2-2. The totals line at the bottom counts every regular season meeting since interleague play began and nothing else, so the 1989 World Series is not in it. Adding 1989 would swing the whole thing to the A's by two, and I'm not going to quietly fold four World Series wins into an interleague ledger to make a number look better.

One hundred and sixty games, two games apart, four buildings, one earthquake, and two summers left before it stops meaning anything at all. I'll keep the table current for as long as there is something to put in it, which by my count is about eighteen more months.

Then we can argue about what to call it.

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