The Giants' Even-Year Titles: 2010, 2012 and 2014
How the San Francisco Giants won three World Series in five years, 2010, 2012 and 2014, with the series results, the pitching, the run-differential math and an honest answer to whether it was a dynasty.
The San Francisco Giants won the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014, three championships in five seasons, and in the two seasons between them they did not even reach the postseason. That pattern, a title every other year, is why the run is remembered as the even-year run. It is also why people argue about whether it was a dynasty at all, since a dynasty usually implies a team that is the best in baseball for years, and the Giants were rarely that.
The more useful question is how a team that never won more than 94 games in those years kept winning in October. This article lays out the three seasons with the historical record, series by series, shows what the run-differential math says about each club, and gives a view on the dynasty label. The short version: pitching, a hard park to score in, and a few October performances that stand among the best in postseason history.
The three titles at a glance
| Season | Record | Finish | Postseason path | World Series |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 92-70 | First, NL West | Beat Atlanta 3-1, Philadelphia 4-2 | Beat Texas 4-1 |
| 2012 | 94-68 | First, NL West | Beat Cincinnati 3-2, St. Louis 4-3 | Beat Detroit 4-0 |
| 2014 | 88-74 | Second, NL West (wild card) | Beat Pittsburgh 1-0, Washington 3-1, St. Louis 4-1 | Beat Kansas City 4-3 |
One manager ran all three clubs: Bruce Bochy, who managed San Francisco from 2007 through 2019 and finished with a 1,050-1,053 regular-season record. The lowest win total on the table, 88 in 2014, still got the club in as a wild card, behind a Los Angeles Dodgers team that won 94.
2010: the first San Francisco title
The 2010 Giants were the first San Francisco champions. The franchise had won in 1954 when it was the New York Giants, and had lost the 1962, 1989 and 2002 World Series after moving west. The 2010 club won 92 games and the National League West, and then won three rounds in October.
Pitching was the identity. Tim Lincecum, a two-time Cy Young Award winner in 2008 and 2009, went 16-10 with a 3.43 ERA and 231 strikeouts. Matt Cain went 13-11 with a 3.14 ERA in 223 and a third innings. Madison Bumgarner, a rookie, went 7-6 with a 3.00 ERA over 111 innings and made the playoff rotation. The lineup was ordinary, scoring 697 runs, but allowed just 583, and the team earned run average was 3.36.
The catcher mattered too. Buster Posey was called up in late May and played 108 games, hitting .305 with 18 home runs and 67 runs batted in, which was enough for the National League Rookie of the Year award. In the World Series against Texas, the Giants won in five games. Edgar Renteria was the World Series MVP, going 7 for 17 with 2 home runs and 6 runs batted in, and Lincecum won two games (2-0, 3.29 ERA, 13 strikeouts in 13 and two-thirds innings). Bumgarner and Cain each won once without allowing an earned run, and Cody Ross had earlier won the National League Championship Series MVP award against Philadelphia.
The historical award records list three October honors for that team: Ross as the NLCS MVP, Renteria as the World Series MVP, and Lincecum as a postseason MVP in the This Year in Baseball awards. The heroes were not the biggest names on the roster, and the common thread was starting pitching.
2011: the missing year
The Giants won 86 games in 2011 and finished second in the West, missing the playoffs. Two things happened. Posey, the defending Rookie of the Year, played only 45 games after a serious injury in May, hitting .284 with 4 home runs. And the offense collapsed to 570 runs, the lowest total of any Giants team from 2009 to 2017, though the pitching held up with 578 runs allowed.
In the odd years the title went elsewhere: to St. Louis in 2011 and to Boston in 2013. But two seasons do not make a curse. The 2011 Giants were an 86-win club whose run prevention was still strong and whose offense ran out of runs.
2012: down 0-2, down 3-1, then a sweep
The 2012 club won 94 games, the most of the three title teams, and the offense recovered to 718 runs. Posey returned to win the National League batting title at .336 and the Most Valuable Player award, with 24 home runs and 103 runs batted in. He also won the Comeback Player of the Year award and the Hank Aaron Award. Cain went 16-5 with a 2.79 ERA, and threw a perfect game against the Houston Astros on June 13.
The club hit only 103 home runs, in a league where teams averaged about 165 over 162 games. That figure tells you the park and the style: San Francisco's offense was built on singles, walks and timely hits, not power.
The postseason was nearly short. The Giants fell behind the Reds two games to none in the division series, then won three straight games in Cincinnati to take it 3-2. Facing St. Louis in the championship series, they trailed three games to one and won the next three, taking it 4-3, and Marco Scutaro was the series MVP. Then came the World Series.
Pablo Sandoval, the World Series MVP, went 8 for 16 with 3 home runs in four games, all three of them in Game 1. The pitching was nearly perfect: Giants pitchers allowed six earned runs in the four games, and Tim Lincecum, demoted to the bullpen after a 5.18 ERA in the regular season (10-15), worked two relief appearances with 8 strikeouts and no earned runs. Detroit had the American League's Triple Crown winner in Miguel Cabrera, and was swept.
2013: the hangover
The next year, San Francisco finished 76-86, fourth in the division. Runs scored fell from 718 to 629 and runs allowed rose from 649 to 691. Lincecum went 10-14 with a 4.37 ERA, and Cain went 8-10 with a 4.00. The 2013 season was the low point of the stretch, and it is worth keeping in view when someone calls the Giants a dynasty, since dynasties do not usually follow a championship with a losing season.
The historical record can show that the pitching and the offense both slipped. It cannot say why, and I won't guess; the useful point is that the title in 2012 did not carry over, which is how most champions behave.
2014: a wild card and Madison Bumgarner
The 2014 team won 88 games, finished second to the Dodgers, and entered the playoffs as a wild card, the lowest seed of the three champions. They scored 665 runs and allowed 614, and Posey hit .311 with 22 home runs and 89 runs batted in. What made the club special was how it used Bumgarner in October.
| Round | Result | Bumgarner |
|---|---|---|
| Wild card | Beat Pittsburgh 1-0 | 1-0, nine shutout innings, 4 hits, 10 strikeouts |
| Division series | Beat Washington 3-1 | 0-1, 2.57 ERA, 6 strikeouts |
| Championship series | Beat St. Louis 4-1 | 1-0, 1.72 ERA, 12 strikeouts, series MVP |
| World Series | Beat Kansas City 4-3 | 2-0, 1 save, 0.43 ERA, 17 strikeouts, series MVP |
Across the four rounds he threw 52 and two-thirds innings, allowed six earned runs, and struck out 45. He won the World Series MVP award, and the historical data show that his two wins came in Games 1 and 5, the second a complete-game shutout, and he saved Game 7, coming out of the bullpen on short rest to finish a 3-2 victory. Salvador Perez's pop-up to third base ended the game.
Bumgarner was not alone. Hunter Pence had 12 hits in the seven-game World Series (.444) and Pablo Sandoval had 12 as well (.429). But if there is a single performance that explains the 2014 title, it is Bumgarner's, and it is a good argument for judging October on its own terms: his regular-season ERA that year was 2.98, a fine number, not a historic one.
Why a good-not-great team won three times
The run-differential math gives a clear picture. Runs scored minus runs allowed predicts a team's record better than the record does, because it is less affected by luck in close games. The simplest version of the formula, with an exponent of two, takes a team's runs scored, squares it, and divides by the sum of runs scored squared and runs allowed squared.
| Season | Runs scored | Runs allowed | Run differential | Formula wins | Actual wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 697 | 583 | +114 | about 95 | 92 |
| 2012 | 718 | 649 | +69 | about 89 | 94 |
| 2014 | 665 | 614 | +51 | about 88 | 88 |
The 2010 team was probably the best of the three, with a run differential of +114 and a team that may have been unlucky not to win more. The 2012 team won roughly five games more than its run differential suggested, which is the kind of overperformance that tends not to repeat. The 2014 team was a plain 88-win club. None of this is a criticism: October is a small sample, and good pitching with a few hot bats is a viable recipe. But it does mean the Giants were not the best team in baseball in any of the three years.
The park may have helped. AT&T Park, home of the Giants from 2000 through 2018 and carrying that name from 2006, drew the franchise's highest season attendance in the historical record shows, 3,387,303 in 2011, and it has a reputation as a hard place to hit home runs, which fits the club's total of 103 in 2012. A team built for that park leans on pitching and contact, and the Giants did.
The bullpen behind the rotation
The starters get the credit, but the historical franchise leaders show a bullpen that was deep and stable. Brian Wilson saved 171 games for the club from 2006 to 2012, the most of the era and third on the franchise list, with Santiago Casilla at 123 saves (2010-2016) and Sergio Romo at 84 (2008-2016). Javier Lopez, a left-handed specialist, appeared in 446 games from 2010 to 2016. No closer has to carry the whole job when several relievers can cover the late innings, and that depth matters most in short series where a manager can match left-handed and right-handed batters every night.
The roles changed from title to title. Wilson was the closer in the 2010 run and appeared in three World Series games that year. By 2012 Romo was pitching the ninth inning, with three appearances and five strikeouts in the sweep of Detroit.
How to read three Octobers
Small samples deserve caution. A seven-game series can be won by a hot week from a role player, as Cody Ross, Renteria and Scutaro each showed, and the same weeks would look unremarkable in a 162-game schedule. That is why the run-differential table matters: it measures the 162-game team, not the October team. The Giants of 2010, 2012 and 2014 were good teams that peaked in the right weeks, and the record shows they did it three times. A fan of the team can reasonably call that luck, skill or both; the numbers cannot separate them.
After 2014: the streak ends
The even-year pattern broke in 2016. San Francisco won 87 games, qualified as a wild card, and beat the New York Mets in the wild-card game before losing the division series to the Chicago Cubs, three games to one. In 2017 the team won only 64 games, one of the five worst winning percentages in franchise history. Bochy stayed through 2019, but the title years were over.
The pitchers who carried the run faded quickly. Cain's ERA went from 2.79 in 2012 to 4.18 in 2014 and 5.79 in 2015, and Lincecum's 3.43 in 2010 became 4.74 in 2014. That is a story about aging and turnover, not about even and odd numbers.
So was it a dynasty?
By the most generous definition, three championships in five years qualifies. The Oakland Athletics won three straight from 1972 through 1974 (the A's three-peat), and the Cincinnati Reds won back-to-back titles in 1975 and 1976 (the Big Red Machine); both of those runs came in consecutive seasons, without a gap year.
The Giants did not. They won 92, 94 and 88 games, missed the playoffs in 2011 and 2013, and won every World Series they played in the period. A better description is an October dynasty: three clubs that each peaked at the right time. That is a smaller achievement than sustained dominance, and still a considerable one. For comparison, the franchise's earlier titles came in 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933 and 1954, and the Giants of the deadball era won 106, 105, 103 and 101 games in 1904, 1905, 1912 and 1913, and the club won consecutive titles in 1921 and 1922, early in the live-ball era. Those teams looked more like dynasties by wins.
Common questions
Did the Giants win in odd years? No. In the seasons between the titles they were 86-76 (2011) and 76-86 (2013).
Who was the best player on the three teams? Buster Posey, who won the Rookie of the Year award in 2010 and the Most Valuable Player award in 2012 and was on all three title rosters. Bumgarner was on all three as well.
How many World Series games did the Giants play in the three runs? The three series totaled 5, 4 and 7 games: 16 games, 12 wins and 4 losses.
Which of the three was the best team? Run differential points to 2010. The 2012 team had the most wins and the 2014 team had the best single October.
Were these the Giants' first titles in San Francisco? The 2010 title was the first in San Francisco; the franchise had won in 1954 in New York.
Where to go next
For more on how tied records and wild-card rounds are settled, see how MLB tiebreakers work, and for another franchise built on a ballpark and a rotation, read the guide to Yankee Stadium. You can follow the club on its team page and read more about October baseball on the playoffs topic page.