Matchups with Dodgers will happen early in ’20
The Giants and the Dodgers are going to get quite cozy at the start of the 2020 season.
Major League Baseball released its entire schedule Monday. It shows the Giants opening on the road for the 11th straight season, at Dodger Stadium, on Thursday, March 26.
They will play a threegame series at Chavez Ravine, then three more in Arizona, before their April 3 home opener against the Dodgers.
The AllStar Game will be held in Los Angeles, too, on July 14. Any Giants selected can keep their hotels for a week.
The Giants open the second half in Los Angeles two days later. Their game will be the only one in the majors that night, meaning the teams will get just three days off for the break, not four like everyone else.
Major League Baseball wanted to add a day when one of its national television rightsholders can air a lone game exclusively, and thought it made sense to do so at the site of the AllStar Game.
As The Chronicle recently reported, the Giants will make their first trip to Target Field, and secondever trip to Minneapolis, as part of a sixgame journey to face the Indians and Twins from May 1 through May 6, as the National League West plays the American League Central in interleague.
The Giants also will host the Chicago White Sox and Detroit in May, visit Oakland in June and host the A’s in July, while traveling to Detroit and hosting Kansas City in August.
The Giants will finish the season with two games against the Diamondbacks and four against the Brewers at Oracle Park. Roster moves: The wheel has spun again. Ryan Dull is off. Burch Smith is on.
The Giants designated Dull, the former A’s reliever, for assignment after a week after claiming him off waivers from Oakland. He got two games with Sacramento, allowing three runs in three innings.
They designated Dull to make room on the 40man for Smith, a 29yearold righthander claimed off waivers from the Brewers. The 29yearold pitched in seven games for Milwaukee and had a 7.82 ERA.
The Giants must like something about Smith beyond his numbers. In 55 bigleague games, including 13 starts, he owns a 6.87 ERA and a 1.70 WHIP. The Giants optioned him to Sacramento. Briefly: Winning in July might be paying off at the gate. The Giants had no paid crowd lower than 36,275 for the fourgame Philadelphia series. The only other such series at home this year was the threegamer against the Cubs, July 2224 . ... The Giants won their season series against the Philadelphia four games to three. Among teams they saw more than once, they won their season series against the Mets (43), Blue Jays (31) and Brewers (42), and lost season series to the Reds (34) and Nationals (15).