A quick breakdown of the upcoming schedule as Giants players and coaches take the field for spring training in Scottsdale, eager to defend their NL West crown.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Major League Baseball's push to get a full 162-game season after a short spring led to a couple of odd scheduling changes for the Giants.
MLB released the updated schedule on Wednesday, and the Giants have had two trips to Milwaukee added to their schedule, both of which will cost them previously planned off days. They will start their three-game series in Milwaukee in April and finish it in September. They also will now finish the season in San Diego, not at home.
The Giants were supposed to start the year with a seven-game trip to San Diego and Milwaukee but the lockout washed away the first week of games. They knew it would be easy to make up the games with the Padres, but the three games at Milwaukee have been split up.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Bay Area and California sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
The Giants will visit American Family Field for just one game on April 25, turning a three-city trip into a four-city one. They were already scheduled to visit Cleveland, New York and Washington D.C., but they now will fly from D.C. to Milwaukee on Sunday night and play an evening game -- 5:10 p.m. -- before flying back to San Francisco to host the A's for two games.
That costs them an off day, and means they'll open the season with 19 games in 20 days, including 11 on the road in four different cities. Team officials were already planning to use a lot of different pitchers early in the year, and the schedule change will make guys like recently acquired Jakob Junis all the more important.
The remaining two Brewers road games will be made up with a doubleheader in Milwaukee on Thursday, Sept. 8. That previously had been an off day between Los Angeles and Chicago, but the Giants will now face a brutal stretch. Starting on Sept. 2, they play 14 games in 13 days against the Philadelphia Phillies, Dodgers, Brewers, Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves. After a day off, they have three more against the Dodgers and then a trip to Coors Field.
Three of the four season-opening games at Petco Park have been moved to the back of the schedule. MLB was not allowed by broadcast partners to change postseason dates, but the regular season was extended three days to make sure a 162-game season was still possible. The fourth missing game will be played Thursday, July 7 between a previously scheduled trip to Chase Field and the start of a series in San Diego. For that one, the Giants at least don't have to change their travel plans much (they would have always chosen to spend that off day in San Diego instead of hanging out in Phoenix in July, obviously).
San Francisco Giants
Find the latest San Francisco Giants news, highlights, analysis and more with NBC Sports Bay Area and California.
RELATED: Five young Giants to keep an eye on during shortened spring
The end result of all the shuffling is that the Giants have lost three off days from their schedule. It's easy to see why so much of Gabe Kapler's time early in camp has been spent talking about the importance of managing workloads.
"We have a lot of innings to cover in 2022," he said earlier this week. "Everybody in our organization has said this in some way or another: We don't think that we have five starters that are going to take down all of those innings and all of those starts. We need lots of contributors."
Download and follow the Giants Talk Podcast
