On the eve of the Giants’ season opener, Mayor Daniel Lurie made a bold declaration:

“As the Giants go, so goes San Francisco.”

Six weeks later, on a gorgeous Monday evening at Oracle Park, with the team on a six-game losing streak and the Padres in town, Lurie didn’t seem too worried about what that comment from a preseason luncheon implied.

Maybe he knew something. The Giants finally won a game.

The mayor sat for an extended interview with The Standard in the Willie McCovey booth on the broadcast level and talked at length about an early devotion to the A’s, Buster Posey, Barry Bonds, Steve Kerr, Charles Barkley’s run-in with San Francisco, Super Bowls, and why he believes sports aren’t just entertainment but a vital part of a city’s social landscape — in a town that he’s convinced has turned a corner.

Midway through our interview, a millennial fan a few rows below our booth stood up and yelled, “Mr. Mayor, will you sign my ball?” Lurie, center fielder, University High, circa 1995, caught it cleanly. “You want the value to go down?” he said as he scribbled his name left-handed before tossing it back.

“Thank you. You’re doing a great job, Daniel,” the fan said. “We appreciate it. Amazing work.”

At that point, the mayor turned to me, pointed to his press secretary, Charles Lutvak, and said, “He set that up.”

Lutvak denied it, of course. Yeah, it was real, a natural development for a mayor who was embracing the opportunity to step away from daily briefings, city budgets, constant meetings, and all other civic duties to hang with 33,096 other fans and soak in a ballgame.

On this night, Lurie fit in like any other fan, except when followed by his assistants and security detail.

“Sports have always been an important part of my life,” Lurie said. “Music, the arts and culture and sports. There’s so much division out there, but anyone can come here and watch a game, sit next to anybody, and just start talking about [Luis] Arráez, about [Bryce] Eldridge coming up, about [Heliot] Ramos and [Matt] Chapman. Of course, we’d love for them to be in first place, but they’re still unifying and important to our social fabric.”

Lurie has plenty in common with Posey, the Giants’ president of baseball operations. They’re both about revival — one for a city; one for a baseball team — both trying to lead a charge back to prominence. Lurie is confident the city is going in the right direction. That can’t be said for the Giants, who are off to a dreadful 14-23 start as most of the big-money players aren’t producing.

So far, the city is having a better year than the team, but the mayor is keeping the faith.

“The city is doing well, but it would be doing better if the Giants were in first place,” Lurie said. “We will be again. When you have a leader like Buster, you feel like, ‘OK, all right.’ Yes, they struggled to start the season, but I have so much confidence in Buster. He’s not going to sit idle.”

Lurie is in his element talking ball of any kind. He knows his Bay Area sports history because he lived it, cherished it, and never forgot it. He was born at San Francisco Children’s Hospital in 1977 to Mimi and Brian (a rabbi); they divorced when Daniel was 2. In 1981, Mimi married Peter Haas, an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune and kid brother to Walter Haas Jr., who owned the Oakland A’s throughout Lurie’s childhood.

And, yes, this avid Giants fan once was an avid A’s fan, so forgive him when he says “we” swept the Giants in the 1989 World Series.

“One time, I was a ball boy in spring training, and I got to forearm bash [Mark] McGwire and [Jose] Canseco after they hit home runs,” Lurie said. “It was their heyday. That was quite a memory.

“In the World Series, we were sitting at Candlestick, second deck, and Will Clark hit a foul ball that my brother [Ari] caught barehanded. Another game, my stepfather was sitting down the third-base line, and he got a foul ball. One World Series, two foul balls. Peter gave me his.”

In January, Lurie delivered his State of the City address at Rossi Playground in the Richmond — fitting, because it was one of the parks he played at as a kid. He played baseball at the Town School for Boys and baseball, soccer, and basketball at University High. He captained the baseball and soccer teams. 

“Soccer was probably my best sport,” he said. “In baseball, I was not a big hitter, but I could get on base and steal.”

No wonder Lurie, a fan of teams doing the little things to manufacture runs and win games, got a bit jacked when Arráez laid down a sacrifice bunt to advance Casey Schmitt to second base.

After high school, Lurie enrolled at Duke, where he earned a degree in political science. He returned to the Bay Area in the early 2000s, began his Giants fandom (the Haas family no longer owned the A’s), and earned a master’s in public policy at Cal. Soon thereafter, he founded Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty nonprofit that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and included 49ers great Ronnie Lott as a board member.

Lurie revealed that he drew inspiration from the Haas family, which has been legendary on the charitable front, to aggressively engage in philanthropic endeavors.

“Walter, like my stepfather, was just a kind, decent man who cared about the community,” Lurie said of the former A’s owner, who never considered moving the team out of Oakland, unlike John Fisher, who gave up on the Bay Area in his pursuit to relocate the team to Las Vegas. “Tipping Point was something that grew out of what I learned from my parents and my stepfather and his family. It was always about taking care of the communities you serve.”

Lurie served as chair of the host committee that helped make Super Bowl 50 at Levi’s Stadium a reality, and he was mayor by the time this year’s Super Bowl returned to the Bay Area. His love of sports is apparent with his minority ownership in Bay FC. (He was at the ground floor in investing in the pro women’s soccer team.) He doesn’t have any ownership of the 49ers but has a stake in 49ers Enterprises, which runs the English soccer club Leeds United.

One of the best perks as mayor is getting to know Bay Area sports personalities such as Posey and Steve Kerr, the Warriors coach who spoke last month to the city’s department heads about leadership strategies and building culture.

Lurie said he applauds Kerr for using his platform to speak out on important issues, including his campaign against gun violence. Asked if Kerr could have a future in politics, Lurie said, “Coach could do anything he wants.”

Lurie hung out at City Hall with Barry Bonds on 2/5/25 (Bonds’ uniform number was 25), which the mayor declared “Barry Bonds Day,” a year and a day after the city honored Willie Mays on 2/4/24. “Where does he rank among all-time hitters?” the mayor asked me of Bonds. I told him that based on the all-encompassing stat WAR, he’s between Babe Ruth and Mays, his godfather.

“That focus he had, he was relentless,” said Lurie, whose return to San Francisco in the early 2000s gave him the opportunity to witness many of Bonds’ records.

Then there’s Barkley. Few trashed San Francisco more than Barkley. Even though much of it was a bit for his TNT broadcasting gig, Lurie wanted to change Barkley’s mind approaching the San Francisco-hosted NBA All-Star Game in February 2025, shortly after he took office.

Lurie called Barkley to suggest getting together and experiencing the city. They ran into each other at an All-Star event, “and the first thing Charles Barkley said was, ‘I’m so sorry, I owe you a phone call.’ We talked for a few minutes, then I saw him the next day and said, ‘Listen, we’re going through a rough time, but we’re going to be addressing these issues.’ He couldn’t have been kinder, nicer.”

Barkley wound up saying nice things about the city on the air and pledged to donate $250,000 to Glide Memorial Church, though Lurie said he didn’t have a direct effect on the donation.

“I think a lot of people got in his ear, and he started walking around the city and saw some really good things,” Lurie said. “That was the early days of our revival. I’m always going to pitch our city, sell our city to everybody. We are a city, without question, on the rise now, and I think the message is getting out to the East Coast.”

And overseas, apparently. A few weeks after throwing out the ceremonial first pitch before the Giants’ first day game March 27, he was in Seoul, throwing out another pitch at Jung Hoo Lee’s old stomping grounds as part of a visit to strengthen the partnership between the sister cities.

After our interview, Lurie and his 12-year-old son, Sawyer, also a center fielder (“he’s a better hitter,” Dad said), visited the booths of Posey and broadcaster Dave Flemming, a friend whom Lurie often runs into around town.

They watched the final couple of innings from the crowd, and Lurie took a video selfie with Sawyer to post on Instagram, summing up the game and scene and finishing this way:

“Let’s go Giants. Let’s go …”

They spoke in unison to finish the sentiment.

“... San Francisco.”