Silence Is a Burden Giants’ Fans Carry

The World Series came to Pacific Bell Park. There was wind and mist and eerie quiet. There was the thick smell of garlic fries and the smooth voice of Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.”

But there was no heart in San Francisco.

There was no rally here. No monkey either.

Thunder was missing. The sticks were hiding.

Here’s the thing about the rally monkey and the noise sticks that received so much attention and some ridicule when the World Series started at Edison Field -- without enthusiastic, uninhibited, excited, ecstatic fans, the monkey would have been a pitiful stuffed simian and the sticks would have been inflatable chew toys, good for the family pets to puncture and spit out.

At Pac Bell on Tuesday night, you could talk to your neighbor. And the guy in front of you. And five rows away. Ten rows away even. You could talk on your cell phone and hear the other person talk back.

You could hear, loud and clear, the idiot out in left field who shouted, twice, to Angel left fielder Garret Anderson, “Baboon.” And you could hear the silence, hear that nobody told the idiot to shut up. Twice.

You could hear one man chant “Beat the Angels, beat the Angels,” and hear nobody pick up the cheer.

You could see a few people waving orange towels. When only a few people wave orange towels they are just orange towels. They aren’t Homer Hankies. They are Giant Jokes.

If the World Series comes to Pac Bell and all you hear is silence, is it really a World Series?

“Our fans have been great,” Angel right fielder Tim Salmon said. “We’ve had a great atmosphere at home.”

There has been a lot of national mocking of Angel fans and the extra stuff they’ve used.

Real fans don’t need noisemakers, sniffed Eastern columnists. Real baseball games don’t need stuffed toys. It was somehow a Disney-concocted sacrilege, the rally monkey and red noise sticks. “Save my hearing,” wailed the stuffed-shirt critics. “Ban the sticks!”

But what seems to have been missed is that noisemakers don’t make noise if nobody bangs them.

What seems to have gone unmentioned is that Angel fans, nearly every one of them, have been wearing red to games for over a month. Red shirts, red hats, red pants. And it isn’t all newly purchased Angel paraphernalia. It is just red, right from the closet. It is spontaneous. And it is universal at Edison Field.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” shouted a man with his face painted Giants’ orange on one side and black on the other. “Get some spirit. We’re pitiful.” He was standing in line outside the men’s room and the other men in line looked at him. Some shrugged. Some rolled their eyes. Some didn’t do a thing.

“This is embarrassing,” said the man, who didn’t want to give his name but who did want to let loose about the sedated fans.

“I watched how things were in Anaheim,” he said. “Those guys were great. They were noisy whether the Angels were winning or losing. I noticed how even when the Angels were getting beat in the first game, their fans never shut up. I don’t know what’s up here. I can’t believe how dull it is.”

Even in the first inning, when the Giants scored first and actually led, there was polite applause and some perfunctory shouting.

But the media sitting in the left field auxiliary press area who worried that the fans in front of them, who stood for Bennett’s singing, would be standing all during the game and blocking the view were happy to be wrong. As soon as the first pitch was thrown, everybody sat down. Apparently on their hands. And they stayed down.

“Look, we didn’t give our fans anything to cheer about,” Giant third baseman David Bell said. “It’s not fair to compare Anaheim to here. If we give them something to cheer, they’ll cheer. We need to do our part.”

That’s the difference between Anaheim and San Francisco so far, though. The fans in Anaheim didn’t need the team to get them involved.

They are involved from the time they hit the parking lot, three or four hours before the first pitch.

They are involved when they put on the red clothes and eat red food. There was a tailgating party Sunday at Edison Field, four women who had brought only red food (tomatoes, tomato soup, red licorice, frosting on cake and cookies). Appetizing? Maybe not. Addled? Absolutely.

Such enthusiasm is not to be underrated.

“I’ve said it before this season,” Salmon said, “that our fans have been great and it does make a difference. The atmosphere matters. You can get a boost from the noise.”

“At first I thought Angels fans were acting silly,” Hank Quigley said. Quigley, 29, from Santa Rosa, was not wearing any black or any orange, the colors of the Giants. His face wasn’t painted. He was even leaving the game early in the eighth inning. He had, he admitted, given up.

“I thought the Angel fans needed to act like they’d been here before,” Quigley said. “But you know, maybe that’s the cool thing. Those people don’t seem to care about how they look. They’re just having fun, win or lose.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.