Fans of Giants, Athletics Ponder World Series in Cities by the Bay

When people around here talk about “The City By The Bay,” you just know they are not talking about Oakland.

Just 10 miles separate Oakland and San Francisco, but their worlds could not be more different. Oakland is, after all, a city whose only television station carries San Francisco Giants games, which can’t be real good for a city’s self-esteem. It’s probably fortunate there is a very long bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.

In so many ways, San Francisco beats Oakland every day, so the very idea of a Bay Bridge World Series -- “Baysball,” they’re calling it here -- is exciting to a guy such as Oakland Athletics fan Jimmy Calderon, a 38-year-old machinist who ponders the possibilities with almost religious reverence.

“Dead meat,” Calderon says about the Giants. “We’re going to kill them. It’s unthinkable that the A’s won’t make it. It’s their destiny.”

With both the Giants and the A’s leading their divisions, talk in the Bay Area has turned to Baysball. Nothing quite like it has happened since the last “Subway Series” in 1956, when the New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen has observed, the only neutral fan is a dead fan.

Both the A’s and Giants, as they say in California, are carrying some emotional baggage: The A’s, World Series champs in 1972, 1973 and 1974, lost in the Series last year against the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Giants, meanwhile, have not won a World Series since they moved to San Francisco from New York in 1958. In that time, the Giants have been in only one World Series, which they lost to their old nemesis, the Yankees, in 1962.

Officials of both clubs don’t say much about the notion of a Bay Bridge series, focusing instead on the pennant race and the playoffs. Giants spokesman Matt Fischer says there is a “fairly healthy rivalry” between the two clubs, and A’s spokeswoman Kathy Jacobson goes so far as it call it a “friendly rivalry.”

It takes a Giants fan such as Rich Olmstead, a 42-year-old telephone installer, to tell it like it is: “Oakland doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. The A’s fans across the bay are a bunch of lightweights, and so is their team. Hey, I rooted for the Dodgers last year.

“Look, I’ve been sitting next to the same group of people at games for 20 years. We’ve seen boyfriends and girlfriends come and go, new wives, old wives. We’ve been through good times together, and bad. The Giants bond us. The city of San Francisco is so splintered, but baseball has been able to bring us together. We’re ready for a win. This is our year.”

The Giants -- whose windy and cold Candlestick Park is not known for being hospitable to fans or players -- broke season attendance records last week. In some ways, the Giants are the underdog, or at least the sentimental favorite.

“We’ve been waiting such a long time for this,” says Giants fan Paula Dueball, a 36-year-old manager for Levi Strauss, whose chairman, Walter Haas, owns the A’s. (“I don’t like to think about that,” Dueball says.)

Even A’s fan Calderon has a soft spot for the Giants. “They never won a World Series in San Francisco, it’s true,” he said. “I think I’d be content with the Giants just getting in the Series but I want to see the A’s win it.”

Oakland city officials are so sure that the A’s will make the playoffs that a booster committee, called Celebrate Oakland, has already planned a couple of pep rallies, a parade and a victory party. The “Welcome To Oakland” banners were scheduled to go up on downtown streets over the weekend. “We want to accentuate the positive as the song goes,” said Mary Lou Weggenmann, manager of community affairs for the city’s Chamber of Commerce.

Oakland officials have estimated that four Series games could dump $70 million to $100 million into the local economy. A Bay Bridge Series would have less of a financial impact, but the attention that would be focused on the Bay Area would bring a shower of publicity that money can’t buy.

Whatever happens, the fans say, there has never been a better time to be a baseball fan in the cities by the bay. “Two seconds ago, I was just talking about it with the guys,” said Jim Kelly, who manages O’Sheas Mad Hatter, a haven for Giants fans. “The feeling is: Bring it on. The feeling is up. This is a very heavy conversation in here. It’s all people are talking about. We want to really back our team, that’s primo. Second, we want to beat Oakland’s butts.”