Bay Series Gets 2 Late Starters--the Mayors

With the first cross-bay World Series under way, the mayors of Oakland and San Francisco finally made their bet.

If the Athletics win, Oakland Mayor Lionel Wilson gets a night on the town in San Francisco, hosted by Art Agnos. If the Giants win, the San Francisco mayor gets a night on the town in Oakland, courtesy of Wilson.

It’s a bet that no true San Franciscan would want to win, if the World Series weren’t at stake.

“I wouldn’t have a clue,” one San Francisco politico said, in typically snooty San Franciscan tones, when asked where Agnos might go should he win the bet. “Someplace with a view of San Francisco, I guess.”

The Battle of the Bay World Series might bring cash, tourists and generally good publicity to the San Francisco Bay Area. But for Oakland, some things far more important are involved: civic pride, for example.

“If San Francisco lost the World Series, I don’t think it would be the end of the world,” Oakland Tribune sports columnist Dave Newhouse said, noting that at least 60% of the fans who attend games at Candlestick Park are from the suburbs south of San Francisco. “(San Francisco) is haughty, it’s smug. There’s a lot of indifference to sports.”

But if Oakland were to lose, it just might be cataclysmic, he said.

“This is Oakland’s chance to bury Gertrude Stein,” Newhouse said, referring to the author’s often misquoted comment about her Oakland roots.

“There is no there there,” Stein, the expatriate writer and poet of the 1920s and 1930s, wrote in her 1937 book “Everybody’s Autobiography.” Historians have said that Stein never wrote anything critical of Oakland, the city of her childhood, and that the infamous line merely was a cry for her lost youth.

Rivalry between the cities is never far beneath the surface. But the first cross-metropolis World Series since 1956 has brought those feelings to the fore. Myths and legends better forgotten are being retold, like the old one about the graffiti supposedly scrawled somewhere in San Francisco after the quake of 1906: Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we move to Oakland.

But although such comments wear thin in the East Bay, people from the East Bay get their digs in, too. Phil Mumma, associate director of the Oakland Museum, can only laugh at the affectation many San Franciscans have of calling their town, “The City.”

“I used to go there a lot more,” Mumma said. “There just isn’t as much reason to go there now.”

Take San Francisco’s downtown, for example. With its many boxy high-rises, the skyline looks like any other downtown. And San Francisco hasn’t had a waterfront to speak of for years. Most shipping has shifted to Oakland’s port.

“The nice thing (about the World Series) is that it gives people a chance to see Oakland and see it is a nice place,” Mumma said. “It is a real place. You can look down your nose at a real place if you want, but it is real.”

San Francisco Mayor Agnos fed the flames when, responding to a television reporter’s question about the traditional wager between Series mayors, quipped that there was nothing in Oakland that he wanted.

Wilson, who long ago got tired of cheap shots fired at Oakland, bristled when he heard the comment. But although the two mayors finally made up last week and made their bet, the trans-bay sniping goes on.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen reported one wag’s suggestion that the mayors should have wagered cracked crab against crack.

No matter that there are about as many of the crustaceans in the waters around San Francisco as there are fishermen at Fisherman’s Wharf, and crack is just as plentiful in San Francisco as it is in any big city.

The Oakland Tribune was not outdone, proclaiming that Oakland has far more going for it than San Francisco. Juxtaposed with a picture of “ultimate soul goddess” Sheila E., the Tribune ran an old photograph of San Francisco’s Sister Boom Boom, also known as Jack Fertig. Fertig, however, hasn’t worn his Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence habit for three years. The fifth-generation San Franciscan is now an astrologer.

“What I foresee is that my second-favorite team (the A’s) is going to take it in seven,” said Fertig, a Giants fan.

As the game began Saturday, scalpers were nowhere to be found. But dozens of people held signs pleading for tickets outside the Oakland Coliseum.

San Francisco accountant Bill Shine, owner of Viareggio restaurant, offered tickets for choice seats to all seven games for $15,000. No one met his price, but there was an offer of more than $13,000, he said.

BART trains headed for the Oakland Coliseum were packed with fans Saturday. BART authorities were prepared to transport 15,000 people to the games, having scrapped the “Idiot Plan.” The plan was so named when BART President Arlo Hale Smith lashed out at the “idiot” who came up with the idea of requiring that people riding BART to the Oakland Coliseum change trains in Oakland.

“Someday we may go back to that, but now we’re on Plan B. We are going to have direct trains,” said BART spokeswoman Vicki Wills.