CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Fans Say Move Is a Giant Mistake : San Francisco natives are restless over plan that would send ballclub to Florida. Some fear that a string of municipal mishaps has put the city on a cable car to nowhere.

George LaFrancis is a street musician with a lot of worries. The main one is money: Despite the herds of summer tourists swarming the city, spare change is not trickling into his guitar case quite like it used to.

But on Saturday, LaFrancis nudged thoughts of his personal dilemma aside to ponder a weightier problem: The fate of San Francisco.

His hometown had just been told its baseball team was fleeing to Florida. LaFrancis has not had the bucks for a bleacher seat in years, but he sees in the Giants’ departure a great cause for alarm.

“It’s another sign that we are going down, down, down,” LaFrancis said after delivering a rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the Rolling Stones classic. “This used to be a city that had it made. But it’s getting to where I’m feeling sort of ashamed of the place.”

Angst hangs thickly in the air all over San Francisco this weekend. It is a foreign feeling here; San Franciscans are notorious for their unwavering civic smugness, a trait reinforced by columnists who relentlessly toot the city’s horn.

But now San Francisco is confronting a future without big-league baseball--the death of a proud, 34-year legacy marked by heroes named Mays, McCovey and Marichal. If the deal goes through and the Giants become denizens of St. Petersburg’s Suncoast Dome, San Francisco would be the first city in 21 years to let its ballclub slip away. The move is scheduled to be considered by major league owners Sept. 9; it requires backing by 11 of the 14 National League teams and eight of the 14 American League franchises.

This prospect, coming on the heels of assorted other municipal missteps, has stirred some painful soul-searching in the city’s bars, on its buses and among the teary-eyed fans who lined up for Giants tickets as soon as news of the sale leaked out.

Gloomily mulling their predicament, many residents echoed the assessment offered by one particularly disgusted Giants supporter, Tony Lima:

“San Francisco,” Lima wrote in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, is “the city that forgot how.”

It was no secret that Giants owner Bob Lurie desperately wanted his ballclub out of Candlestick Park, a Siberia-like stadium so gusty that a pitcher was once blown out of his windup. Four times Lurie asked Bay Area voters to approve public financing for a new stadium. Four times--two of them in San Francisco elections--he was denied.

After the last defeat, in San Jose in June, a weary Lurie made it clear he would accept the first good offer for the team that he got. No special consideration, he warned, would be extended to local buyers.

Still, nobody believed Lurie would really sell the club to a bunch of out-of-towners. He is, after all, a native San Franciscan, a man beloved for rescuing the Giants from a planned move to Toronto when he bought the franchise for $8 million in 1976.

Moreover, Lurie knew that a group of civic leaders, led by real estate baron Walter Shorenstein, was scrambling to find buyers for the team. With such activity afoot, San Franciscans figured their squad was safe, at least for awhile.

Then, on Friday, came the sucker punch: Lurie had said yes to an offer of about $110 million from a Tampa Bay investor group. The Giants, credited with making San Francisco a “big-league city” when they moved West from New York in 1957, would be abandoning it for a new climate-controlled home in the Southeast in 1993.

As the news sunk in, San Franciscans searched for culprits. Initially, Lurie wore the bull’s-eye.

“Lurie didn’t give private enterprise a chance,” griped actuary Gerald Desmond, who was downing whiskey shots during what he called a “not-so-happy hour” at Harrington’s pub in the financial district. “He just said: ‘Build me a stadium or they’re gone.’ ”

“He reminds me of the little boy who takes his ball and quits the game because he doesn’t get his way,” said bar owner Michael Harrington, a Giants season ticket holder who attended the team’s first game in San Francisco in 1958. “Selfish.”

Across town at Fishermen’s Wharf, a grumpy hot dog vendor who would not give his name said Lurie was a “businessman who had to do what he had to do.”

The blame, he said, rests with the city’s “bumbling politicians,” who failed to move quickly and decisively when Lurie warned he was ready to leave. “They just ain’t got a clue anymore about how to hold on to the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff,” lamented the gray-haired hot dog man.

Financial analyst John Manning, a “die-hard fan” who once sold peanuts at Candlestick Park, said his confidence in the city had withered as well:

“We lost the Warriors to Oakland, then San Jose got the hockey team, a lot of businesses are leaving, and we don’t even have a freeway running through our city,” said Manning. “I’m a native, but I’m fed up. I’m upset with the city. San Francisco is no longer a place that gets things done.”

As his constituents seethed, Mayor Frank Jordan got defensive, insisting hotly that he had “done everything I know how as mayor of San Francisco to keep the Giants.”

Jordan, a political novice who has exploded one land mine after another during his first seven months in office, also declared that there was still hope, and vowed that he would “not stand here and meekly let the Giants walk away.”

The voices of the realists, however, seemed louder. And even the city’s chief cheerleader, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, called the chance of keeping the team “thinner than a 19-cent hamburger.”

But Caen also tried to cheer up his readers, reminding them that losing the Giants to “Retirement City” is not the most dreadful problem in the world today: “Sarajevo comes to mind,” he wrote, “and so does Somalia.”

Harrington, a native San Franciscan, said that while he would miss the team terribly, life would go on.

“I hate to admit it, but I will probably go to some Oakland A’s games,” the barkeeper said. “But I won’t feel the same childhood passion I feel for the Giants. You can’t replace that.”