Take Us Outta the Ballgame

He sat alone, way up in the topmost reaches of Dodger Stadium. He dressed for the weather in sandals, shorts and a T-shirt. He dressed for the baseball in a black San Francisco Giants cap. This was Thursday night, the opener of a four-game series that meant everything to the Giants, and not much at all to the Dodgers.

He had a voice like a foghorn, this pale, thin man of 30. “GIIII-UHNTS,” he bellowed, his cry audible from far across the half-filled stadium. He was surprised when someone sat down next to him. Everyone else had put maximum distance between their ears and his lungs.

A schoolteacher, he had driven down from the Bay Area that day. It had been quite an adventure. He told of missed turnoffs, broiling heat, stalled freeways. By the time he bought a ticket and hiked to his seat, it was the second inning. The players below were ants, the ball a tiny white dot. His consolation was that from this roost he could keep watch on the parking lot.

“That’s my truck,” he said, pointing far beyond the palm trees behind the right field fence. “Way over there somewhere. I got my alarm on. When they break in, I’ll make a run for it.” He went on, grimly: “I never have had a good time in Los Angeles. Something always goes wrong. I get lost. Cars break down. The freeways are terrible. The beaches are nice, but there’s not much here I like.”

*

These days nobody seems to love L.A.--and whatever happened to Dancin’ Barry?--but there’s an abundance of people in San Francisco who truly loathe it. This baseball showdown only flushed out the bad feelings. All last week on sports talk shows up north Giants fans kept calling in with lists of why they hated L.A. They complained about television weathermen with goofy stage names, about tanning salons and Tommy Lasorda, smog and beach balls. Lord, do they hate those beach balls.

“The fans there may care about how soon before the first pitch they’ll start tossing beach balls,” a San Francisco Examiner columnist fulminated, “and what cutesy costume to wear, but this is a team and a city impervious to insults. . . . The most hurtful thing you could say about Los Angeles is that things are so bad you can’t tell where the riots happened.”

The columnist quoted a Candlestick Park tailgater on Dodger crowds: “They don’t care. You can walk around in Giants paraphernalia and they won’t even throw things at you. It’s a stadium filled with 45,000 people who don’t care.” He quoted a friend of the tailgater: “It’s a city filled with 13 million people who don’t care.”

And so on.

San Franciscans, of course, have looked down their noses at Angelenos--not to mention Oaklanders and Fresnans and everyone else--for more than a century. Much of the rivalry was contrived, the stuff of newspaper columnists on slow days. Like this one: “Wonderful nonsense,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen called it. But some of it was consequential. Over time, power did shift. A lot of commerce moved south, along with a bit of culture and, most important, a sense of momentum. And during the last 15 years or so the Paris of the West, California’s first major city, has watched itself become Second Banana, No. 2.

*

Even Caen concedes that the war--at least as measured by municipal heft and the vague concept of “importance”--is over, that Los Angeles has won. Still, many of his constituents and would-be emulators don’t seem to want to let the thing go. Part of the lingering animus stems from the simple fact that they lost. It’s like Southerners still carping about Yankees. And part of it, too, goes to their sense of what a city should be like. San Francisco is an easy concept to grasp: a tiny, tiny New York. Los Angeles is tougher to know, let alone love.

San Franciscans also are not keen on self-scrutiny. They talk of L.A. smog, forgetting how ocean breezes push their own mess to San Jose each day. They plaster “Save Mono Lake” stickers on their bumpers, forgetting that their own water was developed at the cost of a Sierra canyon that rivaled Yosemite in its splendor. They clap themselves on the back for their clean, green city, and they turn the cannons south.

The fire is not returned. After riots and recession and all the self-criticism, self-hatred even, that came with them, this nattering from the north seems silly, out of place, dated. Sports teams are one thing, but as far as the cities go, if there is a rivalry, it is grossly one-sided. In fact, generally speaking, people in Los Angeles don’t seem to think badly of San Francisco at all. “They hate us,” Tommy Lasorda said before the game last Thursday, “a lot more than we hate them.” They hate it when he says stuff like that.