Dodgers Take a Giant-Sized Thumping : Baseball: It has never been worse than this, with San Francisco battering Candiotti, 15-1.

SAN FRANCISCO — It won’t purge the pain and misery that San Francisco Giant Manager Dusty Baker has suffered the last couple of months, and the Bay Area long ago has given up any notion that the Giants can still contend for the NL West title.

Yet, for at least a night Friday, Baker was able to sit back, relax, smile and even savor the Giants’ 15-1 rout of the Dodgers before a paid crowd of 25,023 at Candlestick Park.

It was the most lopsided Dodger defeat since July 29, 1987, when they lost to the Giants, 16-2. It also equaled the worst loss by a Dodger team against the Giants in the 1,930 times the two teams have played one another.

“It was the first game I’ve been able to enjoy in quite a while,” said Baker, whose team had lost 27 of its last 40 games. “It’s been tough. I’ve been fighting a bad temper all of my life, and I don’t want to lose control now.

“There’s only so much you can do. When your team is playing the best it can with the talent you’ve been given, what can you do? It doesn’t do any good to go through tirades and all of that stuff.

“I ain’t letting this stuff give me no heart attack or no stroke, man.”

The Giants not only took any suspense out of the game by the second inning, taking a 7-0 lead, but left Dodger starter Tom Candiotti with the worst performance of his 10-year major league career.

Candiotti yielded 10 earned runs in only four innings. He had never given up more than eight runs in any of his 309 starts.

This is a pitcher who had had a 1.74 earned-run average in his last 13 starts, but in four innings gave up only four fewer runs than his last nine starts combined.

“I’m really getting [teed] off at the lack of run support,” Candiotti joked. “If we had scored 16, we would have won.”

Candiotti, whose turn was skipped Wednesday because of the adverse effect the mile-high altitude has on his knuckleball, watched in disbelief as his pitch never knuckled at Candlestick.

The pitching line: four innings, 10 hits, 10 runs, two walks, two hit batsmen, one strikeout, one wild pitch and three home runs. Candiotti entered the game with a 2.98 ERA, and left with a 3.60 ERA.

“No excuses, but I was really affected by the cold and wind,” Candiotti said, “and I just didn’t make adjustments. And I took a licking. There was nothing I could do. There was hardly anybody swinging and missing.

“When the pitcher [William VanLandingham] goes up there and hits one out of the park, you know it’s not moving too good.

“It was just a case where I had a lousy night.”

The most fortunate Dodger of them all was hitting/first base coach Reggie Smith, who was ejected in the first inning for arguing that Jose Offerman should have been safe on a stolen-base attempt.

The Dodgers had visions they were back at Coors Field. They watched VanLandingham hit the first home run by a Giant pitcher in three years. They watched first baseman Mark Carreon, who was in a two-for-23 slump and never had more than three RBIs, have five RBIs by the sixth inning. And they watched John Patterson, Glenallen Hill and Royce Clayton hit home runs.

It was difficult to determine the most amazing statistic of the Giants’ 16-hit attack that featured seven extra-base hits.

Was it the fact that all of the runs were scored without a Dodger error? Or that the Giants’ arsenal occurred with Barry Bonds walking three times--but scoring four runs.

If nothing else, the most humorous moment occurred when Candiotti hit Carreon with a pitch after Hill’s homer in the second inning and received a warning from home-plate umpire Frank Pulli.

“I told [Carreon], ‘So how does it feel to get hit by a 90-m.p.h. fastball?’ ” said Candiotti, whose fastball is clocked at about 78 m.p.h. “We just started laughing.

“I had so much adrenaline going, I just tried to throw the ball as hard as I could throw it. I wasn’t trying to hit him, but that’s what kind of night it was for me.”