The Late, Great Festival of Hate

Dodger Manager Jim Tracy and San Francisco Giant Manager Dusty Baker exchanged lineup cards before the teams met Monday night in Dodger Stadium. They did not come to blows. No player cracked a bat over the head of the opposing catcher. No player went into the crowd to attack a fan.

One of baseball’s longest, most storied, most bitter rivalries resumed when the Dodgers and Giants, with a National League wild-card berth on the line, opened a four-game series in Dodger Stadium.

But although fans of either team still look upon the other with disdain, with chants of “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” echoing through Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco and “Giants [stink]!, Giants [stink]!” in Dodger Stadium, the violence and contempt that marked this rivalry from its origins in New York and for several decades on the West Coast has subsided.

“The fans make it a rivalry,” Dodger outfielder Marquis Grissom said. “There’s no animosity between [Dodger players] and the Giants.”

It wasn’t always that way. These teams hated each other in the early 1900s, when the Giants played in New York’s Polo Grounds and the Dodgers in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. That bad blood followed the teams when the Giants moved to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958.

Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world,” the dramatic three-run homer that gave the Giants a 5-4 pennant-clinching victory over the Dodgers in 1951, is the defining moment of this rivalry, and rightly so.

But there were so many more memorable moments--on the field and off--that fueled a century-long rivalry that has involved such legends as Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Barry Bonds, Leo Durocher and John McGraw, and teams that have combined for 13 World Series championships and 37 pennants.

In the 1920s, when McGraw, who managed the Giants from 1903-1932, and his players traveled over the Brooklyn Bridge in horse-drawn carriages for games in Ebbets Field, Dodger fans pelted the Giants with beer, coins, umbrella parts, “whatever they could find,” said Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers for 53 years.

The Giants were in first place late in the 1934 season when then-Manager Bill Terry, in a discussion with reporters about pennant contenders, was asked what he thought about the Dodgers.

“The Dodgers?” Terry asked, incredulously. “Are they still in the league?”

A motivated Dodger team beat the Giants in the season’s last two games, knocking them two games behind the pennant-winning St. Louis Cardinals.

“There was a psychological thing about the rivalry back then,” said Scully, who grew up a huge Giant fan in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. “Brooklyn was the borough of immigrants, of trolley cars, of ordinary buildings and ordinary lives. If you came from Brooklyn, you were the butt of jokes.

“Manhattan, with its lordly spires and tall buildings, was seen as superior, and that built up a lot of resentment in people from Brooklyn.”

Scully worked at the general post office in New York as a teenager, sorting mail, along with an assortment of Dodger, Giant and Yankee fans.

“We spent all our hours arguing about baseball,” he said.

Though three teams played in New York--Yankee Stadium is in the Bronx--the Giants and Dodgers were bigger rivals because they played each other all season in the National League and would face the American League Yankees only in the World Series.

“The biggest thing about the rivalry then was the proximity of the fans,” Scully said. “They were shoulder to shoulder, and they irritated each other all year long. I remembered arguing about the Dodgers and Giants on Christmas Day.”

Players often competed against each other as they rose through the Giant and Dodger farm systems, and that familiarity bred contempt in the big leagues, so much so that when Robinson was traded from Brooklyn to New York after the 1957 season, he chose to retire rather than play for the Giants.

In 1952, the year after Thomson’s memorable home run, Giant pitcher Sheldon Jones beaned Dodger outfielder Carl Furillo, then later that September, Giant pitcher Ruben Gomez hit Furillo with a pitch.

Furillo thought Durocher, a former Dodger who then was the Giants’ manager, had ordered the hit, and when he got to first base, he motioned for Durocher to come out of the dugout. Durocher did the same, challenging Furillo to a fight, and Furillo charged the dugout, tackling Durocher and sparking a nasty brawl.

“That put more gasoline on the fire,” Scully said.

A few years later, Giant pitcher Sal “the Barber” Maglie, who earned his nickname by throwing fastballs under the chins of opposing batters, knocked down several Dodgers in a game.

Robinson, a former UCLA running back, deliberately dropped a bunt down the first-base line, hoping that Maglie would cover first “so he could knock him into right field,” Scully recalled. But diminutive second baseman Davey Williams covered the bag instead.

“Jackie was in a rage, and all he saw was a Giant uniform, and he just crushed Williams,” Scully said. “I think that ended Williams’ career.”

The Dodgers and Giants were tied atop the National League standings with 101-61 records in 1962, forcing a three-game playoff for the pennant. With Game 1 in Candlestick Park, Giant Manager Alvin Dark ordered groundskeeper Matty Schwab to soak the basepaths to slow Dodger speedster Maury Wills, who had stolen 104 bases that season.

“There wasn’t a cloud in the sky,” Scully said, “and the infield was drowned.”

The Giants beat Koufax and the Dodgers that day, 8-0, and won the playoff, scoring four runs in the ninth inning of Game 3 for a 6-4 victory and a World Series berth.

Perhaps the ugliest incident of the rivalry occurred on Aug. 22, 1965, when Giant pitcher Marichal, angry that Dodger catcher John Roseboro had whizzed his throw back to Koufax right under Marichal’s nose, hit Roseboro over the head with a bat, sparking a bloody 14-minute melee.

In 1973, when Tom Lasorda was a Dodger coach and Charlie Fox was managing the Giants, they approached home plate in Candlestick Park to exchange lineup cards before a game.

“The next thing I know, they were punching each other,” Scully said. “It was nuts.”

Later that decade, Dodger outfielder Reggie Smith, reacting to a racial slur from behind the Dodger dugout in Candlestick, went into the crowd and attacked a fan.

“I don’t know if it was the cold, damp weather in Candlestick,” Scully said, “but the fans there had a meanness about them.”

On the field, each team seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in ruining the other’s season. The Giants celebrated long and hard after Joe Morgan’s home run had given San Francisco a 5-3 win over the Dodgers in the last game of the 1982 season, knocking the Dodgers one game behind Atlanta in the NL West and out of the playoffs.

The Giants spoiled the Dodgers’ season in 1991 by beating them twice in the final three games, leaving them two games behind Atlanta and out of the playoffs.

The Dodgers got revenge in 1993 with a 12-1 victory over San Francisco on the final day of the season. That knocked the Giants out of the playoffs, despite San Francisco’s 103-59 record.

Most of the recent tension between the teams has been in the front office. The Dodgers refused to wear 1951 replica jerseys last season, when the Giants wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Thomson’s home run, and twice this season, they have refused to honor Giant requests to change game times to ease travel.

“But I don’t sense the real bitterness that I sensed back in New York,” Scully said. “I think the difference is the 450 miles that separate San Francisco and L.A. The distance has cooled it off to some degree.”