Once-Beautiful Rivalry Takes an Ugly Turn

A couple of times Friday night, Dave Roberts turned around and stared into the outfield pavilions.

He wasn’t looking at home runs. He was looking at half-wits.

“You hear people shouting, you turn around, and there’s punching being thrown and bottles flying,” said the Dodger center fielder. “There was all kinds of fights out there.”

A couple of times Friday night, between innings, Jim Tracy glanced into the stands.

He wasn’t conjuring strategy. He was witnessing stupidity.

“I saw a number of people in the left-field pavilion doing things, sure I did,” the Dodger manager said. “You hear all that noise, you look up, there it is.”

A longtime West Coast scout said Saturday that the report on the Dodger Stadium stands during games between the Dodgers and San Francisco Giants is clear.

“It’s terrible, awful, far worse than these games at Pac Bell Park,” said the scout, who has attended every game this year between the two teams. “There’s an element of the rivalry here that has really gotten nasty.”

It is that element that became deadly Friday when Mark Allen Antenorcruz, 25, was gunned down in Parking Lot 27 during the eighth inning of the Dodgers’ game with the Giants.

Police said that Antenorcruz was a Giant fan, and that the argument was associated with the rivalry.

“It’s somewhat beyond my comprehension,” said Tracy.

But it’s well within Dodger Stadium, a place where, clearly, the hatred for the Giants is getting out of hand.

Venturing into the left-field pavilion Saturday night, a rowdy spot of Giant insults and Dodger challenges, I came upon 10 shirtless young men with their stomachs painted to read, BURY BONDS!

Not Barry Bonds.

But Bury Bonds.

I asked one of them about the wisdom of using such a word when a fan was gunned down in the parking lot behind him less than 24 hours earlier.

“We didn’t think anything of it,” said Darin Umphenour, a pleasant college kid from Ventura. “It’s just fun, isn’t it?”

It was.

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Fans in the left-field corner heard the shots. How sad that it wasn’t a bat, but a bullet.

Ray Durham stepped out of the batter’s box when he heard the roar. How wrong that it wasn’t the crowd, but a police chopper.

When death came to Dodger Stadium Friday night, nothing resounded louder than the piercing of innocence.

Heather McKeon of Los Angeles climbed out of a car in Lot 27 Saturday, dressed in a Giant cap and smile, and I asked her.

“So, what do you think about what happened last night?”

“Um, it was 6-4, right?”

How we wish.

If it was just about a score, then maybe Mark Antenorcruz is still alive.

If this Dodger-Giant rivalry was still about a game, then maybe I don’t walk through the left-field pavilion Saturday thinking that at any moment, a fight is about to erupt.

Every time a person in Giant gear stood up, that person was cursed and insulted. Every time the Giants did well, those fans wagged their fingers and posed, inciting more curses, more insults.

“It’s off the hook,” said Jeff Newitt, a student and Dodger fan. “If you cheer the Giants, people come after you.”

I spoke to a Giant fan who expected to have peanuts, and worse, dumped on him at any minute.

“Happened last time I was here, I’m just waiting for it to happen again,” said a hunched-over Erik Cuevas of Anaheim.

I spoke to a Giant fan who, at the last minute, left his jersey at home because of the expected abuse.

“I don’t want to get shot,” said Nick Gonzalez of Riverside County.

It’s so stupid, it’s so unlike our sports culture, and it has to stop.

It used to be the fans in San Francisco who were fools, remember? The battery throwers? The Tom Lasorda haters? Those guys who were attacked in the stands by equally foolish Reggie Smith?

But as the Giants have slowly become one of the league’s best franchises, the Dodgers have clearly become their doormat.

And while construction of a pricey new San Francisco ballpark eliminated some of those Candlestick cretins, the Dodger Stadium crowd has simply grown angrier and more frustrated.

Now, it seems, we’re the fools. Now we’re the ones picking the fights, we’re the ones shouldering the chip, we’re the ones who chant, “Giants [bleep]” like they used to chant, “Beat L.A.”

Friday’s murderer, of course, has nothing to do with 99.9% of Dodger fans, and to even place the two in the same sentence is ludicrous.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Nate Bolotin, a student from Santa Barbara who arrived in Lot 27 Saturday with a crew of fans of both teams.

“What is somebody saying, ‘Bonds is better than Crime Dog, so I’m going to kill you now?’ Nobody thinks like that, do they?”

But Friday’s violence was at least a very distant extension of what is increasingly happening in the stands.

The players see it, the scouts note it, and it’s time the fans police it.

“C’mon,” Roberts said slowly, shaking his head. “We play a game.”

Hating the Giants is a Los Angeles sports fan’s birthright.

But taking this hatred seriously enough to curse a stranger or pitch a beer or throw a punch is not.

From our indifferent dealings with the NFL to our refusal to worship losers, Los Angeles sports fans are smarter and more sophisticated than that.

We hate the Giants because it’s fun. We don’t hate them because we really, truly hate them, do we?

Players often talk in cliche terms about these incidents putting things into perspective. But Elizabeth Reed, a mom wearing a Giant cap, did precisely that Saturday night while standing in Lot 27.

“Hearing about the shooting, I got nervous about bringing my children here tonight,” she said. “I’m a Raiders fan, and they don’t even do that on the Raiders.”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com