Say it ain’t so: What it’s like having Dodgers roots in SF Giants territory

"When I covered the Giants, even against the Dodgers, there was no fan in me rooting for one team over the other. That seems like a lifetime ago."

The golden rule of sportswriting is never root for any team. You turn in your fan card that all of us, I assume, had since childhood and report what you see, accurately and without bias.

For some 20 years when I was in the field, I stopped being emotionally invested. I covered many teams in all sports and wrote hundreds and hundreds of stories.

I didn’t care who won.

I just wanted to write a good story and make deadline.

But something happened about a decade or so ago that I can’t explain. Maybe it was being a parent of a young child. Maybe it was the colleagues I started seeing daily when my career moved from the field to the office. They were invested. Why not me?

Somewhere along the line, some of that fan in me resurfaced.

My daughter started liking the teams I liked when I was her age. She’s now in college and still roots for them.

If I wasn’t her dad, maybe she’d be a Bay Area sports fan. But she isn’t. I grew up in Bakersfield. Los Angeles sports teams were the ones most of my family cheered for. They were the teams that kept us up at night, the ones we listened to on the radio (what a treat that was), watched on TV and broke our hearts more times than I care to remember.

I loved the Rams. Wore my Rams jacket from Sears proudly to school, even when I knew it would cause great pain after another playoff loss to the Vikings or the Cowboys.

Our baseball team was the Dodgers and our enemy was the Reds. As a kid of the ‘70s, I could recite the Cincinnati lineup as quickly as I could the Dodgers’. When I returned from the neighborhood store near my grandma’s house with Topps baseball trading cards, I didn’t want to see Pete Rose, Johnny Bench or anyone else from the Big Red Machine. If I did, they were immediately on the trading block.

The Giants?

I honestly didn’t know much about them. From the mid to late ‘70s, they were irrelevant. I didn’t know anything about the ‘50s or the ‘60s or the early ‘70s — the history that made their rivalry with the Dodgers so special and historic.

But in the early ‘80s, I quickly learned that the Giants were the rival and Candlestick Park was no friend.

Joe Morgan’s home run for the Giants that knocked the Dodgers out in the final weekend of the 1982 season was doubly painful. Morgan had been a star on the Big Red Machine.

Jack Clark’s home run that lifted the Cardinals over the Dodgers in the 1985 NLCS was just as bad. Clark had played for the Giants.

My last pleasurable moment of invested fanaticism before I became a serious journalist was in 1988 when the Dodgers won it all. I nearly wrecked the car when Jack Buck said through the radio speakers as Kirk Gibson hobbled around the bases, “This is going to be a home run. I don’t believe what I just saw.”

The Dodgers won the World Series in 1981, too. That one was spiritual and emotional for me. My grandma, who loved her Dodgers and watched games with me, had died a year earlier.

Deep down, I always felt she had something to do with the ‘81 title.

In the 1990s and 2000s, I was too invested in my job and the rules of the profession to really root for anyone. Just as most of my colleagues, I cringed whenever I heard something that event remotely resembled cheering in the press box –, a cardinal sin in sports journalism.

As writers, we rooted for stories and fast games. We breathed a sigh of relief when we pushed the send button to beat deadline.

When I covered the Giants, even against the Dodgers, there was no fan in me rooting for one team over the other.

That seems like a lifetime ago.

I have called Northern California home for 30 years. Given where I work, I am still hesitant about publicly showing support for any team, especially one from hated Southern California.

But I’d be lying if I said the fan in me was still completely in the bottle.

I have a Bay Area sportswriting friend who is in a similar spot. Grew up in SoCal. Rooted for the LA teams since childhood and has lived up here for decades.

During Dodgers games, we’ve become each other’s outlet. We text one another often, usually in a comically pessimistic tone.

They’re going to lose.

They stink.

They, to borrow a line from the late great Tommy Lasorda, couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a (bleeping) boat.

We were back at it again Wednesday night for more than four hours during the wild-card game against St. Louis, analyzing decisions, big and small, knowing that it was going to end badly.

It did not.

The Dodgers beat the Cardinals on Chris Taylor’s two-run walk-off homer moments after I used Lasorda’s boat line to describe Taylor’s recent struggles.

“Taylor coming up,” I texted. “He has fallen from the boat. And still hasn’t hit water.”

That’s baseball. That’s what makes it fun. That’s why I loved the sport as a kid and have remained loyal to my childhood team, even if that loyalty was boxed up and tucked in a closet for many years.

Bring on the Giants.

Should be a heck of a series.