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Column: Where Giants are concerned, Dodgers fans have a spite to the finish

Kansas City Royals fans weren't the only ones left disappointed following the Giants' win in Game 1 of the World Series on Tuesday.
(Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press)
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Let it end, this autumn of our discontent, made inglorious by the Giants’ postseason run. No más, no más. Enough already.

The Giants are back in their Halloween orange and black to haunt us again, a too-frequent seasonal curse. Makes you want to smash a pumpkin.

Sour grapes? Of course (the kind they grow up that way).

So, go, Blue! As in Kansas City Royals blue.

At Golden Road Brewing near Glendale on Tuesday night, Dodgers fans were rooting for the Royals as if they were on 39th Street in Kansas City. Sure, the Royals are suddenly “America’s Team,” a bunch of nobodies who hustle, laugh and somersault into dugouts. Till Tuesday, these guys had been more fun than a room full of Sarah Silvermans.

“Kansas City’s great, but it’s really more about hating the Giants,” admits architect David Poffenberger from a seat at the end of the busy bar.

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Indeed, the Royals are suddenly America’s Team, but they’re also L.A.’s Team, at least when they’re trying to keep the dreaded Giants from claiming another World Series. The Dodgers folded like a $3 beach chair this month, but seeing the Giants excel has just prolonged the agony.

So as the Giants soar, Dodgers fans stew. It’s almost a civic psychosis.

“I just want to see a great series,” says disaffected Dodgers fan Daniel Ramos. “I want K.C. to win. I don’t want to see anyone suffer — unless it’s the Giants.”

In perhaps baseball’s best rivalry, the tensions between the Dodgers and Giants date to 1884, when the teams first met in an exhibition. The teams have played 2,402 times, which is 249 more games than in the vaunted Yankees-Red Sox matchup. In a remarkably close series, San Francisco has a 17-game edge.

In fact, one of the most famous quips in sports, Leo Durocher’s “Nice guys finish last,” was directed at Giants Manager Mel Ott back when both teams played in New York. The mood hasn’t settled down much since.

Once crosstown malcontents, they now represent culturally distinct areas of a baseball-crazed state. This year, the Dodgers finished six games ahead of their division rivals, including a 17-0 drubbing in San Francisco.

“It’s hard to see them in the World Series when you know [the Dodgers] are the better team,” Ramos says of the wild-card Giants.

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“I hate the Giants more than any other team,” explains John Yancey as the Giants leap to a 5-0 lead Tuesday. “Not a violent hate. Just a hate.”

Me? For a while, I managed to take the Giants’ postseason success in stride, till that moment they polished off the Cardinals. I saw the Giants players shampooing each other with champagne, their designer stadium a bouncy house of delight, and I just lost it: “I hate the Giants ... overachieving team in that moldy little city, blah, blah, blah. ...

“Can’t even build a decent bridge,” I growled.

At which point my brain short-circuited and I started pouring pale ale in my ear.

That’s what this series will do to you. Bears-Packers may be the best rivalry in sports. But Dodgers-Giants is arguably the best matchup baseball has ever seen.

Daniel Durbin, director of USC’s Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society, says L.A. fans have the expectation of being front-runners no matter what the sport, and that is heightened by the Dodgers’ free-spending ways the past two years. He says that, at the very least, Dodgers fans expected to get past the first round.

“I think that the fact that the Giants have now been in the World Series in three of the past five years contributes to their frustration,” says Durbin.

Their salvation? Seemingly, the Royals, who were so tight Tuesday night they were swinging at pitches that bounced two feet in front of the plate. It is their first World Series in 29 years, and it showed.

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“It’s all nerves!” yells Ramos.

“I like the Royals, but 30 years? That’s nothin’,” notes Peter Rossow, a Chicago Cubs fan visiting from Michigan.

Well, that’s a whole different psychosis. As I’ve always said, any team can have a bad forever.

Meanwhile, the little jolt Dodgers fans were hoping for Tuesday night went missing. The Royals, previously undefeated in their eight postseason scrums, seemed overwhelmed and underarmed.

“I dislike the Giants sooooo much,” groans Ramos, who once got thrown out of AT&T Park in San Francisco for heckling Prince Fielder.

“But otherwise, I’ve never been treated bad up there,” he adds.

“I actually love San Francisco as a city,” confesses Poffenberger.

Not me.

I think it was God who summed it up best the other day, when he tweeted: “Go Giants! And take the 49ers with you!”

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