the san francisco giants and me: the 1970s

For me, the 1970s ran from approximately 1972-1984. I got married in 1973, and had my two wonderful kids in 1975 and 1978. I worked in a factory for most of those years. Culturally, I was introduced to Bruce Springsteen and punk rock. I also went a little bit nuts, and finally walked out of the factory for good in the summer of ‘84.

As for me and the Giants, the first half of those years were lost to me. From 1972 through 1977, the Giants had only one winning record and never finished higher than third place in a six-team division. Where Willie Mays had been the best Giant as I grew up, the mid-70s Giants were a team of players like Jim Barr (and Barr was a good enough pitcher, but he’s not in the Hall of Fame, and Giants fans had gotten used to having lots of Hall of Famers on the roster).

Also … and I don’t recall where I read this … but it has been suggested that baseball fans who get married tend to fall away from the sport for awhile, as they begin their new life and get more intimately acquainted with the person that they will be spending the rest of that life with. I don’t know if that’s true, but I know that there were about six seasons when I didn’t play much attention to baseball.

I don’t suppose I’m the only fan who awoke from my slumbers during the 1977 World Series. All of those homers by Reggie Jackson got my attention, and some residual effect remained as the 1978 season began. My brother and his wife had gone to a game or two and had a good time, and so for my birthday, they took me to a doubleheader against the Atlanta Braves. The Giants were actually leading their division at the time (June 25), and they didn’t fall out for good until mid-August.

In the opening game of the twin-fest, John “The Count” Montefusco struck out 11 on his way to a complete game victory, backed by home runs from Bill Madlock and Mike Sadek (I’m not sure I realized how rare this was … Sadek only hit 5 HR in his entire career). The nightcap went 11 innings, with the game falling apart as Randy Moffitt (Billie Jean King’s brother) gave up five runs in the 11th. In the two games, I saw a Hall-of-Famer (Willie McCovey had returned to the Giants), I saw Dale Murphy, I saw Cito Gaston as a player. We spent many hours at Candlestick Park that day, and I was hooked once again.

Later in the season, I took my son, then three years old, to his first game. He got to see future Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt … he got to see the first, and only, triple by John Tamargo … and while I have no idea whether he enjoyed the experience, he was hooked, too (I spent a lot of time last night chatting with him as the game progressed).

The Giants were bad the next couple of years, and then there was 1981, which suffered from labor problems. But 1982 was the season that cemented my obsessions.

The Giants struggled for the first half of the season, and as August rolled around, they were in 4th place, five games under .500, and 13 games behind the division-leading Braves. August 3 was quiet enough … they beat the Braves in Atlanta, then repeated that feat the next day. They then returned to San Francisco, and took five out of five against Houston. Atlanta came to town, and the Giants swept all three games, giving them a ten-game winning streak and bringing them within 4 games of the lead.

In that tenth game, Reggie Smith hit a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning to win it. Smith was a very good player at the end of his career, and he had been a Dodger for six years before signing with the Giants for one last fling. We didn’t like him, until he started knocking balls off the wall. Then we liked him just fine. And during that ten-game winning streak, Smith hit .485 with 4 homers.

With ten games to go, the Giants were third, 4 behind the Dodgers. They went down to Los Angeles and won all three games by a single run. When the dust cleared, there was a week to go, and three teams were separated by one game.

I spent most of my life as a steelworker working swing shift, which at our factory ran from 3:30 to midnight. This meant I was at work for night games, but by that last week of ‘82, everyone had Giants fever. And so we built an information system … this was before the Internet or cell phones … there was an old night watchman who was a big fan, and he’d listen to the games until he had to make his rounds, during which he’d pass along the score. As we got the info, we’d post it on big wooden pallets for all to see. That’s how we followed the games from Monday through Thursday. On Friday, I did something that became rather frequent in my last two years in the factory: I played hooky to go to the Giants-Dodgers game. My brother, who was living in Portland, came down, and we watched a scoreless battle turn to shit when Rick Monday hit an 8th-inning grand slam off of Fred Breining.

By Sunday, the last day of the season, the Giants were eliminated. My wife and I, along with our two kids (7 and 4 years old by that point), went to an outdoor afternoon concert featuring Bonnie Raitt and Rosanne Cash. While we enjoyed the music, Joe Morgan hit one of the most famous home runs in Giants history to eliminate the Dodgers from the playoffs.

And if you want to know what life was like for a Giants fan before last night, consider what I just said. One of our greatest memories, one that we can call up in our mind’s eye in a second, one that is shown again and again to this day on the big screen at the ballpark … this event, so monumental to Giants fans, was in the end nothing more than our team preventing our rivals from success. Because Giants fans had no success of our own to celebrate, we were left to celebrate the misfortunes of others. From 1958 until November 1, 2010, that’s what being a Giants fan meant.