‘Baysball’ Fever : Fans See an A’s-Giants Series as a Bridge Over Troubled Waters

SAN FRANCISCO —  When people around here talk about “The City By The Bay,” you know they are not talking about Oakland.

Just 10 miles separate Oakland and San Francisco, but their worlds could not be more different. Oakland is, after all, a city whose only television station carries San Francisco Giants games, which can’t be real good for a city’s self-esteem.

In so many ways, San Francisco beats Oakland every day, so the very idea of a Bay Bridge World Series--”Baysball,” they’re calling it here--is exciting to a guy like Oakland Athletics fan Jimmy Calderon, a 38-year-old machinist who ponders the possibilities with almost religious reverence.

“Dead meat,” Calderon says of the Giants. “We’re going to kill them. It’s unthinkable that the A’s won’t make it. It’s their destiny.”

With both the Giants and the A’s leading their divisions, talk in the Bay Area has turned to Baysball. Nothing quite like it has happened since the last “Subway Series” in 1956, when the New York Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers. As San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen observed, the only neutral fan is a dead fan.

Both the A’s and Giants are carrying some emotional baggage: The A’s, World Series champs in 1972, 1973 and 1974, lost in the Series last year to the Dodgers. The Giants, meanwhile, have not won a World Series since they moved to San Francisco from New York in 1958. In that time, the Giants have been in only one World Series, which they lost to their old nemesis, the Yankees, in 1962.

Officials of both clubs don’t say much about the notion of a Bay Bridge series, focusing instead on the pennant race and the playoffs. Giants spokesman Matt Fischer says there is a “fairly healthy rivalry” between the two clubs, and A’s spokeswoman Kathy Jacobson goes so far as it call it a “friendly rivalry.”

It takes a Giants fan like Rich Olmstead, a 42-year-old telephone installer, to tell it as it is: “Oakland doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. The A’s fans across the bay are a bunch of lightweights, and so is their team. Hey, I rooted for the Dodgers last year.

” . . . The city of San Francisco is so splintered, but baseball has been able to bring us together. We’re ready for a win. This is our year.”

Oakland city officials are so sure that the A’s will make the playoffs that a booster committee, called Celebrate Oakland, has already planned a couple of pep rallies, a parade and a victory party. The “Welcome to Oakland” banners were scheduled to go up on downtown streets over the weekend.

Whatever happens, the fans say, there has never been a better time to be a baseball fan in the cities by the bay.