Giants-Dodgers rivalry: Scully’s seen, called it all
There’s no Giants-Dodgers rivalry without Vin Scully articulating the blow by blow events to the New York boroughs, the Southland communities and ultimately, thanks to technological advances, the world.
There was Scully on Monday night, breaking down the latest Madison Bumgarner-Yasiel Puig dustup, the latest in the endless stream of Giants-Dodgers bench-clearings, as if Scully traveled through time and Bumgarner played the part of Leo Durocher, Puig as Carl Furillo.
“‘Don’t look at me, don’t look at me.’ That’s what it looks like he’s saying,” Scully said of Bumgarner. “And the next thing you know, Puig is saying something to the effect, ‘What are you going to do to me? What’s you do to me? What’s you do to me?’
“So one’s saying, ‘What’s you do to me?’ and the other is saying, ‘Don’t look at me.’ Ohhhhkay, we are going to the eighth inning in the latest drama of the Giants and Dodgers.”
The teams relocated six decades ago. The players changed era to era. The fans handed the baton to their children, who
handed it to their children. The owners came and went. The ballparks were put up and torn down.
The one part of the rivalry that has gone unchanged and continues to be the finest in the baseball landscape is Scully, who linked the generations, described in matchless detail and melodic expression the Giants and Dodgers over time and today guides us through a mythical and magical tour of the rivalry’s lore.
It’s as if we can hear James Earl Jones paying tribute to the legend.
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been Scully. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But Scully has marked the time. He’s a part of our past, Ray. He reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.”
When Scully, 88, retires at season’s end, following the Oct. 2 Dodgers-Giants game at AT&T Park, he’ll leave behind a 67-year legacy in the booth and enough stories to fill a decalogy.
“Well, you really have to go back to New York and realize that the Dodger fans and the Giant fans were, in a lot of cases, shoulder to shoulder all year long working at their jobs,” Scully said this week. “I can remember as a kid working for the post office during the Christmas holidays trying to make some money, and we’d be standing in front of hundreds of cubby holes and putting mail in the holes. And we’d spend all the time slotting and arguing about who was better, Duke Snider or Willie Mays, etc., etc.”
It’s no secret the rivalry’s intensity was at a different level in New York, and Scully cites the story of Furillo, a longtime Dodgers outfielder, and the fiery Durocher, who managed both teams and ran the Giants when Scully began as a Dodgers broadcaster in 1950.
Furillo was a popular target for Giants pitchers, and Sheldon Jones beaned him in 1951, prompting Furillo to be carried off on a stretcher. In 1953, Furillo was drilled by Ruben Gomez, initiating a Furillo-Durocher brawl. After the plunking, they glared at each other — perhaps like Bumgarner and Puig — before going at one another, Furillo storming off first base and Durocher emerging from the dugout.
Unlike Bumgarner-Puig, Furillo and Durocher grappled, and Furillo had Durocher in a headlock. As teammates arrived to break up the melee, Furillo fell to the ground, and Monte Irvin stepped on his hand and broke his finger.
It wasn’t unusual behavior in those days.
“In Ebbets Field,” Scully said, “the home dressing room was separated from the visiting dressing room by a door, a very simple door. And there were some bad moments. Really, I think around the time that Carl Furillo was beaned and Leo was running the Giants and all of that, they nailed up that door so you couldn’t open it. You couldn’t get into either room.
“To me, that’s silent testimony to the fact that the feelings really ran high.”
Those feelings date to the teams’ early existence in the 1800s and into the early 1900s when Charles Ebbets owned the Dodgers and John McGraw managed the Giants. Neither was fond of the other.
“The borough of Brooklyn had an atmosphere of, it’s us against the world,” Scully said. “So the Giants were the lordly team on the Harlem River, and they’d come over to Brooklyn. In the olden days, they tell me that McGraw would bring the Giants over to Brooklyn in horse-drawn carriages, and the people in Brooklyn, the real fans, would throw things down on top of them.
“So the rivalry was somewhat bitter because of the fact there was a great deal of friction. At least now, you have several hundred miles separating the cities. Oh, sure, there are Giant fans down here, and there are Dodger fans in San Francisco. There’s not quite the bitter rivalry they had in New York. And I’m delighted for that. I really am.”
The rivalry in San Francisco began at Seals Stadium in 1958 — rookie Orlando Cepeda homered as the Giants trounced Don Drysdale 8-0 in the first big-league game on the West Coast — and moved to Candlestick Park and eventually Pacific Bell Park, and Scully recalled every step of the way, starting when he called games just a row behind fans at Seals Stadium.
“A fellow would turn around and just say to me, ‘Do you have a match?’ ” Scully said. “It was that informal and that close.”
In those days, broadcasters read the commercials between innings, and Scully sometimes found himself in competition with Giants fans, especially when he read beer commercials.
“They’d start hollering the names of all the other brands of beer that they could possibly think of,” Scully said, “so that taught us to record all the commercials rather than be heckled by the fans.”
At Candlestick, fans at Dodgers-Giants games sometimes were as competitive as the players, not necessarily in a good way.
“At Candlestick, the wind was a nightmare,” Scully said, “but I also thought that the surroundings affected the personality of the audience. I could be completely wrong, but it was cold, raw, windy, and I think the people in the stands were unhappy and sometimes would take their unhappiness out.
“But once they moved to AT&T Park, it’s completely different. The fans are goodnatured, they’re happy, they’re fair, they’re wonderful. … The weather at AT&T has made it a wonderful party atmosphere. No meanness at all.”
That’s where Scully’s career will end and a long, wonderful chapter of Giants-Dodgers lore will close. In his 67th year chronicling and analyzing two storied teams, Scully will sign off for the last time and extend a “very pleasant good evening” to a rivalry that wouldn’t have been the same without him.