Giants fans thought last season was torture? Just imagine how it felt to be a Dodgers fan watching the team's sworn enemies win the World Series."It was pretty brutal," Dodgers fans Jeremy Teeguarden said as he shook his hanging head at the not-distant-enough memory. "I watched a couple of the games but, really, it was pretty much unbearable to watch.
"Yeah, not good."
Teeguarden and his 5-year-old son, Ethan, were among the couple of hundred Dodgers fans who dared to wear their True Blue colors Saturday to Scottsdale Stadium, spring training home of your (not their) world champion Giants.
They were outnumbered and outheckled in a sellout crowd of 12,081, a spring training record for the Giants in Scottsdale. All they could do was sit there and take it as the Giants beat the Dodgers 8-7.
Dodgers fans might as well get used to it. Until the Dodgers win another World Series - it's been almost 23 years - they're going to hear all about it from Giants fans who went 56 years between banners.
"The rest of our family is Giants fans from Santa Cruz," Teeguarden said. "I've been hearing it, especially from my mother-in-law. She is the worst. She hasn't stopped talking.
"We were pretty brutal to them for 20, 22 years. We always had the '88 championship."
Ah, yes, the "Win One with the Gimper" fallback position. Dodgers fans have played that card ever since Kirk Gibson limped out his home run against the A's in the 1988 World Series.
From that day, all arguments with a Giants fan - from umpire calls to who rides shotgun - ended with a Dodgers fans namedropping Gibson, then showing the World Series ring finger. That always took care of that.
"We've always had Kirk Gibson. We never let them forget about that," said Dodgers fan Chris Zapata, a 32-year-old from Chandler, Ariz., who names Fernando Valenzuela as his hero.
"I got family in San Francisco, lot of nephews and nieces, so they're happy now. It was their first one, so you got to give them that, I guess."
At least Zapata can ignore their phone calls when he is tired of hearing all about it. Not Mike MacEachen, a former assistant track coach at Cal who has been a Dodgers fan for all of his 60 years.
MacEachen moved to Albuquerque and is still surrounded by Giants fans. There was 9-year-old son Ian to his right and 7-year-old son Riley to his left at Saturday's game. Both boys wore black Tim Lincecum shirts, with their dad stuck in the middle in Dodgers blue.
"They hit their heads when they were little," MacEachen said as he tried to explain away his obvious failure as a father to rear Dodgers fans. After all, his brother is a Dodgers fan, his dad was a Dodgers fan, and his dad's dad was a Dodgers fan.
He used to go to Dodgers spring training games in Florida as a child and play pickup games with the players' kids underneath the bleachers. He comes to spring training now, and he'd have to go under the bleachers just to escape the "Beat L.A." jeers.
"We've grown up Dodgers fans, so I know the rivalry is intense," MacEachen said. "I really got to where I had a tough time with the Giants when that guy Juan Marichal hit the catcher with a bat. I go way back. It's been in my family forever.
"I teach my boys, if the Giants disappeared forever, no one would care."
Larry Robideaux, for one, doesn't mind that the Giants got their own ring. The Dodgers fan from Ventura County said he cheered for the Giants during the World Series because he liked the way they scrapped and played ball.
Besides, if the drunk Giants fan sitting behind him Saturday ever got out of hand, all Robideaux had to do was remind him the Dodgers have won more rings than the Giants since the teams moved west.
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