The Giants plan a season-long 50-year anniversary celebration this year - bobbleheads, reunions, posters and commemorative giveaways galore.
Great timing, considering memories are about the only thing the Giants have going for them this season. The first signs of gloom and doom should appear Monday - if they haven’t already - when they open the season against the Dodgers in Los Angeles.
I’ve hung tough with the Giants for most of their 50 years in San Francisco. We have much in common.
We both arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the same year (1958), we both are known more for our failures than achievements (however meager they might be), neither of us appears to have many fans these days (we’ve both been accused of being too old and overpaid) and the immediate future for the two of us closer to dreadful than dazzling.
How did it all go so haywire?
Having moved to Sunnyvale from drizzly Portland, Ore., at age 8, I spent three carefree years throwing apricots at my neighbor’s garage door, riding bikes on dusty dirt roads through acres of orchards and placing pennies on railroad tracks for freight trains to flatten.
But I had a life-changing experience at age 11 when my dad took me to a night game at Candlestick Park in 1961. The Cubs were in town. The Giants lost 5-4.
You’d think I could take a hint.
Only things got better in a hurry.
I became Willie Mays’ greatest fan, I marveled at Juan Marichal’s high leg kick (he looked like someone about to fall off a cliff) and once I heard Russ Hodges on the radio broadcasting Giants games, I knew I had struck it rich. His signature “Bye, bye, baby” home run call remains the greatest of all time.
I’ll never forget the sight of Russ Hodges in the radio booth at Dodger Stadium during a typical tense late-inning game in the 1960s when the television camera showed his ashtray nearly overflowing with cigarette butts.

thecalifornian.com