There are few franchises in pro sports that value and honor their team’s history as much as the San Francisco Giants. With this year’s theme being a 50-year celebration of Giants’ baseball in Northern California, the club has brought back players from earlier decades to spend time with some of their old teammates and families, meet members of other Giants’ clubs and take their bows in front of the home fans.

On July 19, over 40 of the Giants’ former pitchers and catchers showed up at AT&T Park for a weekend of camaraderie and reminiscing.

Some of the Greatest
Perhaps the greatest Giants team was the 1962 pennant-winning club that edged out the rival Dodgers in a thrilling three-game playoff. Hard-throwing right hander Bob Bolin, who is now retired and living in his home state of South Carolina, was a 24-year-old swingman on that team, and he remembers the wild scene at the San Francisco airport when the Giants returned from Los Angeles after snatching away the pennant with a thrilling playoff win.

“There were literally tens of thousands of fans to greet us and they overran the runways, so we had a hard time landing,” Bolin told The Union. “When we got to our bus on the tarmac and headed to the terminal, the fans surrounded the bus and started shaking it. They even broke out some of the windows. They were screaming, ‘We want Mays! We want Mays!’ One of our guys [reserve outfielder Carl Boles] kind of looked like Willie so someone shouted, ‘Let’s throw ’em Boles and get out of here!’ Believe it or not, a bunch of us actually ended up hitchhiking home from the airport. As you can imagine, the fans who picked us up were thrilled to take us home.”

Things weren’t quite so wild in the 70s when Giants teams mostly hit the skids, but in 1974, a brash young pitcher named John “The Count” Montefusco showed up and electrified the hardcores that still came out to windblown and chilly Candlestick. Montefusco homered in his first Major League at-bat against the Dodgers in LA and ended up winning the game in relief.

“I always enjoyed beating the Dodgers because they were so good, they had that great ballpark, they always had big crowds and their players were all so squeaky clean, like a bunch of choir boys,” said Montefusco, who now lives in Las Vegas.

Montefusco also liked to make bold statements such as “I’m going to strike out Morgan, Rose and Bench [the key hitters on the great Cincinnati teams of that era] tonight, just watch.”

Sometimes he’d pull it off, and sometimes he wouldn’t, but Montefusco said it gave him an edge on the mound, and helped draw fans to the park.

Playing to the Crowd
Fireballing lefty Vida Blue, who came over in a trade from the A’s prior to 1978, was also a big fan draw, and he was the spiritual leader of a team that stayed in first place for much of that ’78 season. Blue, who still lives in the Bay Area and does community relations work for the Giants, gave his ballclub a new nickname that year: “The Little Orange Skateboard.” Blue occasionally fired up the fans by coming out of the dugout to wave a towel or even a little orange pom-pom.

“I wanted some action and energy from our crowd because they had been kind of laid back,” Blue said. “I wasn’t disrespecting the other team, I just wanted to fire our fans up. We had a great pitching staff that year with myself, Bob Knepper, Ed Halicki and Montefusco in the rotation and Gary Lavelle and Randy Moffitt in the bullpen. We almost won the thing that year.”

Another team that came close was the 1982 Giants that went to the last weekend of the season before falling out of contention. Jim Barr, who started and relieved that year, is now a coach for the Sacramento State baseball team. Barr said his favorite memories from 1982 were how some of the veterans set the tone on the field.

“The leadership of guys like Joe Morgan and Reggie Smith really carried us,” Barr said. “They set a great example. Our starting pitching was good, but the key was our bullpen. We had a great one with Greg Minton, Al Holland and Gary Lavelle.”

Another guy who pitched on that club – but was also with some bad Giant teams in the mid-80s – was tall right-hander Bill Laskey, who still lives just a few miles down the road from San Francisco. He has some distinct recollections of “Crazy-Crab,” the Giants’ notorious “anti-mascot” of the forgettable 1984 season.

“We used to throw baseballs and other things at him, and the fans really abused him,” Laskey chuckled. “He was this little guy and I don’t think he had any idea when he put that outfit on what he was getting into.”

Turing it Around
Things got much better for the Giants in the 90s, particularly on a memorable September afternoon in 1997 against the Dodgers when catcher Brian Johnson launched a stunning game-winning homer that beat LA and sparked a drive that culminated with the NL West title.

“What I remember most was that we were all exhausted because it was the 12th inning, and we had been through a lot in that game already,” Johnson said.

Johnson hit the first pitch from reliever Mark Guthrie into the left field bleachers, setting off a wild celebration in the stands and on the field that remains one of the club’s biggest moments in San Francisco.

“When I came up to bat, I was just trying to make contact. I just put the bat on it and once I hit it, I knew it was gone, even with the wind blowing in that day. I think that was the greatest game I was ever a part of,” Johnson fondly recalled.

And like Johnson, who now has a successful consulting business in his hometown of Detroit, moments such as that one will stay embedded in the collective memories of Giants’ fans forever.