The Giants’ rivalry with the Los Angeles Dodgers is one of the oldest in MLB history -- in all of sports, really.
The rivalry was taken up a notch in 2018 when Giants hired president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi away from the Dodgers. So how did he react to his former team winning the 2020 World Series over the Tampa Bay Rays?
“Well, what I’ll say is I’ve got a lot of friends over there, very happy for the people that came so close and came up short,” Zaidi told MLB Network’s Christopher Russo on Thursday. “And I’ll say this, as far as being a member of the Giants organization, you know we want to be an organization that defines success by our own accomplishments and not other team’s failures.”
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The rivalry between the two teams dates back to when both teams played in New York. The Giants played at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan while the Dodgers played in Brooklyn.
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In 1957, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles. Later on, he convinced then Giants owner Horace Stoneham to bring his team to California. While baseball fans in New York were upset about the move, they ended up getting the Mets, who have had an interesting history of their own.
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The southern and northern California rivalry continues to this day, but Zaidi made it clear he wants his new chapter with the Giants to be a positive one, and not anti-Dodgers.
“For me, there was no rooting interest beyond feeling a personal sense of happiness for the people that I worked with over there,” Zaidi said. “But believe me, like every other team in the NL West, there’s no other team that we want to compete with and no other team we want to beat than the Dodgers.”