For the last two decades, the Giants have acknowledged their inner Christy Mathewson, their inner Monte Irvin, as part of their heritage. Did this help them win the World Series in 2010 and 2012? Well, Posey and Sandoval did not hurt.  A cadre of Giants, including one Willie Howard Mays Jr., will return to the ancestral home in the next week to be honored for the most recent Series victory. This organization is touching all the spiritual bases.  During the World Series of 2010, I wandered the halls in the ballpark in China Basin and loved seeing old photographs of wondrous doings in a far-off time and land — Mel Ott, Sal Maglie. The Giants had names from their glorious past tossing out the first ball — McCovey, Cepeda, Perry, Marichal, Irvin, Bobby Thomson’s family, Dave Dravecky. They invited Barry Bonds, who is part of the history. A few days later, they polished off the Texas Rangers for their first championship since Leo Durocher and Dusty Rhodes in 1954. I wrote a column that began with two words: Karma counts.  “There was a ticker-tape parade in 1958,” said Larry Baer, the president of the Giants, who cherishes history as a partner of profit. “We replicated that in 2010.”  Baer and the current ownership also honored the haunts of the ancient past. Two years ago, Mays visited Public School 46 in Harlem, where the Polo Grounds once stood. This week, Buster Posey will make a private visit to the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J., for some catcher talk.  The Giants are coming home for a visit. That is their attitude, and it is a marvelous one. By honoring their past, they have illuminated their present. At the moment, they generate more emotional wattage in New York than the franchise hunkered down in the marshes of Flushing.  Does karma really matter? Why did it take 86 years for the Boston Red Sox to get past the disposal of Babe Ruth? What miasma hangs over the North Side of Chicago? How long will the creepy smirk of Bernie Madoff haunt the Mets?  For a long time, the Giants seemed haunted by some malediction from their departure from New York. At the same time, the Los Angeles Dodgers, pursued by outright hatred from Brooklyn for being the alleged instigators of the move to California, won five World Series while the Giants failed, often with comparable talent.  In 1992, with the team facing a possible move to Florida, Peter Magowan of Safeway, a New Yorker who had coincidentally moved to San Francisco in 1958, joined a new ownership team put together by Baer. (There are now 32 owners, with Charles B. Johnson, chairman of Franklin Resources, the largest single shareholder.)  “We wanted to celebrate the connections to New York, and not deny it or minimize it,” said Baer, comparing his hometown, San Francisco, to New York, where he worked for a decade. I told Baer I have always thought of San Francisco, with its bustling waterfront, as European — Genoa or Istanbul or Naples or Barcelona.  “When you live in Northern California, this big thing, this elephant in the room, is the rivalry with L.A.,” Baer said. “We feel more like New York or Boston. We think of ourselves as a city. The City. Longtime San Franciscans call it the City. L.A. is the biggest city in California, but we are a city like New York or Boston, with a central business district, people go downtown for entertainment, to the opera, the symphony, the theater, the ballpark.” He also compared New York and San Francisco because of ingenuity, electronics, energy.  Some of this is marketing babble, but the Giants made the visceral connection with an expedition to deepest Gotham in January 2011 for the baseball writers’ annual dinner, and they came bearing superstars and hardware.  They also had the acuity to accept an invitation from a sports bar, Finnerty’s on East 14th Street. Two new owners, Brian Stapleton and Dieter Seelig, had been renovating its East Village funk for a year, trying to induce patrons to stop and have a beer, anything. One bartender invited some friends of hers to root for the San Francisco 49ers on Sundays, and some began coming back for the Giants.  “Ten-thirty on weekday nights,” Seelig said the other day. “We’re open till 4 a.m., and sometimes, those games don’t end till 3 a.m. The night Matt Cain pitched his perfect game, people began coming over at midnight and stayed till the end. We must have had 60 people here.”  Finnerty’s gained a reputation as a Giants bar, much the way there is a trend toward soccer pubs for specific teams, cricket and rugby pubs, Steelers bars, college football bars, you name it, Seelig said.  Could the success and new bicoastal reach of the Giants cut into the popularity of the Mets? What popularity? you ask. The cash-poor Mets are trudging into the new season without one legitimate major league outfielder, not a good omen in Front-Runner City.
The San Francisco Giants, visiting New York to celebrate another championship, have a soft spot for their former home, and the feeling is mutual.