Now even the managers are talking smack

Everybody knows where the commotion started.

Nobody is prepared to say where it might end.

"Just depends," Giants manager Dusty Baker said on the eve of Game 2, "on how many balls are thrown close to somebody."

That tells you why the National League championship series between St. Louis and San Francisco should be worth keeping an eye on, even if you have to turn TV Guide upside-down to figure out which channel it's on.

You rarely see teams that truly don't like one another, and following a fifth-inning Game 1 stare-down and shoving match that began with a fastball up and in on San Francisco's Kenny Lofton, these two look like promising candidates.

Even the managers are talking smack, and keep in mind that nobody talks smack in baseball without some very good reasons.

For one thing, almost nobody hears the best lines. The key players begin every confrontation 60 feet, 6 inches apart, and when a pitcher points at a hitter and mouths, "Are you talking to me?" chances are he isn't posturing like Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver."

More likely, he's just making sure the taunt isn't intended for the guy behind him. Talk about a waste of a good insult.

For another thing, the pitcher is holding a rock, and the batter is gripping a club. That automatically makes it one of those moments in life when a misunderstanding can be very costly.

Which brings up the real reason people in baseball usually keep their mouths shut. Talk smack and eventually, you'll be expected to back it up. Everybody who steps between the white lines (including Roger Clemens) has to step up to the plate sooner or later -- except, of course, the managers.

That makes you wonder why St. Louis' Tony La Russa and Baker, his San Francisco counterpart, chose to turn up the volume on their series so suddenly in Game 1.

One minute, the two men were a mutual admiration society, hugging at home plate. A few hours later, they were eyeball-to-eyeball on the diamond and still jawing at one another in separate interviews a few hours after that.

There was some temptation to blame the tension on Bob Knight -- yes that Bob Knight -- who toured the Cardinals' clubhouse before Game 1 as a guest of his good pal, La Russa. But his fingerprints were nowhere to be found.

Ditto for Bob Gibson, the former Cardinal great who was one of the most intimidating pitchers of any era, and just happened to be on hand.

The strange thing is that La Russa and Baker have been friends for years, despite crossing paths in a number of trying ways over the years.

When both were players decades ago, La Russa was the last player to be squeezed onto the Braves' postseason roster at Baker's expense. Baker's final season as a player unfolded in Oakland a few years later, where La Russa was beginning his first as a big-league manager.

Stranger still is that while Baker showed no signs of having his team back down, he figured he and La Russa would be pals no matter what happened.

"Yeah, we're still friends, but on the field we're competitors," Baker said. "Just because you have a fight with your wife doesn't mean you don't love her."

What Baker means is that these are two teams run by guys who will make sure they care.

There's no proving whether the pitch from Cards reliever Mike Crudale to Lofton was retaliation for the home-run pose Lofton struck in his previous at-bat, or whether it was a young pitcher so pumped up by the occasion that he just missed going inside against a veteran having a good night.

These teams have very little history between them. What bad blood there is probably dates to a brawl last season that began with some purpose pitches at Jim Edmonds. But until Wednesday night's fracas, there was no chance this would rival the old Giants-Dodgers series for pure dislike.

It may not still. But at least the Game 1 confrontation put everybody on notice. Baseball fights rarely come off, and this one was no exception. Still, apparently it served everyone's purpose to turn it into something more than it seemed.

La Russa blamed Lofton: "That was very unnecessary. It's a trick I've seen him pull before. It caused a lot of stirring around and people saying nasty things to each other."

But deep down, you wonder if the manager wasn't secretly thanking Lofton for turning up the intensity -- something the best managers do in the biggest series.

Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press.