This story was excerpted from Maria Guardado's Giants Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Ten years ago, a fan known simply as “Dan from Warwick” called into Mike Francesa’s show on WFAN in New York to pose a rather innocuous question: Do the San Francisco Giants and the New York Giants ever get together when they find themselves in the same city?
The football team, after all, is named after the baseball club, which was founded in New York in 1883 before relocating to the West Coast in 1958.
“That might be the weirdest question I’ve gotten in a long time,” a bemused Francesa said. “Yeah, as a matter of fact they have the Giant picnic, they hold it over in Totowa, I think it is. And then they have the Giant relay race and the Giant raffle, and then they all get together for the Giant breakfast the next morning and then they go their separate ways.”
Francesa’s sarcastic response ended up inspiring a fun spoof that came to life last month, when the longtime sports talk radio host teamed up with former New York Giants Eli Manning and Shaun O’Hara and current San Francisco Giants Logan Webb and Matt Chapman to film a promotion for Season 5 of “The Eli Manning Show.” The 35-second skit shows Francesa walking in on the quartet of athletes having brunch in a conference room as part of the “Giants-Giants annual meetup.”
“They really do get together,” Francesa says, shaking his head as he exits the room in disbelief.
The idea for the parody came from the New York Giants’ marketing department, which had been searching for a way to collaborate with the San Francisco Giants for several years. Their schedules finally aligned on July 31, when the Giants happened to have an off-day in New York prior to their series against the Mets.
Manning, O’Hara and Francesa each came to the Giants’ team hotel in midtown Manhattan for the filming, which took around two hours to complete. Webb said he jumped at the chance to participate, especially since he’s a big NFL fan who played quarterback for his high school football team.
“We had a blast,” Webb said. “We got to sit at a dinner table with Eli Manning and Shaun O’Hara for two hours. Those guys are funny. You always see other athletes in other sports, and you think they’re different than we are, but I think we’re all very similar. We like to rag on each other and make jokes. It was a blast. Two great guys. We kind of talked about playing golf at some point with them, so maybe it is an annual thing, and we start meeting up together.”
Webb’s only gripe was that the Giants’ social media team didn’t put together a stronger highlight reel from his football days to show Manning, who delivered an amusing assessment of the two-time All-Star’s quarterbacking skills.
“Those were the worst highlights that they could have possibly found,” Webb said. “There are so many better highlights than that. They put those ones out there. But I grew up watching [the Manning brothers] and loving them, so it was really cool to be able to do that.”