Local Giants fans amped up for World Series’ arrival in San Francisco (w/video)

No matter which team wins Friday’s World Series opener at AT&T Park in San Francisco, half of Adam Goldberg’s family will happily return home to Sebastopol.

Goldberg, a real estate broker, and his son Eli, 7, will be wearing orange and black and rooting for the Giants, as they have for years. His wife, Tina Howa, who grew up in Kansas City, will don the blue Royals shirt her sister sent from KC, albeit with some mixed feelings.

“We love the Giants,” Howa said, recalling that her family went to the tumultuous victory parade in San Francisco following the Giants’ triumph in 2010, the team’s first World Championship since 1954, four years before it moved here from New York.

Howa wasn’t a “huge sports fan” when the Kansas City Royals last won a series in 1985, while she was in high school. And since moving to California 20 years ago, she admittedly hadn’t been true to the Midwest team.

“The Royals have been awful most of that time,” she said. “I haven’t been with the Royals through thick and thin.”

The Giants, meanwhile, won the World Series again in 2012 and are now tied with the Royals, at one game each, as the series arrives in San Francisco. Eli Goldberg sometimes wears orange and black to bed.

Through the postseason’s preliminary rounds, Howa said she rooted for both teams. In the World Series - “when push comes to shove,” she said - Howa found her feelings for Kansas City, where her family lives, proved strongest.

Bella Goldberg, 14, a freshman on the golf team at Analy High, sympathized with the long-time loser Royals and decided to back her mother’s choice, her father said. Should Bella opt to stay home for the Analy-El Molino football game Friday, her grandfather, Earl Goldberg of Santa Rosa, will happily take her place in The City.

Adam Goldberg said he can tolerate the sight of his wife in blue, a shade that tends to make Giants fans see red. “At least it’s the Royals,” he said. “It’s not Dodgers blue.”

Bob Herr, a retiree from Graton, admitted to being a “diehard Dodgers fan” as a kid growing up in Los Angeles during lefty fastballer Sandy Koufax’s dominant years in the 1960s. Now a convert to the orange and black, he’ll be at AT&T Park Friday with Bill Crane, a west county friend, to watch the Giants’ third Fall Classic in five years.

Herr moved to Sonoma County in the early 1970s and stopped following Major League Baseball - until the Giants opened their waterfront ballpark in 2000, the start of the Barry Bonds era. “That was kind of weird,” he said. “A team based on one guy.”

He likes the Giants’ recent championship teams much better. “It’s such a team with heart,” Herr said. “Every year that they pull it together, I can’t figure out how they do it.”

Herr groaned through the Giants’ wretched midsummer slump, when they turned a 7.5-game lead over the rival Dodgers into a two-game deficit. But he was at the park, watching Tim Lincecum’s second career no-hitter in awe from the bleachers on June 25.

“You can’t buy tickets to a no-hitter,” Herr noted.

Despite finishing six games behind the Dodgers in the National League West, the Giants ripped through the postseason wild card game, division and league series with an 8-2 record, while the Dodgers got bounced out of the division series in four games.

Longtime Giants fan Rob Pitts of Santa Rosa finally got season tickets, including the playoffs, this year. Pitts and his wife Jennifer will be at Friday’s game with friends from Sebastopol, Dean and Catherine Mesquite, and on Saturday with their sons, Spencer, 16, and Alec, 17, both Analy students.

The couple will stay at a hotel Friday and Saturday night. “It’s going to be a blast,” said Pitts, who owns a traffic safety business.

He was a bit surprised to see the injury-plagued Giants make it to the World Series, especially after losing lead-off hitter Angel Pagan. What made the difference, Pitts said, was “how some of the younger guys stepped up.”

The final game of the league championship series with St. Louis, settled by Travis Ishikawa’s walk-off three-run homer, was a thrill. “The whole stadium was chanting (his name),” Pitts said. “It was crazy.”

Pitts gave his Game 5 tickets to a business client.

Samantha Elliott of Windsor bought a sleek Giants jacket, black with bright orange trim, at the All American Sports Fan shop in Coddingtown Mall on Thursday afternoon.

She’s thrilled to be going to Friday’s game with tickets her boyfriend bought online for her birthday gift moments after the Giants clinched the National League championship. Prices shot up quickly for those who dallied, she said.

On Thursday, the StubHub online ticket agency had 3,068 tickets available for Friday’s game, starting at $515 for standing room only, about $11,500 for an upper deck seat behind home plate and a whopping $25,000 for a lower box seat way out in left field.

Elliott said she will pair the new jacket with a Yomiuri Giants shirt, orange and black, her boyfriend brought back from Japan.

“I know they’re gonna win,” Elliott said, predicting Friday’s outcome.

Store manager Ron Norman, a Giants fan since first grade, said his sales have been up about $3,000 a day - roughly a 300 percent increase - since the team won the Oct. 1 wild card game.

“I’m a very happy guy,” said Norman, a Petaluma native, wearing a Giants cap.

Giants merchandise continues to move fast, and other stores in the chain are calling to see if he has stuff to spare.

He’s also sold 10 Kansas City Royals hats and one jersey, his entire stock of stuff for the American League team.

Oakland A’s fans bought most of it, along with some Dodgers fans “just to be bitter,” Norman said.