LOS ANGELES – Hours before the first pitch, Ron Washington sat atop a golf cart on the Dodger Stadium grass, just a few feet from where he hit a sharp grounder up the middle for his first major-league hit.

Five decades ago.

The Giants’ revered infield coach was called up by the Dodgers in September 1977 and befriended a teammate who took him under his wing and became a lifelong buddy and fellow big-league manager.

“He bought me my first suit. He bought me my first pair of alligator shoes,” Washington said of Dusty Baker. “Dusty took care of me. We’ve been friends ever since.”

For the first time since that final month of the 1977 season, which proved to be historic in American culture, Washington and Baker are on the same team again — Washington as one of Giants manager Tony Vitello’s most trusted coaches and Baker as a special assistant who’s Hall of Fame bound. Whenever they run into each other nowadays, usually at Oracle Park, they share baseball stories and discuss the 2026 season.

The Giants, here for a four-game series, fell 4-0 to Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers Wednesday night, ending their three-game win streak. Ohtani threw seven scoreless innings to lower his ERA through seven starts to 0.82, and Willy Adames ran the Giants out of their only threat — he was doubled off second base when mistakenly bolting to third on a fly to the warning track in center and took full blame for not realizing there was just one out.

It was an overall stinker for the Giants, so what better time to get nostalgic and touch on a relationship that’s five decades in the making? Baker remembers Washington as “always a hustler. He would run to the plate. He never went half-nothing. He was a good kid.”

That kid turned 74 last month. Baker turns 77 next month. Just three years apart, but in 1977, they were worlds apart. Baker already was an accomplished outfielder and hitter, having debuted nine years earlier as a teenager with Hank Aaron’s Atlanta Braves. Washington was getting his first taste of the big leagues, a challenging feat as an infielder breaking in on a team with the longest-running infield in big-league history: Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey.

“Yeah I ran to the plate,” Washington said. “I ran to first base when I walked. But when I struck out and had to come back to the dugout, that’s when I walked.”

On the final day of 1977, Baker made history twice. He hit his 30th home run, making the Dodgers the first big-league team to feature four 30-homer players in the same season, and he immediately crossed paths with ecstatic on-deck hitter Glenn Burke, who raised his open palm to the sky, prompting Baker to slap it with his own extended hand.

It’s believed to be the first high five, a moment that has its own chapter in Baker’s fabulous new autobiography, “Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life,” with author Steve Kettmann. Washington played in the game, but all these years later, he can’t say he remembers witnessing the celebratory gesture, but he does vividly recall what it meant to be on that team at that time.

“I remember the memories of the guys I was around,” Washington said. “I was around Dusty. I was around Davey Lopes. Ron Cey. Steve Garvey. Rick Monday. These are some bad boys. Tommy Lasorda didn’t have to do anything. Just manage the ballgame. The players managed the club. See the difference? That’s the way they were.”

No way either Washington or Baker envisioned what was to come. Both became baseball lifers and big-league managers, among the few African Americans to take the reins, and among the select few to manage in the World Series.

Three years they managed in the postseason simultaneously, 2012, 2011, and 2010, but never faced off in a World Series.

“I stayed in contact with Wash the whole time,” Baker said. “When he started coaching, then managing, I’d pull for Wash because most of the Black guys were feeling the Black guys, especially because there have been very few. So you stay in contact for moral support more than anything. Like, ‘You all right, man?’ ‘You doing good?’ ”

Washington said, “He’s a people person and has a knack for getting the best out of them. I think he got that from his daddy. He played with some of the sharpest people in the game. I mean, Hank Aaron was his guy. He’s been around some bad asses. The years he’s been in the game and all the managers he played for, I’m sure he grabbed something from every one of them. It shows now with his 2,000 wins.”

Washington remembers Baker buying him his first suit and alligator shoes when the Dodgers visited Atlanta, which was typical. Baker learned in his Braves days, including from Aaron — along with Orlando Cepeda, Clete Boyer and even Bob Uecker — to mentor younger players.

The laundry list of mentees included Washington along with Jeffrey Leonard and Rafael Landestoy, all late-season callups with the Dodgers in 1977, all embracing their first big-league experience.

“That was our job,” Baker said. “You pass it on to the next generation.”

An example of how Baker watched out for young players came during spring training when he would tell coaches to give his at-bats away to Washington and others. Washington said, “He used to do it all the time.” Baker said he’d try to get less experienced players at least one at-bat a game because, “That one at-bat was more important to them than it would’ve been to me.”

Washington got into 10 regular-season games that season, all at shortstop, and hit .368 (7-for-19). The Dodgers won 98 games, beat the Phillies in the National League Championship Series (Baker was series MVP), and lost to the Yankees in the World Series.

For Washington, that September was his first and last experience as a Dodger. He was dominating the Pacific Coast League in 1978 before a major knee injury detoured his career for a couple of years and ruined his chances to become a fixture as a Dodgers utility man. He didn’t reach the majors again until 1981 with the Twins.

Washington finished his 10-year playing career in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Houston and coached and managed ever since, earning a World Series ring with the 2021 Braves. Now he’s a Giant, recruited by Vitello to oversee the infielders, and his value to the club is on display with the stunning defensive development of second baseman Luis Arráez.

As Washington noted while sitting on the Dodger Stadium golf cart, “This is where it all started.” His first hit came Sept. 12, 1977, when he batted second between Lopes and Reggie Smith (Baker hit seventh) and ripped a grounder past Padres pitcher Dave Freisleben, against whom Washington also got his first Triple-A hit.

“The colors are the same. The dimensions are the same,” Washington said as he looked around Dodger Stadium. “But I never cared about the dimensions because I wasn’t reaching that fence that often anyway.”