LOS ANGELES — If the men who run baseball teams act rationally, Madison Bumgarner will make his final start in a Giants uniform at Dodger Stadium on Thursday. Bumgarner, 29, has spent his entire career in San Francisco, leading his team through its most successful decade of existence.

The Giants’ decline came swiftly, and their star pitcher is soon to exit. In San Francisco, a Bumgarner trade will be a coda for mourning, the symbolic end of an era. The reaction in Los Angeles will be neither equal nor opposite. This isn’t physics. But there will be a reaction, or at least there should be. Thursday marks the end of an era for the Dodgers, too.

Every hero needs a foil, and Bumgarner has been the perfect receptacle for the scorn of an angsty Dodgers fanbase. He scowls. He intimidates. He pitches well in the postseason, and he even hits home runs. He’s greeted everyone from Alex Guerrero to Yasiel Puig to Max Muncy with a personalized version of “shove it.” Some of the rivalry’s most enjoyable moments came when these Dodgers did not shove “it,” whatever “it” is, and told Bumgarner what he could do instead.

In an era of antiseptic personalities, when genuine rivalries are subsumed by marketing-department messaging, we didn’t have to squint to see the emotions when Bumgarner faced the Dodgers. It might sound silly, but the games meant something to him. That’s sports in a nutshell.

“The history and energy of the rivalry is in every player,” Orel Hershiser said, “because they grew up with it.”

Hershiser occupies an interesting place in this conversation. He anchored a Dodgers rotation for one of the team’s most successful decades, but he didn’t have a classic, Bumgarner-esque foil for its duration. When I asked him to identify “his Bumgarner,” Hershiser paused.

“It wasn’t a starter for me as much as the teams,” he said. “Pitching in New York, Dodger-Met games were huge. Dodgers-Giants. Dodgers-Cincinnati.”

Among his favorite pitching opponents, two pitchers stood above the rest for Fernando Valenzuela: Nolan Ryan and Dwight Gooden. Once, in September 1985, Gooden and Valenzuela each completed nine innings of a 0-0 game. The Mets scored two runs in the 13th inning against Tom Niedenfuer to win 2-0. That’s the substance of an epic rivalry – but the two pitchers would face each other only once more, in 1989. By the following year, Valenzuela had pitched his final game in a Dodgers uniform.

Rivalries came easier when there were fewer teams to play, and no interleague games on the schedule. They were easier to appreciate when NBC’s “Game of the Week” was a singular national event. That’s why Hershiser believes it was easier for his generation to internalize the rivalries – they were magnified by a network that cherry-picked a pair of opponents each week.

To put the singularity of Bumgarner’s rivalry with the Dodgers in perspective, we have to reach farther back in history than the 1980s. His next start against the Dodgers will be his 35th. Only five pitchers have made more head-to-head starts against the Los Angeles Dodgers with only one team: the Braves’ John Smoltz (36), the Phillies’ Chris Short (37), the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson (43), the Giants’ Juan Marichal (63), and the Braves’ Phil Niekro (67).

Because the September schedule is always stacked with intradivision games, Bumgarner regularly faced his rivals with playoff implications on the line for the Giants, the Dodgers, or both teams. And because it’s arguably the greatest rivalry between any two teams in baseball, we really have to reach back to Marichal to find a mutual hatred that had an opportunity to persist as long and as strong.

Around baseball, this hasn’t been a banner century for attaching faces to historic rivalries. Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright has started 38 games against the Cubs. Red Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield started 36 games against the Yankees. Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte started 41 games against the Red Sox. The acceleration of player movement mitigated the impact of their equally talented peers.

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Dodgers’ Max Muncy: ‘You have to realize that it really isn’t about you’ This even helps explain why the lag time between Muncy’s “go get it out of the ocean” quote and its eponymous T-shirt was measured in hours: Bumgarner’s history of antagonizing the Dodgers had a full decade to marinate before he poked his latest bear. And that’s rare.

One man had a front-row seat to the entire Bumgarner-Dodgers canon. Sometimes he sat even closer. Clayton Kershaw was Bumgarner’s opponent in 11 of those starts and, yeah, Kershaw’s going to miss him.

“When you think about the Giants, coming up with me it was like (Tim) Lincecum for a long time, for a couple years. Then it was Matt Cain for a few years,” Kershaw said. “Bum’s been the longest-tenured guy. That’s just a credit to him. We all have good times ribbing him back and forth, between our clubhouse and theirs. When it comes down to it, I know everyone in here has a ton of respect for what he’s done. Any team that gets him is getting one of the best competitors we’ve got.”