A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (6 page)

The further the stands and the screen extended
towards center fielder, the farther away it was from home plate.
Deep center field was a considerable distance, and in order to make
up for the ridiculous left field dimensions, right-center field was
so deep that Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds would have had little chance
of going deep there. Duke Snider, a left-handed slugger in the
bandbox Ebbets Field, was completely destroyed by the Coliseum.
When Willie Mays first saw the place, he approached Snider during
batting practice.

“
Duke, they just killed you, man,”
he exclaimed in his high-pitched whine.

Right-handed pitcher Don Drysdale
emerged as a star. In 1961, young Sandy Koufax came into his own.
Slowly, manager Walter Alston transitioned from the aging, veteran
stars of Brooklyn – Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges – to a team
with a Los Angeles identity; Frank Howard, Maury Wills, Tommy
Davis
.
The Dodgers were generally
contenders after their first season, as were the Giants in their
first four years in San Francisco.

On April 15, 1958, 23,449 San Franciscans attended
Seals Stadium and watched their new heroes defeat their old rivals,
Don Drysdale and the Dodgers, 8-0. The Giants drew 90 percent
capacity of the stadium located at the corner of Seventh and Bryant
Streets in their first year. The club quickly built themselves up
on the strength of new, young San Francisco stars like Orlando
Cepeda, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal. But they never reached
the World Series, as L.A. had in 1959. The Giants lost seven of
their last eight games to blow the pennant after being in first
place all year in 1959.

San Francisco did pass a $5 million bond issue to
build a modern stadium. Charlie Harney sold his land to San
Francisco for $2.7 million on the proviso that he be put in charge
of the construction project. He pledged to complete the park "In
eight months." The graft and corruption in San Francisco was
rampant, with Mayor Christopher and Harney smiling all the way to
the bank. It became a model for bad planning, bad government and
bad bureaucracy.

Dirt from Harney's nearby hill was used as landfill,
but it sheared off the windbreakers. Chub Feeney came out to
observe progress and saw cardboard boxes blowing around. "Does the
wind always blow like this?" he asked with desperation in his
voice, visions of the bleak future in his eyes.

"Only between the hours of one and five," answered a
crewmember. The workers just laughed. They had theirs, the union
had theirs; the suckers from the Big Apple were committed to their
incompetence with no recourse. Certainly they lacked the will to
insist on excellence.

The smell of clams, polluted water "thicker than Los
Angeles smog and fouler than Canarsie garbage" permeated the
environment, wrote Southern California writer Arnold Hano, who was
familiar with the air quality down there.

Harney thought the stadium would be named after him.
The winning contest name, however, was the uninspiring, unoriginal
Candlestick Park. Nobody ever really figured out why it was called
Candlestick Point in the first place. It meant nothing and stood
for less. After Harney heard it was not to be named after him, work
slacked off and the completion date was pushed back. Eventually a
grand jury probed the payment of Harney's parking contracts, a
notoriously crime-addled business run largely by organized crime in
San Francisco to this day. The Teamsters' strike delayed
installation of key stadium components. Then Harney refused to
allow the Giants to observe their future home. The city fire
marshal inspected the place and called it a "fire trap."
Eventually, Candlestick was reinforced with concrete, the first
stadium ever constructed in that manner.

When Candlestick Park went up in 1960, Vice
President Richard Nixon inaugurated it by calling it the “finest
baseball stadium in the world.” That review resonated for about a
game or two. Fans were literally blown away. On the very first
batting practice swing Willie Mays took, he connected and the wind
sheared his bat in half.

The opener drew 42,269 fans. Distinguished guests
included Nixon, California Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown,
Commissioner Ford Frick, and ex-manager John McGraw's widow. The
Giants beat the St. Louis. Superstar center fielder Willie Mays
drove in all their runs.

Both the Dodgers and Giants were close in 1961, but
Cincinnati captured the championship. Mays somehow had not excited
the populace. He seemed to always pop up in the clutch with the
bases loaded. He was a New York creation, Leo Durocher’s prodigy,
not a homegrown product like the more popular Cepeda.

Candlestick was a liability from the very first
season and never improved. Dodger fans who traveled north made fun
of it. "The Candlestick weather leaves you depressed," said
shortstop Eddie Bressoud. Opponents were just happy to leave.
Pittsburgh pitcher Vernon Law said he would not report to San
Francisco if he were ever traded there.

"Never mind the hot coffee, get me a priest!"
Cardinal's announcer Joe Garagiola joked while enduring a game in
its cold, breezy broadcast booth.

"No one liked playing there," pitching coach Larry
Jansen recalled. "Every team that came in hated it, but I told the
pitchers this was our home and we'd have the edge if we just
prepared ourselves mentally and physically. Wear longjohns, wear a
choker around your neck and warm up an extra five minutes."

Willie McCovey hit an infield pop-up that carried
for a homer. Diminutive relief pitcher Stu Miller's glove stuck to
the fence and he was "blown off" the mound during the 1961 All-Star
game, causing a balk. On that July day, 100 fans were treated for
heat prostration. Then swirling winds caused a huge temperature
drop and the infamous gustblown Miller incident. The wind caused
seven errors by both teams, an All-Star Game record. Roger Maris,
the superstar right fielder of the New York Yankees, was in shock,
saying Candlestick should have been built "under the bay."

"Chewing tobacco and sand isn’t a tasty
combination," remarked Baltimore relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm. To
spit in the wind at Candlestick Park was hazardous.

"Whatever this is, it isn't a Major League
ballpark," wrote Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
.

On one occasion, a pop fly off the bat of
Pittsburgh's Don Hoak was actually lost. It was called foul and the
game was held up for 15 minutes. A coiled heating system may have
been the most famous example of San Francisco incompetence. Built
under the seats in order to warm the behinds of frigid fans, it
never did work. Famed attorney Melvin Belli froze his toes and
sued, winning full damages: the price of his season ticket, which
he paid to San Francisco for the plant of trees, but "not at
Candlestick," he said. "They would freeze out there."

Stoneham had a legal waiver printed in the program
disavowing future responsibility for malfunctions. Women complained
about their nylons torn by the seats. Heart attacks occurred when
people walked the steep hills to get to the park in the brutal
bayside conditions. "Cardiac Hill" got its name when16 people died
traversing it. In 1962 the elevators failed. $55,000 was paid to a
Palo Alto firm to study the wind, but no answers were
forthcoming.

"It's an act of God"!?

It was a waste of dough, just like the money paid to
Harney.

It had open-ended bleachers, and
the monstrous shipbuilding crane loomed beyond like the alien space
ship in
Independence Day
. Anything
hit in the air was an adventure. Dust swirled amid hot dog
wrappers. The players despised everything about the place. It had
no redeeming qualities whatsoever, except that people who wanted to
leave were allowed to. At night, the fog rolled in like Old
Testament Egypt on Passover.

Fans from warm surrounding communities showed up for
mid-summer games in shorts and t-shirts, then froze to the bone.
There was no relief under the stands, which became wind tunnels,
even worse than the open spaces. After games, fans were met head-on
by the howling elements. Whitecaps roiled the bay. The parking lot
immediately had cracks in the cement, since it had been built on
landfill. Broken glass was not picked up by the city-employed
stadium operations, all of whom were bored, lifeless and made fans
feel unwelcome.

The concessions were blasé, hot dogs were cold, the
buns were soggy. Beer was warm. Concessionaires were rude. The
bathrooms stunk of vomit and urine. It was dirty the day it opened
and never got better. The city-built, -owned and –controlled
Candlestick was a symbol of government inefficiency. San Francisco,
once considered a “can-do” city that, after the 1906 Great
Earthquake, had re-built itself in time for the Pan-Pacific
Exhibition of 1915, lost enormous prestige.

When fans left Candlestick, there was nothing to do
for miles and miles and miles anywhere near the place; no
restaurants, no bars. Whatever was there was dangerous and
uninviting, anyway. South San Francisco, the nearest civilization
to the south, had no nightlife of any kind. It was, literally, an
“Industrial City,” which they advertised itself as on a nearby
bluff much the way high schools put up a giant “D” or “R” on hills
overlooking campuses. Someplace that nobody even knew how to
actually get to, called Brisbane, existed somewhere west of the
stadium. It was of no use beyond a postal annex.

The downtown fun spots of Union Square, the marina
and Fisherman’s Wharf required a car ride on the freeway, or
through the ghetto, then exiting and negotiating major parking
hassles. There was little ancillary benefit to The City. Most fans
just wanted to get home. If they lived on the peninsula, they never
came close to San Francisco proper coming or going from
Candlestick.

Then there was its effect on Mays. The winds just
pushed his powerful shots back onto the field of play. He was
forced to alter his swing and become an off-field line drive
hitter. Candlestick Park eliminated any chance he had at breaking
Babe Ruth's career home run record of 714. The place was a disaster
with a capital "D."

By 1962 there was frustration with the club. "San
Franciscans are advised to stay away
from coarse foods . . . avoid stimulants that irritate the stomach
walls . . . if seized by a choking feeling, lay quietly and
well-covered until your physician arrives," wrote Mel Durslag of
the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
. The well aimed barbs
between Los Angelenos towards San Franciscans came early and
often.

Candlestick was a model on how
not
to build a
stadium, first learned by the Dodgers. Candlestick Park was - and
still is - the laughing stock symbol of San Francisco ineptitude in
the face of Los Angeles excellence. L.A.'s efforts at building
Dodger Stadium went smoothly. A New Yorker, Captain Emil Praeger
was the chief architect. Vanell Construction built it to
perfection; every seat unobstructed, spacious parking for16,000
cars, all landscaped with exotic tropical shrubs and palm
trees.

Despite all of this public
evidence of San Francisco’s . . .
inferiority
, San Francisco and San
Franciscans insisted on the myth that they were instead
superior!
The leading lights of this
subject were two local gossip columnists, Herb Caen and Charles
McCabe, and a politico named Art Hoppe. Hoppe was paid good money
every first and 15
^th
of the month to dispense lies about America.
Truth was not his ally, so he found . . . other means of earning
his pay. Caen and McCabe wrote provincial articles extolling the
virtue of all things in The City Caen called, in those pre-Saddam
Hussein days, “Baghdad by the bay.” Caen was a talentless hack
whose stock in trade was identifying people more impressive than he
was, finding out some secret about them, then printing it in the
paper. McCabe at least had some style. They wrote for a rag called
the
San Francisco Chronicle
, which
was thin and unimpressive. The
Chronicle
had little if any reportorial presence in places where the
news was being moved and shook; Washington, New York, Southeast
Asia (where American involvement in Vietnam was escalating), or in
Europe. Most of the important stuff just came in from the wire
services.

Its sports section was printed on
green paper and called the “Sporting Green.” They did employ a
couple of good baseball writers, but the whole emphasis was on the
Giants with a “homer” point of view. It was skimpy and scant. High
school sports got no love whatsoever. Reading the
Chronicle
took a couple of minutes. There
was no there there.

The afternoon paper, the
Examiner
, was better, but no great prize.
Again, the contrast with Los Angeles excellence manifested itself,
this time in the form of the
Los Angeles
Times
. The
Times
was a conservative paper owned by the Chandler family. They
had a large circulation and catered to a mostly-white, Christian
readership populating suburban enclaves such as Pasadena, Palos
Verdes Estates, and Orange County. It was written for people
embodied by the parents of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)
in
The Graduate
.
The
Times
put their weight behind Richard Nixon,
a local Congressman fighting Communism on the House Un-American
Activities Committee during the contentious Alger Hiss affair. The
paper backed Nixon through his Senate election, his Vice Presidency
under Dwight Eisenhower, and a 1960 campaign he won but-for stolen
votes in Illinois, and “tombstone votes” in Texas.