Oracle Park, San Francisco (MLB #8 - From the Ridiculous to the Sublime)

 


Of the 40 or more major and minor league stadiums at which I’ve attended games over the years, I’d ranked San Francisco’s Oracle Park as one of the two most beautiful (stay tuned to see which is my other favorite). Particularly during a day game, it is absolutely gorgeous. Sitting in the upper deck behind home plate, you look out over the field to see San Francisco Bay right behind the outfield. It can be a little chilly (under 60 degrees tonight), but you won’t get overheated, and it gets little rain or fog.

It's sublime.

It replaces a park that had an uncontested reputation as the worst place to play or watch a major league game for the last 40 years of the 20th Century, Candlestick Park, the Giants’ home from 1960 through 1999.

Candlestick was ridiculous.

Most notably, it was windy. It was located on a point sticking out into the Pacific Ocean, and in the afternoon and evening, the winds would howl. Horace Stoneham, the owner of the Giants who moved the team from New York to San Francisco, oversaw the building of the park, but typically toured site in the morning. The story I heard was that the first time he went in the afternoon, he said something about how windy it was, and the people who were on the site all day every day assured him that no, this was typical. They had an architectural feature that was supposed to deflect the wind, but while the overall wind was less, but it swirled inside the stadium, making every ball hit into the air an adventure. In 1961, they hosted the All-Star Game, and in the 9th inning of a one-run game, a gust of wind hit the pitcher, blew him off balance, and a balk was called. A study done a couple of years after the stadium opened showed that the winds would have been considerably less if it had been built a few hundred feet away, but you can’t move a stadium.

It was cold. It was often in the 40s in the evening, and that’s not counting the wind chill. They built a radiant-heating system for some of the most expensive box seats, but the heating system didn’t work very well, and the owner of one of the boxes successfully sued the team for false advertising. Also, the visiting team’s dugout was colder than the Giants’ dugout, because of the layout of the stadium and the direction the winds came from.

And periodically, fog would roll in.

Surviving a game in Candlestick became a badge of honor for fans. I’m sorry that I never made it there. Currently, the two stadiums with the worst reputations are Oakland Coliseum and Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. Neither has a reputation nearly as bad as Candlestick, but we wanted to make sure that we got to Oakland Coliseum while it was still in use, which is why we’re doing the California swing this year.

The game:

Giants are playing the New York Yankees this weekend, and so far, the story of the series is the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, one of the biggest names (as well as one of the biggest players, at 6-foot-7) in the game. He grew up in the area as a Giants fan. In last night’s game, the first of a three-game series, Judge hit two home runs, and the Yankees won, 6-2. Tonight, he hit a two-run homer in the first inning, then got an intentional walk in the middle of a two-run third inning. But the Yankees were still only ahead 4-3 with two outs and no one on baseball in the top of the 8th inning and Judge batting. He hit a ground ball, and beat out the throw to first – he’s big, but he can move. The next batter hit a deep fly ball that the centerfielder couldn’t quite catch, then the next batter hit a two-run homer, and it was 7-3. If the Giants could have converted either of those two almost-outs, it would have been a close game, but instead there was no drama at the end.

Getting there:

We went to tonight’s game with longtime Tucson friends Chris and Jeannine Leverenz, who now live in the Bay Area. We took CalTrain, rather than driving all the way into the city, and it worked remarkably well. That’s one reason why I approve of downtown stadiums, because public transit works well for them.

 

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