Seals Stadium

The deeply cynical among us understand that between the Boys of Summer and the Field of Dreams, an awful lot of gas is expended in the name of baseball nostalgia—and that most nostalgia is humbug. Yet when it comes to the vanished ballparks of our youth, like Seals Stadium of the Pacific Coast League, nostalgia is not humbug: it is life blood.

Dave Newhouse, sports columnist for the Oakland Tribune, who attended his first game at Seals Stadium the same year I did, 1948, mists over when he breathes, “It was the most beautiful minor league park ever!” A more prosaic Dario Lodigiani, who played second and third base for the San Francisco Seals between 1949 and 1952, agrees: “Of all the parks in the league—and there were some fine ones—everybody knew that Seals Stadium was the best.”

Even those of us vitally interested in whether the Brooklyn Dodgers would finally beat the damn Yankees in a World Series still spent most of our allotted homework time fantasizing about the Seals in their jewel of a yard at 18th and Bryant Streets, nestled between San Francisco’s Potrero and Mission districts. When the New York Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, displacing the Seals and causing the eventual destruction of Seals Stadium, most Seals fans switched allegiance, but some of us never forgave the interlopers and could never accept Candlestick Park as a substitute for the field of our childhood dreams.

There was pro baseball in San Francisco even before my great-grandparents arrived on the boat from Sicily in the early 1880s. The PCL evolved from the California State League in 1903. The next year it joined the National Association, eventually rising to a Triple-A rating: it was often referred to as “the third major league.” The Seals played their games in Recreation Park at Eighth and Harrison. It was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, a temblor 16 times more powerful than the Loma Prieta ‘quake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1989 “Bay Bridge” World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics.

A new Recreation Park, seating 15,000, was built at 15th and Valencia, and the Seals also played “home” games in Oakland and at Ewing Field in S.F’s foggy Richmond district. This was the era that witnessed such Seals heroes as first baseman Harry Heilmann, outfielders Paul Waner, Smead Jolley and Earl Averill, shortstop Frankie Crosetti, and pitchers Dutch Reuther and Sam Gibson, who won 29 and 28 games respectively in the championship years of 1928 and 1931. It was in this latter season that the Seals opened their proud new stadium, a $600,000-$l million steel-and-concrete ballyard whose modern construction material gave it the nickname, “the Queen of Concrete.”

In the first official PCL game played at Seals Stadium, April 7, 1931. with Ty Cobb in attendance, the hometown nine beat Portland, 8-0. (Coincidentally, on April 15, 1958, the new San Francisco Giants whipped the Los Angeles Dodgers at Seals Stadium — the first official major league contest played on the West Coast — by the same score.)

After winning the PCL championship the opening season in Seals Stadium, the team managed to do it again only two more times, 1935 and 1946; winning the playoffs in 1944 and 1945) before the final 1957 season, when the Seals took the PCL flag by winning 101 games. Other notable Seals Stadium years include 1935-51, when the team was managed by colorful S.F. native Frank “Lefty” O’Doul; 1941, when San Francisco hosted the first PCL All-Star game; and 1959, when Willie McCovey was called up from Phoenix by the Giants. In his first major league game, Willie Mac got four hits, two of them triples. The final game was played in the old park on September 20, 1959; the Giants lost, 8-2, to the Dodgers.

Photos of Seals Stadium prove that oft-repeated metaphor; jewel box, but there was nothing like actually being there. Odors of new-mown grass and freshly-baked bread (from a nearby bakery) mingled with intoxicating smells from the Hamm’s Brewery across the street. From the patron’s point of view, Seals Stadium was deliciously intimate, seating slightly more than 18,000. After the Giants moved West, they played only two seasons (’58-’59) in Seals Stadium. By 1960, baseball was already big business and you couldn’t conduct big business in a yard that held only 23,000 — the maximum that could be squeezed in after the Giants installed bleachers in left field.

The stands behind home plate stretched down to the foul poles and rose in one precipitous, uncovered single deck up to the light standards. Even from the last row you could read the brand name on the first baseman’s mitt. The seats were made of metal frames with green wooden slats — strong, wide seats that, with the addition of a cushion brought from home, kept your tush comfy through those traditional Sunday doubleheaders. Those seats, product of an industrial nation as yet too proud to believe in planned obsolescence, were saved when Seals Stadium faced the wrecking ball in 1959, and were shipped, along with the equally durable light standards, to Tacoma’s new Cheney Stadium, home of the PCL Tacoma Giants.

The bleachers in right field were backless benches installed in 1946. Until 1958, left field consisted of a 20-foot-high wall that reached from the foul pole to the center field scoreboard. When Paul Fagan bought the Seals in 1945, hoping to introduce major league baseball to the West Coast, he decided that it would be a classy move to ban advertisements from the outfield walls. He also provided sumptuous ladies’ restrooms and a glass-enclosed radio booth behind home plate, from which Don Klein announced home games and recreated road games, complete with sound effects, on a 10-minute teletype delay.

For all the intimacy and user-friendliness of Seals Stadium for the patrons, it was even better for the ballplayers. Though the dimensions vary slightly, depending on who you read, Lawrence Ritter’s memorable Lost Ballparks reports that it was 365 at the left field foul pole and 350 at the right field marker, with a depth of 404 feet in dead center and 424 to right center — in other words, major league distances. Klein, the Seals radio announcer between 1949 and 1955, says that “the Stadium was outstanding because its measurements were challenging enough to produce a well-balanced game. The Giants wouldn’t have had the weather problems they’ve experienced at Candlestick if they’d put a double-deck on Seals Stadium.”

Echoing Mark Twain’s probably apocryphal remark that “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” Dario Lodigiani agrees with Klein. “You know what nighttime in San Francisco can be like in the summer, but nobody ever complained about the weather the way they do today. The wind blew. but it was high and we didn’t feel it much on the field. It helped the batter, though. If you hit the ball to right, it seemed that sometimes the wind held it in the park, but to left or left center, whoosh, it really carried; it was like a jet stream got hold of it.”

Lodigiani also praises Fagan’s accommodations for his players. “The clubhouse was outstanding, best in the PCL.” When Seals Stadium was first built, it boasted three clubhouses, for the Seals, the visitors and the San Francisco Missions, a PCL team that shared the stadium through 1937, when the franchise went south to become the Hollywood Stars. “Some clubhouses had those little metal lockers like in high school, but at Seals Stadium, we had big wide ones, plenty of room for our stuff.” There was also a barber chair; shoeshine stand, and draft beer on tap. Lodigiani says, “If you couldn’t play in the majors, Seals Stadium was the place to be.”

The competitive size of the park gives the baseball adventures that took place there the same epic patina that colors major league exploits. In 1933, Seals rookie Joe DiMaggio set the still-standing PCL hitting streak record. He got at least one hit in 61 straight games between May 28 and July 26, when Oakland Oaks pitcher Ed Walsh Jr. finally shut him down. One of Klein’s favorite Seals Stadium memories is the season-ending doubleheader on September 13, 1953, when Seals rookie Tony Ponce pitched the nine-inning opener and the seven-inning nightcap, going all the way in both, defeating the Los Angeles Angels, 4-2 and 1-0, the ninth such feat in PCL history.

Klein, Dave Newhouse, PCL historian Dick Dobbins (author of Nuggets on the Diamond, an entertaining compendium of PCL lore), and I agree that one of our most thrilling baseball experiences from those halcyon days of Seals Stadium was the 17-inning game that Al “Inky” Lien threw against the Hollywood Stars on September 10, 1950. This nail-biter included such “nuggets” as Seals outfielder Brooks Holder deliberately dropping a foul ball with the bases loaded in the 14th and the score still 0-0, to keep the runner on third from tagging up; and the Seals’ fleet-footed Jackie Tobin opening the bottom of the 17th with a double, stealing third, and then scoring on a sac fly, in a bang-bang play at the plate, for the game’s only run.

In an era of fragile millionaire pitchers who cannot even get 17 outs, can you conceive what kind of baseball god could go 17 innings? And win 1-0? It happened not at the Polo Grounds or Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park, as fabled as those ballparks may be. It happened at Seals Stadium, on a sunny Sunday afternoon that, typically, was turning a bit cold and foggy by the time Tobin’s teammates mobbed him at home plate. The next day, Al Lien’s weary, smiling, beer-drenched face appeared in a huge photo on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sporting Green. I kept that photo until it turned brown and literally disintegrated long after they had torn down my favorite ballpark.