Whiting: The rediscovered Giants’ ‘Winter Season’ in San Francisco 130 years ago
From Sam Whiting at the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 2017, with mention of SABR member Angus Macfarlane:
Danny Dann was at a neighbor’s holiday open house in the Haight when a 19th century photo of a baseball game caught his eye. He asked his host where it had been taken and Terry Casey responded with a line he’d been waiting to deliver.
“You’re standing in it,” said Casey, “in right field, actually.”
This was of more than passing interest to Dann because it meant his own condo, a few doors up Beulah Street, sat in what had been center field at the long-gone ballfield known as Haight Street Grounds. Also because he has spent his career working at ballparks, the last 22 with the San Francisco Giants, where he is vice president of marketing and advertising.
The photo sent Dann digging into the park’s history online, where he found that the New York Giants, ancestor to his own employer, had come to San Francisco to play ball there for a few months in the winter of 1887 on what was then called a barnstorming tour.
“That is pretty cool,” said Dann, 49. “It is something that happened 130 years ago.” More than cool, as it turned out, because nobody in the front office of the present-day Giants — an organization steeped in its own history — was aware of it.
Read the full article here: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-rediscovered-Giants-Winter-Season-in-11043780.php
Originally published: April 3, 2017. Last Updated: April 3, 2017.