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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
The San Francisco Giants are ensconced in their new ballpark. Now if they could only throw off the hex and win a game there.
Apr 19, 2000 | I loved Candlestick Park, the ugly concrete wind farm where the San Francisco Giants used to play. I cried the day they closed it in September. But after the end-of-season ceremony, when the team had a helicopter carry the Stick's home plate over to the new digs downtown at Pacific Bell Park, I accepted the news I'd been resisting for three years: I had to have seats in the new stadium.
Who'd have thought a Major League Baseball franchise -- the guys who brought us the strike of '94 -- would do ritual so well? But the sight of the plate being lowered into the mud at the new park a few miles away, televised on the stadium Jumbotron, made me feel better, like I'd find a new baseball home, just as good or better than the old one. Even after thieves stole the plate from the new park, I didn't care. I had to scrape up thousands of dollars to pay for seat licenses and season tickets, and make my friends do it with me.
Still, it was a reach -- psychologically as well as financially. I don't belong to a country club or any other kind of snooty social in-group. My daughter goes to public school. Buying these seats didn't quite feel like me. For a while I had an investment-banker boyfriend who'd bought charter seats, the expensive ones on the elite club level, the minute they became available. One day during a fight he reached into his briefcase and waved his new charter contracts in front of me, as if to say, Don't you want to be around to get a piece of this? It was more endearing than it sounds now, but I guess the answer was no; we broke up soon afterward.
As 2000 approached, I realized I couldn't rely on a man: I'd have to get my own seats. It hurt. For the seats I wanted -- lower box, not the best but still great -- the charter "seat license" alone was $3,000 a seat, plus another $1,900 for the season tickets -- almost $10,000 for the two-seat package. My best friend and I figured we could each afford a quarter of that, and eventually we found four friends who'd each take an eighth.
But as it came time to finalize our decision, my exhilaration fought with fear and a certain kind of guilt. The San Francisco media has been full of stories about lifelong Giants fans shut out of tickets this year by all the dot-com assholes whose companies have bought season tickets but are probably too busy to go. Hey, that sounds like me.
Plus, the stadium's private financing means the team had to sell off every inch of it to the highest bidder for sponsorships. Pac Bell bought the park's name before the stadium was even born, and as it went up people began complaining about the big Coke bottle in left center field, the Old Navy mascot, the dot-com ads everywhere.
But the uncertain future of my favorite Giant, manager Dusty Baker, was the source of my biggest doubt about investing in the Giants' new park. Baker is the spiritual leader of the gritty, blue-collar, Candlestick Park Giants I loved in the 1990s. For seven years he took a mid-payroll team, no stars save Barry Bonds, and made them fearless baseball warriors, and frequently playoff contenders. He was twice named National League manager of the year.
As 1999 closed it was clear that the Giants' owners weren't doing enough to sign him, though his contract runs out at the end of 2000. It began to worry and annoy me that after all the team's owners had done to build a solid foundation at Pac Bell Park, they were putting the future at risk by failing to lock up Baker.
But that's me. I worry too much. I have problems with commitment. In the end I paid my almost $2,500 to own a piece of the park. Though as the season opener approached I was still afraid that I'd be disappointed, that I wouldn't like the park, or the fans, or worse yet, the team the Giants ultimately assembled to play in the shiny new baseball-boutique by the bay.
As usual, a lot of my worries were for nothing. Pac Bell Park is a glorious cathedral of baseball. A co-worker and I walked to our first game, the opening pre-season bout with the Milwaukee Brewers, about a mile hike from our office downtown. You traverse grimy Third Street, which sneaks under the freeway (where the homeless still live), genuflects at the new ball field and then, fittingly, stretches all the way south to Candlestick Park.
Just as the streets get more crowded, Pac Bell suddenly rises up in front of you. That first game, my friend and I were awestruck, speechless, like pilgrims at the end of a long journey. Twenty-four palm trees wave above Willie Mays Plaza (in honor of his uniform number, 24). Lights around their bases illuminate the trees as they surround the tall bronze statue of Mays out front.
In bronze Mays is not quite 30, and he's just hit a home run. His lithe, powerful body is at the end of a mighty swing; the bat is falling away, still cradled in his last three fingers (Mays worked with the sculptor to get the release right), and he's looking skyward like all great transcendents. There is not another stadium in America with so majestic an entrance.
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