Giants vs. A’s in the World Series. It’s every Bay Area baseball fan’s dream. And in 1989, that’s exactly what we got. But how quickly things can go so terribly wrong. As the players warmed up for the start of Game 3 on October 17, the great Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 rumbled through the region at precisely 5:04 pm. For many across Northern California that night, their lives would never be the same. But for the 60,000 plus of us sitting at Candlestick Park in San Francisco waiting for the game to start, it was an entirely surreal experience.
I was a 15-year-old kid back then, a fourth generation Giants fan. 1989 was at the tail end of a pretty dry spell in San Francisco baseball as the team had not been to the World Series since 1962, and had not won it since 1954 — 4 years before they moved west from New York. So to say that I was jazzed for the Series to begin would be an understatement. My optimism was pretty thoroughly dashed after lackluster losses in the first two games, however, so I was moping around the house after Game 2 on Sunday.
Then I got a phone call. It was my Uncle Jim wanting to talk about the game. We rehashed what went wrong and how the formula going forward was pretty simple — we had to pitch better and hit better. It was rather brilliant analysis on our parts, I must say. But then he asked something peculiar. “What are you doing on Tuesday?”
I was confused. “Uh… Watching the game I suppose.” Duh. Stupid question, Jim.
Then came the punchline: “You want to watch it together? At the ‘Stick?” After I remembered how to speak, we talked about how he had managed to score tickets for us to Game 3, but to this day I have very little recollection of that conversation. My mind was elsewhere.
Fast forward to Tuesday, and there we were at 5:03 pm, sitting in our seats in the very top row of the upper deck behind home plate, excited for the game to start. Then the shaking began. It started as a light jostle before accelerating into a more violent shaking and even a rolling motion. It felt like my seat had just driven over a large speed bump far too quickly. I’m a California kid who had been through my share of earthquakes so I wasn’t really scared, but the whole stadium gasped simultaneously. When the shaking stopped, there was complete silence for a few seconds before we all realized we were alive and the stadium was still standing. So we cheered. The unmistakable sentiment was, “OK, that was interesting. Now let’s play ball!”
Just as we were recovering from that, the first of many strong aftershocks hit, and it didn’t feel substantially weaker than the original. It started to sink in that the game wasn’t happening. And then fans who had radios began hearing news reports of some of the destruction that had happened around the Bay Area. A stunning, devastating reality set in. Security officials out on the field announced with bullhorns that the game was cancelled and we should exit the stadium. My 15-year-old brain was spinning a mile a minute. I was at my first World Series game, and this happens? Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.
The World Series was delayed for 12 days while the Bay Area recovered from the 1989 earthquake. Jim and I were back in those same seats for the resumption, but the Giants lost 13-7. The next day they were swept 9-6. Nobody in the outside world remembers much about that World Series, as it probably should be. But it’s something I’ll never forget.
