the san francisco giants and me: the 1950s

A few days ago, a friend said if the Giants won, he expected that I’d write several thousand words on my history with the team, much as Bill James had done when the Kansas City Royals won the 1985 World Series. I noted that while James had his annual Abstracts, I had a blog, and over the course of almost nine years I’ve probably told all of my Giants stories before. But, because it might be nice to see them in one place, and because I can’t think about anything else right now, I’ll see what I can do for my friend.

I was born in a suburb of San Francisco in 1953, and for all but one year of my life have lived in the Bay Area. (OK, one of those years, the Bay was Monterey.) If I try to dredge up a few memories of my earliest years (and memories are not to be trusted), I can recall going to Disneyland when I was probably something like 3 or 4 years old … I can remember rooting for the San Francisco 49ers (the first big professional sports team in the area) and my fave, Hugh “The King” McElhenny … I can faintly remember attending nursery school at the Fairgrounds (see story at end of this paragraph for more about that location) … and I can remember the Giants, who came to San Francisco in 1958. I can’t be sure I remember 1958, but like a lot of little kids, I adopted Orlando Cepeda as my favorite Giant, and he was Rookie of the Year in ‘58, so perhaps that’s when it started. One thing is for sure, I remember when Willie McCovey came to the big leagues on July 30, 1959, although this is surely an early example of the problem with memories, since my memory is that we were staying at Hoberg’s Resort, about 100 miles northwest of our hometown of Antioch, while everyone else in the family old enough to have a memory recalls that we were at the Contra Costa County Fair in Antioch that day. The point is that, no matter how faulty my memory is, at least one of my earliest memories involves the Giants.

(I have also told the story more than once in recent years about how I discovered I had been to Seals Stadium, the team’s home for the first two years of their existence in The City. I have a memory of attending a game with my family … my dad, my mom, probably my older brother … I got the only autograph of my childhood, Cepeda’s, of course … and for most of my life, I had no memory of Seals Stadium. But I once reminded my mom about that game we went to long ago, and she said she had never been to Candlestick Park, which means that game I recalled took place at Seals Stadium. And as soon as I realized this, I also realized that in my memory, the ballpark only had one deck.)

One last story and I’ll close my 1950s chapter. I sponsor the Baseball Reference page for the 1958 Giants. Until today, if you visited that page, you’d see my name along with the note, “Still waiting for that first World Championship.” This morning, I changed it to read “No longer waiting for that first World Championship.” I’m told the change will show up in the next day or so.

Comments

[Chris]

The page is changed!!

[Steven Rubio]

How?

[Steven Rubio]

Oh, duh.