A flood of memories of 'Stick in '62 Team had area around 1st base turned into bog to slow Wills

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Candlestick Park opened in 1960, but I didn't hate the park or its baseball team until two years later.

My theme song in '62 could have been, "Why Must I Be a Teenager In Love ... With The Dodgers?" The Dodgers broke my heart that year. More accurately, the Giants broke it, by cheating, and I learned how to hate the team and the ballpark as a two-fer package deal.

Candlestick's weather, which made England's bleak Moors feel like Malibu, drove men to extremes. It drove many good fans away from the ballpark, and it drove otherwise-rational fans to belligerent, borderline behavior. It made the Giants' players cranky. Will Clark's voice rose two octaves when he raged about getting "Candlesticked."

The brutal weather created an atmosphere in which Alvin Dark and Matty Schwab could cheat the Dodgers out of a pennant while the umpires were rendered powerless, their judgment numbed and nullified by the cold.

Candlestick was a pox on baseball for 40 years, but for four games in 1962, for the Giants and their fans, it was the Garden of Eden. Emphasis on garden.

I saw Candlestick when it opened, on TV, from the far-off land of La La. Dodgers announcer Vin Scully gushed about the new ballpark, with its space-age "radiant heating" piped into every seat! (It never worked.)

The place looked exotic on TV. Players wore heavy-duty sweatshirts and turtlenecks, and the winds comically whipped their baggy flannel pants, making it clear that Candlestick was a different world, as uniquely San Francisco as a North Beach coffee house, daddy-o.

To a So-Cal kid, San Francisco was an incredibly cool place. I learned about beat poetry by reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I learned to drive by watching "Bullitt" and how to negotiate by watching "Dirty Harry." And I learned about baseball cool and style from Willie Mays and Sad Sam Jones, who pitched with a toothpick in his mouth!

Maury Wills, shown sliding into third in 1965, was the reason the Giants turned the area around first base into a bog in '62. Maury Wills, shown sliding into third in 1965, was the reason the Giants turned the area around first base into a bog in '62. Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close A flood of memories of 'Stick in '62 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

I rooted for the Dodgers, but how could I hate the Giants? Matty Schwab and Alvin Dark were about to show me the way.

The Dodgers led the Giants by five games in early August when the Dodgers came to the Stick for three games. The Dodgers featured baseball's most feared weapon, Maury Wills, on his way to stealing 104 bases and winning the NL MVP.

Wills couldn't be stopped. ... Or could he? On the eve of the series, manager Dark asked head groundskeeper Schwab if he had any ideas on slowing Wills. Schwab did, and he set to work with a touch as subtle as a blacksmith's. Matty and his son Jerry, using sand and soggy peat moss, created a bog in Wills' takeoff area off first base.

The Dodgers wailed, the umpires ordered repairs. The grounds crew wheel-barrowed the sloppy goop off the field, mixed in a few scoops of real dirt, and reapplied the porta-swamp. Play ball.

For the two subsequent games, Jerry Schwab watered the first-base area like a rice farmer.

The Giants swept the series. The two teams finished the regular season tied for first. The three-game pennant playoff opened at Candlestick, where Schwab & Son quicksanded Wills again. People think Gaylord Perry was a cheater, but he used his illegal goo in dainty dabs, not in truckloads.

The baseball gods took care of the Giants in the World Series, but the damage was done, to the Dodgers and my innocence. My hatred for the Giants was on.

Looking back, I believe that the Giants' outrageous dirty tactics were facilitated - if not inspired - by the weather. Playing conditions at the Stick were so wretched that they fostered an anything-goes mentality. The umps kind of shrugged off the blatant sabotage as part of the overall misery tax imposed on all comers by Candlestick.

On my first trip to the Stick, in 1978 as a beat writer covering the Dodgers, boyhood grudges behind me, I realized how terrible the place really was, and how deeply hated it was by players.

Especially the visitors. The Giants' dugout was heated, but not the visitors' dugout. The Giants could also duck into the warmth of their clubhouse, but the visitors had to walk across the field to get to their clubhouse. On the plus side, this perp walk provided Tommy Lasorda and Giants fans an opportunity, twice per game, to express their mutual love and respect.

On that first trip to the Stick, I sought out Matty Schwab. He was a friendly fellow, showed me his office under the stands. On one wall he had created an artistic montage of dangerous items hurled onto the field over the years by the lunatic fringe.

At Dodgers games my pals and I sailed paper airplanes into the warm Chavez Ravine thermals. At the Stick, red-eyed fans tested the winds with flashlight batteries and quart bottles of hootch.

My hatred for the Giants faded when ballparks became my workplace, no longer my church. But my feelings for the Stick never thawed.

Man, for a hip and sophisticated city, San Francisco sure got taken to the cleaners on that real estate deal. Forty years in that dump! Alcatraz closed down after only 30 years, and it was a much nicer joint. On the Rock, the heating worked, and cheaters were not rewarded.