Candlestick Park is about to go out with a bang. Soon after the last 49ers game, demolition crews will place charges throughout the stadium, someone will push a button and the great concrete bowl off Jamestown Avenue will implode, an arena that produced 53 years of memories collapsing in just 30 seconds.

Giants fans in particular loved to hate the Stick, with its notorious wind, rowdy patrons and rough environs. But Candlestick was actually one of the tamer entries in a long, proud tradition of weird and wonderful San Francisco ballparks.

The first mention of something like baseball in San Francisco took place in 1852, when the Daily Alta California ran an item about "full grown persons engaged very industriously in the game known as town ball." Town ball was the precursor of baseball, a bat-and-ball game played on a square where the players frequently made up their own rules. Even when the game got rules, this lax attitude toward authority and decorous behavior was to continue in San Francisco.

The city's first game of actual base ball (it was originally spelled with two words) was played on Feb. 22, 1860, at a spot called Centre's Bridge.

According to the book "Nuggets on the Diamond" by Dick Dobbins and Jon Twitchell, Centre's Bridge was probably somewhere south of Market along the Mission Plank Road, which ran from Mission Dolores to roughly near where the Transamerica Pyramid is today.

In that first game, the San Francisco Base Ball Club defeated another San Francisco team, the Red Rovers, 33-33.

The Rovers forfeited the game because they refused to keep playing unless the San Franciscos removed their pitcher, who they claimed was cheating. In those days, pitchers threw underhanded, and if the batter didn't like the pitch, he could ask the pitcher to throw him a better one. This explains both the football-like score and the ruffled feathers of the Red Rovers, who presumably felt the San Francisco pitcher was not serving the requisite meatballs. So outraged were the Rovers that they refused to pay for the post-game dinner. The San Franciscos celebrated at a saloon anyway, kicking off a long tradition of post-, pre- and sometimes during-game imbibing.

Beat the Wide Awakes

San Francisco's first real ballpark was the Recreation Grounds, built in 1868 on a lot off 25th and Folsom in a then-remote part of the Mission District, a heavily Irish neighborhood. The park, on the site of present-day Garfield Square, was enclosed by a plank fence. Four thousand fans watched the San Francisco team, now called the Eagles, defeat the Oakland Wide Awakes. As Kevin Nelson notes in his book "The Golden Game," this curious name was often given to teams because the men had to rise early to play before they started their day jobs.

Base ball as played at the Recreation Grounds would not have brought joy to the heart of a modern-day commissioner. Not only did gamblers openly bet in the grandstands on everything from the next pitch to the score of the game, they took an active hand in improving their odds, reportedly employing such tactics as firing off a pistol as a fly ball descended, trying to startle the outfielder into dropping it.

Baseball grew so popular that the tiny Recreation Grounds could not hold the crowds, and in 1884 a larger park, Central Park, opened at Eighth and Market. It was followed three years later by the Haight Street Grounds, built on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park.

The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed Central Park and the Haight Street Grounds. But in their place rose the most wonderfully unruly ballpark in San Francisco, and maybe anywhere: Recreation Park.

Mention the golden, pre-megabucks age of San Francisco baseball and most people think of Seals Stadium, a beloved 23,000-seat stadium located off 16th and Bryant that was replaced by Candlestick in 1960. (The old Double Play bar still stands on that corner, the sole reminder of the vanished stadium.) But for a vanishing breed of old-timers, the truly unforgettable ballpark was Recreation Park.

Out of the fog

Recreation Park, which stood on the block surrounded by Valencia, Guerrero, 14th and 15th streets, opened in 1907. It was home to the San Francisco Seals of the professional Pacific Coast League until 1930, except for half of one season in 1914, when the team's owner decided to move them to a brand-new field in the Inner Richmond District - somehow failing to notice the icy winds and thick fog that regularly plague the area. The experiment was a humiliating failure, and the Seals returned to the Mission.

Recreation Park was so rickety and creaking that it was known as "Old Rec." Yet after the Seals left the park, as Jerry Flamm wrote in his book "Good Life in Hard Times," "Many San Franciscans stubbornly claim that baseball has never been the same in the City."

It was a different game and a different time. Bleacher seats cost kids 10 cents; on Fridays, they were admitted free. "If the last out of a game the Seals won was caught by a Seal outfielder, the kids would pour out of the bleachers, climb on to the top of the inner left field wall, hang by their arms, and drop down into the outfield," Flamm recalled. "They would surround the outfielder who caught the fly ball and he would throw it onto the air for a wild scramble for the cherished souvenir."

Balls were prized by more than fans. In those days before baseball teams became Fortune 500 companies, foul balls caught in the stands had to be returned to the team. There were two uniformed special policemen stationed near the bleachers, whose job it was to sprint to the place where a foul would land. (Predictably, some fans would shout that the cops were better at judging fly balls than the Seals' outfielders.) When a ball was hit outside the park, a Seals employee - who without a doubt had the weirdest job in the history of San Francisco - would push a button that activated a buzzer at the main outside entrance to the park at 15th and Valencia. One buzz meant the ball was heading toward Valencia; two buzzes meant toward 15th. Alerted, a waiting "ball hawk" employee would sprint in that direction, racing kids who would try to make off with the ball.

But Old Rec's greatest claim to fame was the Booze Cage, a closed-off section of elevated benches at field level, running from first to third base around the back of home plate. The baselines were only about 15 feet from the Booze Cage, and the only thing separating the spectators from the players was a flimsy chicken-wire screen - which meant that everything the fans yelled could be clearly heard.

All-inclusive price

The Booze Cage was so called because the 75-cent admission price included either a shot of whiskey, two bottles of beer, or a ham-and-cheese sandwich. History does not record which of these items was most popular, but few women dared to venture into the Booze Cage, which was filled with loud, raucous teamsters and other working joes, many of whom clearly had chosen options one or two.

Old Rec's eccentricities extended to the field of play and the ground rules. Next to the center field clubhouse was a 15-foot-high cutout figure of a bull; if a player hit it, Bull Durham tobacco would pay him $50. But the most memorable feature was a gas meter hole about 1 1/2 feet square at the bottom of the clubhouse. Any ball that rolled into the hole was a home run.

Forget luxury boxes and catered sushi. What today's ballparks need are more Booze Cages and gas-meter home runs.

Editor's note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's "Portals of the Past" will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.