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This Day In Sports…September 30, 1999:
After 40 seasons, the San Francisco Giants play their final game at Candlestick Park. Appropriately, it was against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Inappropriately, the Dodgers won 9-4. Built on a point on San Francisco Bay that is a wind-tunnel from the Pacific Ocean, Candlestick was often inhospitable, even on summer days. In 1983, the Giants began awarding “Croix de Candlestick” pins to fans who made it all the way to the end of night games. The weather is best there in the early fall, and it would remain home to the 49ers through the 2013 season.
Opening Day at Candlestick in 1960 was an omen: a day that started warm and sunny and ended cold and windy. The semi-panacea was the view of San Francisco Bay from the stands, but that disappeared when the stadium was closed in for the 49ers, who moved there in 1971. (And it would disappear anyway when the fog rolled in.) Among the historic events there were the 1961 All-Star Game, when Giants reliever Stu Miller lost his balance due to a wind gust, “The Catch” by the 49ers’ Dwight Clark that sent the 49ers past Dallas and into their first Super Bowl in 1982, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake before Game 3 of the World Series.
How many home runs would Willie Mays have hit in another ballpark? Oracle Park, the Giants’ current home, for example. Well, Mays once claimed batting in Candlestick Park cost him 100 career homers. And hey—he hit 660, so if you bump that up to 103, he’d be the all-time leader, one better than godson Barry Bonds. But part of Mays’ legacy is the improbable highlight-reel catches he made in center field at the ‘Stick, swirling winds and all.
The final event in Candlestick Park history before it was torn down was a Paul McCartney concert in 2014, 7 1/2 months after the 49ers’ final game there. San Francisco mayor Ed Lee helped arrange it as a late addition to McCartney’s “Out There” tour as a salute to the facility—and the fact that it was the site of the Beatles’ final public concert in 1966. The band played 11 songs over about 30 minutes in their finale in front of about 25,000 fans.
At McCartney’s “Last Pick At The ‘Stick,” he was on stage for two hours and 40 minutes without a break (at the age of 72) before 47,000 fans—it would have been 49,000, but an estimated 2,000 were stuck in gridlock trying to get to the stadium and gave up. McCartney’s tour set list at the time was 39 songs, but he added a 40th for this stop. It was “Long Tall Sally,” the last tune the Beatles ever played in concert. My brother and I attended. A forever memory.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
