Chronicle Classic
They have a band at a ball game for the same reason that they have piccolo in the band. It adds a little edge of excitement to things without getting in the way.
Since the organ commonly used at Candlestick Park is one of the more hideous of our municipal horrors, the presence of Del Courtney’s band at yesterday’s opening game demands respectful attention. Or as much thereof as the situation permitted.
The band was awfully far away from the grandstand most of the time, and the winds in the park can do stranger things to sound than they do to baseballs. Now you heard the music and now you didn’t, and what you heard was often confused and unrecognizable. But nobody cared an enormous lot.
It was slightly hair-raising to look across the park during the flag-raising and see the drummer bang the drum half a beat before you heard its boom; it was that far away. “The Star Spangled Banner” flaps fast in the breeze at Candlestick Park, musically and physically. Naturally, they played “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “San Francisco.” And other things, mostly when the teams were changing places on the field. And along about the sixth inning the band just sort of melted away.
If you keep your ears open to all impressions in a major league ball park on the opening day of the season, you will hear a music incomparably more powerful than that of any band.
The deep sounds of a crowd of 39,000 caught in the semicavern of a double decked stadium are as full of pockets and hollows, counter-currents and surface drifts as the surf on an ocean beach. There can be some surprising components to these sounds, as when you discover that somebody near you, sitting right there on the edge of the field in broad daylight, is listening to a play-by-play description of the game on a portable radio.
The crowd-sound somehow never grows so overwhelming as to blot out the three most characteristic sounds of baseball itself — crack, thud and zing. (Bat meets ball, ball meets glove, ball bounces off the steel mesh of the backstop.) These things have a rhythm and timbre with only one meaning. There has been an opera on “Casey at the Bat,” but our composers will come closer to the essence of the thing when they learn to exploit that crack, thud and zing.
I miss the ship’s bell with which they used to toll the runs scored at the end of each inning at Seals Stadium. But that, I suppose, was bush.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on April 11, 1962.