In depth of the Depression, S.F. had best ballpark in the country
At the corner of 16th and Bryant stands a venerable bar and grill called the Double Play. This joint, which opened in 1909, is the only reminder of the most beloved of San Francisco’s neighborhood ballparks — Seals Stadium, home to the minor league San Francisco Seals.
As related in an earlier Portals, Seals Stadium’s predecessor was a ramshackle wooden ballpark known as Recreation Park, which opened in 1907 at Valencia and 14th streets. In the late 1920s, the owners of “Big Rec” decided to replace it with a larger, more modern stadium.
They found a suitable site a mile to the east, on a lot bordered by Bryant, Potrero, 15th and 16th. Remarkably, Seals Stadium took less than a year to build and cost just $1 million — that’s about $14 million in today’s dollars, or less than 1 percent of the expected price tag of the Raiders’ football palace in Las Vegas.
Construction started in 1930, just in time for the Depression. As Daniel Bacon notes in “Sandlots to Stadiums: The Baseball Parks of San Francisco,” which appeared in the fall 2001 issue of the Argonaut, unemployed men would jump on the running board of one of the Seals’ own-
ers’ car every day as he drove to the site, begging him for a $3-a-day job.
The graceful, 18,500seat stadium was filled to capacity the day it opened in 1931, with fans in the uncovered single-deck stands enjoying the sun. Six 125-foot banks of lights — “We turn NIGHT INTO DAY,” ads proclaimed — allowed night games to be played in San Francisco for the first time. (It would be four years until night games came to Major League Baseball.)
There was a public address system, which meant umpires no longer needed to use a megaphone to yell out the starting lineups. All in all, the concrete-and-steel stadium was considered the finest ballpark in the country.
The Seals won the Pacific Coast League pennant that year. In the coming seasons a host of talented players patrolled the new ballpark, from veterans like Francis Joseph “Lefty” O’Doul from Butchertown (now Bayview-Hunters Point) to rookies including a skinny kid from North Beach named Joe DiMaggio.
DiMaggio and his brothers learned to play ball at North Beach Playground. In “The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball,” Kevin Nelson writes, “When they played the outfield at the playground, particularly in deep left-center, they had to watch their step because that was where the Golden State Dairy grazed its horses in
the afternoons after they were done pulling the milk wagons for the day.”
DiMaggio played his first full season with the Seals in 1933 and immediately racked up a 61-game hitting streak, second in professional baseball history only to one Joe Wilhoit and his 69-game streak for the low-minors Wichita Jobbers in 1919. DiMaggio was soon signed by the New York Yankees, where he went on to become one of baseball’s all-time greats.
The Seals were often strapped for cash but were a powerhouse, winning 13 PCL championships. Win or lose, fans remained fiercely loyal to their team, its players — some of whom lived in the neighborhood — and friendly, easily accessible Seals Stadium. Games with the rival Oakland Oaks were a particular highlight, with fans taking the ferry across the bay in each direction. In 1948, the Seals set a minor-league attendance record of 670,000, which lasted for 40 years.
“Most everyone who went to Seals Stadium seemed to love it,” Nelson writes. “Seals Stadium was built at a time when all the ballparks were neighborhood ballparks. Its Potrero Hill neighborhood was a bustling city landscape with cars, trucks, taxis on the streets, people passing on the sidewalks, walking in and out of shops, restaurants, markets, and bars — lots of bars.”
The nearest bar was the Double Play.
“The Double Play was a favorite of ballplayers who liked to drink, and that basically meant all of them,” Nelson writes. “In the 1930s, the Seals featured an aging pitcher named Noble Winfield ‘Old Pard’ Ballou, who liked to wind down after a night game with a nightcap or two at the Double Play.”
Old Pard would usually sleep off his excesses in the bullpen, but sometimes when the team needed a reliever, he could not be found.
“At these times a clubhouse boy ran down to the Double Play, where, as often as not, Old Pard would be propping up a stool, partaking of the hair of the dog that bit him. Stirred to action, the old baseball warrior would put on his game face and do his duty for the Seals.”
Although Nelson admits the story “may or may not bear an intimate relation to the truth,” it nonetheless evokes the lighthearted nature of playing baseball in an era when minor leaguers had to hold down day jobs and would invite fans onto the field to shag flies with them.
Old Pard and his thirsty teammates may have been inspired by the presence of the nearby Rainier (later Hamm’s) Brewery, which was topped with a sign depicting an enormous foaming glass of beer. Lit at night, the sign was visible from inside the park. It outlived the stadium, but sadly, was removed in 1976. Also adding to the stadium’s ambiance was the Langendorf Bakery, which sent the smell of baking bread wafting across the park.
After World War II, ambitious new owner Paul Fagan gave the stadium a major makeover, removing the billboards, painting the entire stadium green, and hiring musicians to entertain between innings. He also raised players’ salaries to $5,000 a year, the major league standard.
Not all of Fagan’s innovations were successful: When he banned peanut sales in 1950, claiming that it cost more to clean up their shells than he made, disgruntled fans brought in their own peanuts and hurled the shells onto the field. The “Peanut Revolt” forced Fagan to hand out 18,000 free bags of nuts to save face.
Fagan was trying to position the Seals to become a major league team, but his hopes were dashed when the New York Giants moved to San Francisco. Seals Stadium hosted its last minor league game in 1957. On April 15, 1958, the first major league baseball game in the city was played at Seals Stadium,
when the Giants took on the other new East Coast transplant, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
But the bandbox in the northeastern Mission was only a temporary home to the Giants. Ownership considered the stadium too small and demanded parking. Although Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and Lefty O’Doul argued that the ballpark’s 23,000 capacity could be doubled by adding a second tier to the grandstands, supporters of a new stadium said renovations would be too expensive.
They also claimed that the weather would be better at the proposed new location, at Candlestick Point. That turned out to be not quite true, but by the time that was obvious, it was too late.
In October 1959, Seals Stadium was torn down, ending the long era when going to a ballgame in San Francisco was like going to the corner store.