San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Loss of bar a strike against baseball fans
We were driving on Bryant Street heading home just the other day. The traffic signal turned red at 16th Street and I turned to the Sailor Girl, my companion in small adventures. “There’s the Double Play,” I said. “We should really come by for lunch one of these days.” She agreed. The time wasn’t right that day. But, one of these days.
That day will never come. Only a day or two later, the Double Play caught on fire and burned down. It’s gone, probably forever.
The first thing I felt when I heard about the fire was sadness: I always liked the place. The Double Play was a San Francisco institution. And an American one as well. Rafael Hernandez moved to San Francisco from Mexico and in 1988 got a job as a dishwasher at the Double Play. He worked his way up to chef and nine years later bought the place. His wife waited on tables and their oldest son was the bartender. It was a San Francisco kind of place.
The second emotion I felt was regret. I’m sorry I didn’t go to the Double Play more. I’m sorry I didn’t make the effort. Maybe just stop by for a beer. Maybe go by to watch one of the last Giants games of the season on television. The Double Play was a great place to watch baseball on TV. I had it on my list. But you know how it is. I got busy. Maybe next season.
The Double Play was the closest thing we had to a shrine to baseball in San Francisco. It was located directly across the street from Seals Stadium. Most San Franciscans know the first major-league baseball game on the West Coast was played there: April 15, 1958. The newly minted
San Francisco Giants beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 8 to 0. Willie Mays played in that game. So did Orlando Cepeda. It was historic.
But to other generations of San Franciscans, Seals Stadium was historic because the Seals played there. Joe DiMaggio broke into professional baseball there. DiMaggio was a San Francisco guy, in the days when that was important. Lefty O’Doul was the manager of the Seals for years. He was another San Francisco guy, born and raised in Butchertown.
When I was a kid growing up on Potrero Hill, we could sometimes hear the roar of the crowd from Seals Stadium when the Seals were going good, and the wind was right.
We went to the games sometimes, too, and listened to Don Klein on the radio: games from faraway Seattle and Portland, Ore. We disliked the Los Angeles Angels and the Hollywood Stars, because they were from L.A. and we were San Francisco kids. The Dodgers? Well, that was East Coast stuff. We had to learn to dislike them.
It was a rare thing to find a place that could make the transition from the old San Francisco to the new one. The Double Play did it. The walls were lined with old stuff, like a museum: programs, baseball cards, old gloves. Newspaper clippings about high school games from long ago: Mission High, Lincoln, Poly, Sacred Heart.
The Double Play used to have a backroom where the walls were painted as if the customers were seated in a Pacific Coast League game, with the Seals just hanging on to a narrow lead. A baseball mural, San Francisco’s version of the Sistine Chapel, assuming that Michelangelo was a baseball fan.
A piece of trivia: All the ballplayers in that Double Play mural were lefthanded. The mural was lost when the landlord remodeled the building, and the extra space was put to other uses.
But baseball always stayed on the menu at the Double Play. The game was usually on the television, and the customers paid attention. I remember stopping by in the heady days of the first of the Giants’ World Series. Barry Zito was pitching. Pablo Sandoval hit three home runs.
The Double Play was packed three-deep at the bar, customers standing up in the booths, cheering, high-fiving.
“It’s the next best thing to being at the game,” Jon Clifton, one of the customers, told me that night. “It’s like being part of the crowd. You get caught up in the energy.”
I remember that night fondly. I’ve been lucky enough to see a dozen World Series games in person, but that World Series on TV at the Double Play is my favorite.
The Giants season winds down this weekend.
It’s been disappointing. No Orange October this year. But I might have been able to catch a game at the Double Play. It would have been fun.
Maybe the Double Play will come back. There’s a GoFundMe campaign to rebuild it.
But a new Double Play won’t be like the old one. That’s gone. If there is a lesson in this it is the regret in the air, like the bitter smell of ashes. I’m sorry I didn’t go to the Double Play more when I had the chance. We pass this way only once.