San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Old S.F. ballpark left legacy of fog, fire and few fans
There were signs that San Francisco’s Ewing Field was cursed from the very start.
During an Opening Day pregame celebration for the 18,000-seat baseball park on May 16, 1914, owners brought a giant floral horseshoe as a totem of good luck. The frigid wind blew it to the dirt so many times, they just left it there through the ceremony.
“You ought to call it icicle field,” one fan told Chronicle sports editor Harry B. Smith.
“It was freezing cold,” Smith wrote the next day, “just about as bad as you’ll ever find it in that neck of the woods, and it is quite within reason that it interfered with the quality of the pitching.”
Ewing Field is all but forgotten in time. But the Richmond District ballpark that served as a one-year home to the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League deserves to be remembered as the ultimate cautionary tale of poor planning and hubris. It wasn’t just a huge financial failure. By the end, it was a Stephen King villain of a field. Seemingly sentient in its evil, it nearly destroyed the western half of the city in its cinematic final act.
It started, like many big San Francisco failures, as a declaration of victory.
The Seals had been playing in Recreation Park, an aging Mission District ballfield whose operators had feuded with J. Cal Ewing, the team’s owner. Ewing responded with his pocketbook, sinking $100,000 in a replacement field below Lone Mountain on the corner of Masonic Avenue and Anza Street, then considered part of the Richmond District.
It was a speculative move. Ringed by four cemeteries, the area was known more for its dead San Franciscans than its live ones. But streetcar service was active, and there were already plans to move the bodies to Colma.
Ewing built with the weather in mind, designing the grandstands to face the sun (should it deign to appear), and using wood, figuring concrete and steel were more likely to conduct the cold. Opening Day was a frigid and windy foreshadowing of days to come, but The Chronicle’s coverage mostly projected optimism.
“Truly the opening of Ewing Field yesterday was an occasion that will go down in San Francisco’s baseball history, which dates back a half century,” baseball writer Fred A. Purner wrote. “Undoubtedly such an up-to-date and beautiful home for baseball cannot help but advance our great and glorious national pastime.”
But almost immediately, the media turned on the field, and few in the sellout crowd returned as regulars. Within three weeks, that crowd of 18,000 had winnowed to a hardy 200, including the peanut vendors and cushion sellers.
“Each and every one of them should be handed a gold medal by the management of Ewing Field,” Purner wrote in The Chronicle after that June 6, 1914, game, before reporting that Seals star Elmer Zacher “pulled a bit of good-natured humor by showing up in center field with an upraised umbrella.”
It was an early taste of the frustrating Candlestick Park experience. Perhaps fueled by their discomfort, the crowd seemed prone to anger; alongside the ads on the outfield wall was a warning that fans who threw their cushions would be arrested, with $10 going to whomever turned them in.
Except Ewing Field had a bigger problem than Candlestick’s wind and cold. The fog rolled in from the west unimpeded, making the tracking of fly balls particularly difficult.
An oft-told Ewing Field tale that ballplayer Pete Daley started a fire in the dugout to keep warm has been largely debunked. But more likely true is the story, reported by Chronicle columnist Will Connolly in 1938, that the Seals once sent a batboy to inform outfielder Zacher that the side was retired; he was lost in the fog and didn’t realize his own team was up to bat.
While not every game was miserable or sparsely attended, heavy fog was a frequent obstacle; the Chronicle reported several games influenced by balls lost in the fog, and beat writers being unable to see the action.
Ewing Field was frequented by teams from Oakland, Portland and Los Angeles, and by mid-summer it had become notorious outside the city.
“Every afternoon a fog rolls in from the Golden Gate just about the beginning of the second inning,” the Los Angeles Times reported in July 1914. “The players become dim spectators through the mist and the few scattered spectators sit in the stands in a shivering misery.”
There were financial issues beyond the fluctuating crowds, including freeloaders. The Chronicle later reported that future governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, Jerry’s dad, burrowed under a fence on Opening Day in 1914. Fans discovered they could easily watch on Lone Mountain for free; at one point Ewing threatened to raise the outfield fence to 50 feet to block their view.
He didn’t need to. The team was sold at the end of the year to Henry and Clarence Berry, with Ewing Field’s inclusion as a package deal initially holding up the transaction. The Berrys ultimately shed the anchor, moved back to Recreation Field in the sunny Mission District in 1915, and stayed for most of the next 16 years — when Seals Stadium was built at Bryant and 16th streets in the Mission. Ewing Field, the “up-to-date and beautiful home for baseball,” had lasted one year.
However, the Richmond field was quickly modified for rugby, football and soccer, which made more sense in the wind, cold and fog. A portable wooden boxing ring was assembled, and at least one championship fight was staged in the outdoors, with the ring stored underneath the wooden grandstands.
It would eventually serve as more fuel to the literal fire that was Ewing Field’s final act: On June 5, 1926, a patron dropped a lit cigarette and caused one of the biggest conflagrations in San Francisco history. Every firefighter and truck in the city was needed, as 100 homes burst into flames. That notorious Ewing Field wind carried some of the embers a mile away.
“Not since 1906 has San Francisco been in such danger of being wiped out by fire,” San Francisco fire chief Thomas R. Murphy told The Chronicle the next day.
Ewing Field would remain an eyesore for 12 more years, used by Richmond District weekend golfers who would jump the fence to practice their swings. Football games continued to be played through the 1930s with fans in bleachers, and the burned-out baseball grandstands still visible on the other end of the grounds.
The remains of the field were demolished in 1938 and replaced by the upscale Ewing Terraces in the new Anza Vista neighborhood, where they remain with no memorial for the ballpark except the name.
The larger homes now sell for more than $2.5 million, even with the fog.