In 1887, S.F. was Giants’ winter home
Danny Dann was at a neighbor’s holiday open house in the Haight when a 19th century photo of a baseball game caught his eye. He asked his host where it had been taken and Terry Casey responded with a line he’d been waiting to deliver.
“You’re standing in it,” said Casey, “in right field, actually.”
This was of more than passing interest to Dann because it meant his own condo, a few doors up Beulah Street, sat in what had been center field at the long-gone ballfield known as Haight Street Grounds. Also because he has spent his career working at ballparks, the last 22 with the San Francisco Giants, where he is vice president of marketing and advertising.
The photo sent Dann digging into the
The photo sent Dann digging into the park’s history online, where he found that the New York Giants, ancestor to his own employer, had come to San Francisco to play ball there for a few months in the winter of 1887 on what was then called a barnstorming tour.
“That is pretty cool,” said Dann, 49. “It is something that happened 130 years ago.” More than cool, as it turned out, because nobody in the front office of the present-day Giants — an organization steeped in its own history — was aware of it.
As the Giants prepare to open their 60th season in San Francisco, they plan to take note of the heretofore unknown “Winter Season” that took place seven decades before their first official game here. A trademark, a monument, and a product placement tie-in are all being considered.
Though the Giants have no official historian, there are entire ballparks full of unofficial ones who are unaware that the big-league Giants once played in a minor-league ballpark by Golden Gate Park.
“I have never heard of that,” said former Chronicle sports editor Glenn Schwarz, who has been involved in Bay Area baseball since 1971. “Anything can fall through the cracks, but the Giants have been among the leaders in embracing their past and talking about the days of yore.”
Officials had long recognized an exhibition featuring pitcher Christy Mathewson against the Chicago White Sox at Recreation Park in November 1913 as the first Giants game played in San Francisco. So to learn that the first game actually happened 26 seasons before that “was a surprise,” said team archivist Missy Mikulecky. An even bigger surprise is that it wasn’t just a one-game stand on a touring team full of scrubs.
The Giants stayed in San Francisco for nearly three months, sporting a team loaded with five future baseball Hall of Famers, most with stylish handlebar or push-broom mustaches.
These included right fielder Roger Connor, who would hold baseball’s career home run record for 25 years until Babe Ruth broke it in 1921.
The catcher was Buck Ewing, who was rated by many “the greatest all-around ballplayer who ever lived,” according to the Baseball Guide of 1940.
His battery mate was Tim Keefe, a right-handed whirlybird who had once pitched both games of a double-header, giving up one hit in 18 innings. Anchoring the infield was shortstop John Montgomery Ward, who could also pitch as needed, having thrown the second no-hitter in history, in 1880.
Most famous of all was outfielder Michael Joseph Kelly — the “King of Baseball,” or King Kelly, for short. He is credited with inventing the hit-and-run and positioning of fielders to defend against particular hitters. He also sang onstage, his favorite being “Kelly at the Bat,” substituting his own name for Mighty Casey of the Mudville Nine.
If you count Kelly, who was on loan from the Boston Beaneaters, it was arguably the greatest Giants ballclub ever fielded. Even without him, the Giants would win the franchise’s first major-league championship the next year, in 1888.
Yet there isn’t a word about the 1887 Giants at AT&T Park, which includes the Gotham Club, a members-only society dedicated to the team’s New York lineage.
“I’m not surprised the Giants don’t know about it,” said Angus Macfarlane, 69, a self-described “baseball treasure hunter” and member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
“I’m disappointed in what they don’t know and don’t really want to know,” said Macfarlane, who once tried to interest a Giants employee in this bit of 1887 trivia during a SABR tour of AT&T Park.
One reason almost nobody knows about it: There is little official documentation of the ’87 Giants’ visit. There is no known photo of the team playing at the Haight Street Grounds. And off-season games were unofficial and therefore unrecorded by the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., the record-keeping arm of Major League Baseball.
Barnstorming tours were organized by promoters or the players themselves, providing off-season work in the days before ballplayers sold cars and insurance or did TV ads.
“Normally it was not a teamsponsored event, but managers and players would travel all over the place to warmer climes to earn cash during the offseason,” said Jim Gates, library director at the Hall of Fame.
Gates doubts that the players would have been in their teamissued uniforms. In those days, players put down $25 deposits on their uniforms at the beginning of the season and had to return them to get the deposits back.
They were free to call themselves the Giants, though, because team nicknames did not become protected until 1969, when Major League Baseball trademarked them.
According to historian Macfarlane, who has binders full of research stacked on his dining room table in the Outer Sunset, the 1887 Giants, then in their fifth season as a ballclub, were invited west by the management of the new Haight Street Grounds to play against teams in the California League.
“Going to San Francisco” was the headline announcing the tour in the New York Times, Aug. 21, 1887. When the promoter of Central Park, a competing California League ballpark located at Market and Eighth streets, heard about the plan, he tried to undercut the Giants tour by inviting other major-league ballclubs to play there.
“There was a feud between the operators of the parks,” said Macfarlane. “The proprietor of Central Park was a vindictive bastard, so he said, ‘I’m going to one-up them. I’m going to bring out three clubs.’ ”
The winter season was touted in The Chronicle under the headline: “The Diamond.” More headlines read: “Chat About the Game of Baseball,” “Points for People Who Are Not Posted,” “A Chance for Girls to Read Up on the Sport,” and “An Article Not Particularly Intended for Sharps.”
The full-page display included illustrations of the players on all four teams, listed as the St. Louis Browns, New York Giants, the Chicago Team and the Philadelphia Team.
The Giants took up residence at the Russ House, a fashionable hotel and restaurant on Montgomery Street, and opened the winter season on Thanksgiving Day. Attendance was near capacity of 14,000, Macfarlane said, far outdrawing a civic dedication of a statue donated by Adolph Sutro atop Mount Olympus.
“The famous $10,000 Kelly and his team of Giants from Gotham made their debut at the Haight street grounds yesterday morning under the most favorable auspice and in the presence of an immense throng of people,” The Chronicle wrote of the first game, which the Giants won 9-2.
The crowds thereafter failed to live up to that of the opener, due largely to the fact that most games were played on weekdays in the damp winter cold. The season went on for 13 games, including one played in Santa Cruz and one on Christmas Day.
The big-league teams stationed at Central Park played each other, while the Giants played at the Haight Street Grounds against minor-league teams named the Pioneers, the Haverlys, the Greenhood and Morans.
The season finale, though, was a big-league matchup — and a preview of 1888’s baseball championship series, the last before the first World Series was held. The Giants skunked the St. Louis Browns (later the Baltimore Orioles) 5-0.
“Never before in the history of baseball on the Pacific coast have so many famous players aggregated here at one time,” The Chronicle’s wrap-up of the season said. Yet it also reported that the “winter season” had been a financial failure due to “bad weather and a lack of public interest.”
Most players’ split of ticket sales amounted to $800, but King Kelly, the Barry Bonds of his day, took away $1,200.
The Haight Street Grounds lasted nine seasons. It is best remembered for football; it was the site of the first four games between Stanford and Cal. Demolished in 1895, the site was subdivided into 64 buildable lots.
At the corner of Stanyan and Waller, the bay windows of the Stanyan Park Hotel mark the vicinity of home plate, directly across from Kezar Pavilion. The left field wall was along what is now Shrader Street, and the right field wall was on Frederick.
“There is no memorial. No plaque. No graffiti. Nothing,” said Macfarlane. But something might be coming.
The trivia that Danny Dann uncovered has propelled the Giants to apply for a trademark on the name “Haight Street Grounds.” As soon as it comes through, the coffee kiosks at AT&T Park may be renamed for it.
Next season, the Giants will celebrate their 60th anniversary in San Francisco. If Dann has his way, the franchise will also place a historic marker at the site of the Haight Street Grounds, honoring the winter season of 1887.
Terry Casey, the fan with the photograph that started it all, would be glad to see it. Though he was unaware the Giants had played at the Haight Street Grounds, he has his own history to honor. As a kid, he attended the Giants introductory parade in 1958, and later he was a vendor at Candlestick.
“I’d love to see the plaque right in front of my house, in right field,” said Casey, 66. “I give it about three weeks before somebody steals it.”