Giants make huge news with S.F. debut victory in ’58
worthy of the moment, described the scene with a sense of wonder:
“Elderly gentlemen with their grandchildren, the boys from the office, the lady boosters from Hayward, the family parties, the city hall and county courthouse cronies from around the Bay, the old leather-lunged Seals fans, the welldressed who never saw a baseball game in their lives before, but collect ‘being-first’ for conversational purposes — they were all there.”
The Giants announced they were moving from New York to San Francisco in 1957, but the team didn’t fly into San Francisco until two days before the game, with a monster parade on April 15, 1958, that dropped 400 pounds of confetti on Willie Mays and the other players and coaches.
Pundits had wondered, when the New York move was announced, if San Francisco was big or willing enough to support a baseball team. The answer was clear on Opening Day against their old Brooklyn rivals the Dodgers — the so-called “Bums” — who moved that year as well. Streets were quiet and bars were full. The sounds of transistor radios could be heard on the streets. The Chronicle reported that the S.F. Public Utilities Commission meeting covered 29 items in less than an hour, so the board members could make it to the game.
“The State Assembly fell short of approving its budget by one vote because the man they needed was at the ball game,” Champion wrote, sparing the legislator and withholding his name.
The win did bring out the poetry in The Chronicle’s writers.
“They wrote the perfect script for the perfect play and the San Francisco Giants enacted it without a single cue from the wings yesterday,” Chronicle baseball writer Bob Stevens began his game day article. “A capacity crowd of 23,448, at Seals Stadium, loud, colorful and enchanted, sat in whispering winds and under nursery blue skies to welcome major league to the shores of the Pacific, and got a show even a Barnum wouldn’t have dared to conceive.”
Indeed, it was a hell of a start in the first Major League Baseball game played on the West Coast.
The Giants had been predicted to finish last in their league; a slew of rookies, including a young Orlando Cepeda and Jim Davenport, were on the team, but most fans couldn’t name a player other than Willie Mays. They were facing Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ young star who had a 17-9 record and a 2.69 earned run average the year before.
It would have been a dream day for grizzled San Francisco Giants fans, if such a thing existed. Giants pitcher Ruben Gomez, one of the smallest players on the team (he was called a “Puerto Rican cutie” by Stevens), threw a six-hitter against a team full of stars — who had won a pennant just two years earlier.
“Only one Dodger got as far as third base,” Stevens wrote. “Six of them struck out. One of them, Carl Furillo, nearly brained himself crashing into the cement wall of bleachers trying to flag down the 390-foot shot unloaded by Cepeda, a drive only a paying customer had the remotest chance in the world of handling.”
The Dodgers won the next game easily. (“BUMS MURDER US, 13-1,” the headline read.) Notable in the game was Dodger Gino Cimoli, the only San Francisco native on the team, taking a fastball to the batting helmet.
“Gino dropped like an axed steer when hit, and never moved for several seconds,” The Chronicle reported. “Abramo Cimoli, father of Gino, jumped the fence and charged to the plate where the stricken Cimoli was lying. Abramo, a night supervisor for PG&E, helped his son to the sidelines.”
But that didn’t take away from the memories of April 15, 1958, a perfect day for a team that celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2018.
Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, as he nearly always did, put it best.
“All in all, a memorable day to remember not to forget,” Caen wrote. “And I think it’s great that the Giants finally have a big league city to call home.”