#3 Baseball

 Baseball most definitely is life.  Baseball - at least to me - is also a religion - witness the million or so who showed up for the Dodgers World Series Parade in Los Angeles on 3 November!), No, I am not a lunatic when I say this - think about it.........

Baseball-wise, I was groomed the perfect way, going to my new-found 'temple', aka Ebbetts Field a day after my 5th birthday.    By age 10 I was regularly going there and while getting to a ball game in L.A. was a whole lot different from Brooklyn, Dad, working in Beverly Hills as a loan officer to the entertainment industry, now found it a whole lot easier to be given tickets for all the home games he wanted to go to and happily joined him going to Dodger Stadium night games (primarily) 6 months a year.    

The Dodgers were a dynasty in the mid-60s.  I went to World Series games every year the Dodgers were there.  But I remember 1965 not for baseball play but for my baseball knowledge (and I've always been a baseball history nerd):  Games 3,4 & 5 were at Dodger Stadium.  During game 3, the video board asked a question regarding Dodger World Series history hitting.  During game 4, the video board asked a question regarding Dodger World Series history pitching.  I 'predicted' before the start of game 5 that not only would the question today be about Dodgers World Series history fielding but that the answer would be Billy Wamsgams.   Billy Wamsgams made an unassisted triple play against the Cleveland Indians in the 1920 World Series.  Of course I was right! I felt damned good about it - good enough to remember this 59 years later!!!

I was not in Los Angeles during the 1988 World Series between the Dodgers and the Oakland Athletics.  I was at one of Petaluma's two Chinese restaurants, sipping won ton soup while listening to the game where, as Kirk Gibson came up, I sensed what was going to happen - a walk-off home run that ended any Oakland aspirations that year.  But I really do have to write about the 1989 World Series between Oakland and the San Francisco Giants - I was at the one Series game that year of true historical significance - game (and Series) postponed due to an earthquake during the game.

As a 'prelude' to that earthquake game:  I went to a whole lot of games during the summers I spent in Petaluma, Ca.  One of my tax clients from Petaluma had a pair of season tickets to home games at Candlestick Park, the second of three home fields the Giants have had in San Francisco.  Hall of Fame player and manager Frank Robinson and his wife Barbara were friends/clients from my Los Angeles days and after taking that Petaluma client an aisle away to introduce him Barbara Robinson, that Petaluma client wanted to take me to a game any time he could!  I also had Wednesday getaway game tickets at the Coliseum for 8 Wednesday, noontime games for many years - Rick Zalon, who I met in 1981, and I had these mini-season series tickets. And fellow Probate Court Referee Al Nicora was an Oakland-based attorney whose firm had a private sky box in Oakland, too.  Thus, I was not lacking baseball after moving out of Los Angeles.

On 17 October 1989, at 5:04pm, on a relatively balmy and, in the late afternoon, definitely sunny day, the stands were packed and the world changed over the next 20 seconds, perhaps the longest 20 seconds of my life:  earthquake - 6.9 on the Richter Scale.

Picture if you will the vast parking facilities of Candlestick Park turned into one big beautiful tail gate party.  There were 4 of us in the station wagon from Petaluma - the three others were meeting with others for their tailgate festivities - we were there at noon - we all started early because this was going to be fun.  One of the three was a member of AA - he was sober all day long.  The other two were PFD (pretty fucking drunk!).  I met others at a designated location in the parking lot for our weed-based tailgate party.  I met the others from Petaluma and around 4:30pm, we found our way to our seats - three rows from the top of Candlestick, on the right field side.

What can I say about those 20 seconds of shaking?  I think I might have discovered the instantaneous cure to constipation because this more effectively scared the shit out of me than anything else I've ever encountered.  Were it not for the fact that the attendees of this packed baseball stadium  were either stoned or passively drunk out of their minds after a day of tail gating, I really think it could have turned riotous.  Yet without stadium lights or public address  system functional (hey, all power was out - seemingly everywhere!  There were no traffic lights and a portion of the Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed - this was something no one ever anticipated nor an event that any of us would ever forget.

Oakland won the Series after it resumed 10 days later - at least that is what I just refreshed my memory by reading.  Who cared ?  We survived 'the' earthquake and I drove the four of us back to Petaluma, no traffic lights functioning anywhere along the route.......that, I can never forget