 My interest became very clear after reading a few books on West Coast baseball. The story was dominated by the Dodgers. And the man who brought the team to San Francisco, Horace Stonem, was dominated by Walter O'Malley, the colorful Dodger owner. So I felt that the giant story had never been told. And I decided that they needed their day in the sun. And the book is not about the recent success. If you're going to the book to see about the World Series championships, they're referenced, they're mentioned. But this book is about the beginning, the beginning of the move, setting down routes, the relationship to the city, and the rocky times, really. When you go out to the stadium today and you see what is it, 493 consecutive sellouts or something like that, and the beautiful connection that the city has with the team and the success both not only in the standings, but also on the bottom line, the franchise and the connections with the culture of San Francisco, we forget. And I think many of the fans under 30 that go to that ballpark don't remember, they couldn't really, could they, that it was rough times. And some days at the end of the Stonem years in 1975, there were days when there were less than 1,000 people in the stands. So this was a troubling time. And not only did they almost leave town once, they almost left town twice. So that's what the book is about. It's about the setting down of routes and the new identity, not just a change geographically coming from New York, but a change in identity and really the challenges that that posed. So what I'd like to do today is I'd like to take you through very quickly. I have two little ideas. I wanna talk briefly about the reasons why they came. And we have to remember that the chief reason that the Giants and the Dodgers came to the West was the dissatisfaction with where they played in New York. The Polo Grounds were the home of the Giants, the oldest ballpark in baseball in needing so much repair. And in a neighborhood that was now becoming a public housing experiment. And there was no room for parking. And if Stonem was going to stay in New York, he had a lot of remodeling costs ahead of him. So it was gonna be a very tough call. And Ebbett's Field in Brooklyn was similar. It was not as old as by a few years. But again, Walter O'Malley faced the same problem. Renovation, making it fan-friendly, bringing it up to date really. And he had more trouble with the city because he kept asking for permits to build things. And Robert Moses, the czar, the city czar there who'd handled development was not interested and the city of New York was not interested. So hence the move. And you have to also remember something coupled with that was not only the dissatisfaction with the New York venues, but the promises from San Francisco and Los Angeles of new facilities. That was another really important thing about ballparks that lured both teams out to the West Coast. The first place that the Giants played was Seales Stadium at 16th and Bryant. It was not a facility for Major League Baseball. It was less than 23,000. And it was a cozy place, a wonderful place. I grew up, my first professional baseball game was there. My grandfather took me to see the Seales play in 1949. A wonderful memory I have of it. But in terms of Major League Baseball, it was just not a good facility. And the Dodgers played in the Coliseum, which was even worse, a big cavernous place. They ended up getting Dodger Stadium in 1962, but the Giants moved to Candlestick Park in 1960. They remained there for almost 40 years. The last game was 19... They moved into what was Pac Bell, but AT&T today, at the beginning of the 2000 season. So you could see that as a kind of 40-year cycle at this ballpark. And this ballpark was, for different reasons, unsatisfactory. And I'll talk a little bit about that as we go on. I want to now move to a portion of the book that I'd like to kind of focus on tonight and briefly again. It's... I get the title from Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate, who wrote a book called The Place of Writing and the Writing of Place. How does writing bring a place into being? And I was thinking about how that might work with... Baseball is a writerly sport. And baseball writers have a lot to do with the way we see things and the way that the teams sort of are shaped. So I want to look at a project that local writers here sort of initiated, which was to convert a New York entity, a New York team into something uniquely San Franciscan. And I want to focus on that for the rest of the talk. Now, we have to remember that the writers here were reacting to two things that were coming out of New York. One was a sense of, I would have to say, lamentation. And it's a word that applies, I think, very well to what Red Smith is writing. The notion of loss is important to underscore. And I've talked to a lot of New York people and they say some of them, older fans, they remember this idea that they left and it really was a tough thing. So Red Smith sort of talks about that and so does Arthur Daly. But there was another aspect of the press's reaction that the local press picked up on. When I say local, I mean San Francisco press. And that was the criticism of the place they were going to play. So you have, for example, statements about how San Francisco was ill-suited to be a major league venue, that the weather was terrible, the fans didn't know anything, the city was odd and so on. And this was just a way for them to kind of become a kind of big league place. There is a famous restaurateur in New York where he used to host all of the great players. His restaurant was called Toot Shores. He was quite a character in the city, well known by everybody. And of course, because he hosted the Yankees and the Giants so much, he was appalled at the idea that anybody would leave New York City. And therefore, every place else was silly. But natives here understood something about the city. They didn't need to be told that they needed a team from New York to be big league. Natives here felt very comfortable about the status of the city, that it was a cultural place, that it was sophisticated, that it had historical realities. And indeed, some of the natives were quite shocked at the sort of euphoria. They especially took offense at the idea of a city turning over a day where they all, the idea of a parade, coming, one native said, "'Good God, they're gonna think we're from Kansas.'" There's this idea that we're restraint here. Now, the project that the writers kind of got involved in, I call it from one of Ezra Pound's American poets' lines, Make It New, when he was talking about modernism, is the strategic idea of remaking a New York, if you will, entity into something that's local. So these are the writers. Some of them are quite familiar to you, I think. The man, the first name is Curly Grieve. He was the editor of the San Francisco examiner. And his interest in Major League Baseball goes back to 1952, when he became one of the prominent voices for bringing Major League Baseball to San Francisco. He gets a lot of credit for that. And indeed, the press box in Candlestick Park was called the Curly Grieve press box after his efforts. These writers were very, very concerned about bringing Major League Baseball to San Francisco and to also shaping it in a certain way. There is a picture of Grieve. He was someone who noticed, he also had a sense, the writers had a sense of cool. They were detached, they wanted to make sure that they didn't go overboard in praising the team. They wanted to make sure that everyone saw that San Francisco was a perfect place. It was indeed a big league city without having the giants come here. But he also wanted to show the enthusiasm. So it was a kind of a balance here. You don't wanna show the provinciality of the New York writers by just going crazy over this. So there was a balanced sense of cool detachment. Prescott Sullivan is another person that was involved in this. He is the model, by the way. Just aside, Neil Simon cast him in The Odd Fellow. He was Oscar, the character in the play. And Prescott was the model for this. Charles McCabe was someone who pointed his finger at this tension between the balance of what is going on here. He recognized that there was a tension because you have this sense that San Francisco is really something, a place that doesn't need any New York credit, if you will. But at the same time, he noticed how Major League Baseball does, in a sense, fulfill a certain identity with the city and the fans. Now, the big problem with remaking a team is, in the Giants case, was they came with the only real superstar that they had, Willie Mays. Now Willie Mays was sort of the focal point for this tension of reinvention. Einstein was probably the biographer that knew Mays best. And he saw in this that there was a kind of strange notion of reception. And this was because Mays reminded everyone, all the writers, of New York. Everything about Mays, all his feet, his great catch in the World Series, the gold glove, the stolen bases, all of this, cried out New York polo grounds and all that. So there was a sense of Mays being historical, as well as the great player he was. So this posed a problem for the men of reinvention. You notice the New York hat and then the San Francisco hat. Well, this was the problem here. But eventually, of course, even the most, shall we say, restrained among the writers came to recognize Mays, especially in the 1962 pennant race, when many say there would have been no pennant race, no pennant without Willie Mays. He was phenomenal that year. And he had been in the San Francisco uniform by then for four full seasons. And the idea of lefty O'Dull and the seals had receded in memory a bit. So it was, he started to convert even the most xenophobic among the sports writers. There was, remember, San Francisco had four newspapers. And these writers all had different strategies for reinvention. One was a strange one that was to assert that in fact Major League Baseball was gonna be influenced by the seals. It's not the other way around. And this was James McGee's argument in an article called Rich Inheritance for the majors here. And of course, he was thinking of the DiMaggio's. What the writers tended to do was to ignore Mays or at least not ignore him completely because you couldn't, but they decided to treat him with what you could call benign neglect. They praised him in a sense. They acknowledged his greatness, but they didn't go crazy. Instead, they focused on first Orlando Cepeda who had no history at all with New York, no baggage there, and a year later, William Covey. Neither of these men played in New York City. There wasn't any problem here. You could just concentrate on them and lo and behold, you have the local heroes and the teams now becoming a San Francisco team by just simply recognizing these people. They also started three rookies in the 1958 starting lineup, Jim Davenport, Willie Kirkland, and Cepeda. None of those men played in New York City. Now, you can't have simply the players. Oh, I should say one other thing. The front office of the Giants really helped the men of reinvention. It really helped the Greaves and the Prescott Sullivan and the Bob Stevens and all the writers that were involved in this art, Rosenbaum, all these writers who were involved in the reinvention or the revisionary project. The Giants started signing Latinos primarily out of the vision of Horace Stoneham who saw this talent coming out of the Caribbean and he brought in, he was truly the pioneer in bringing in Latinos and made baseball open. He gets credit for breaking baseball's second color barrier because of the way in which he brought in so many of these. So the front office was kind of unwittingly helping by transforming the club through the scouting program. So they, Juan Marichel was one of the people that came as a result of this. Tito Fuentes, Andre Rogers, all the aloo's, they all were involved with this. None of those men, with the exception of Rogers, none of them really had any connection with New York teams. But to really reinvent the Giants, you need to go to the face of the franchise and that's Horace Stoneham. So Horace Stoneham moved to San Francisco and he was immediately introduced by Grieve and by Prescott Sullivan and other writers as a kind of San Franciscan and they started stressing the things that he did to make himself a San Franciscan. And it even got to the point where people recognize this across the country and this is a writer with St. Louis Sporting News who recognized the idea that Horace is now a native son. He no longer sees one writer that really, we don't associate with sporting news or the sports columns, Herb Cain, a man that everybody in this room of course knows about and there's a bust of him up on the fifth floor. You go and if you ever wanna do microfilm, you can walk right by his bust up there. His famous columns, he was a guy that, if you were in Herb Cain's columns, it was kind of a who's who. He knew everybody in town and anybody was anybody ended up in his columns. Horace Stoneham moved to San Francisco in the very first week of October, 1957. By the end of the year, he was in Herb Cain's column five times. The next year, he was in Herb Cain's column 12 times. I know, I'm gonna give you one little tidbit from Herb Cain's column. It was a January, I'm gonna do this from memory. January 21st, 1958. This is what, this is how it goes. Giant's boss, Horace Stoneham, hosted six pals at the Owl and Turtle. When the bill came, Horace had a big grin and held up an autographed baseball. Bill Varney, the owner, came over to the table and Horace said, have we got a deal? Varney said, if it's Bill Rigney, you pay half the bill. If it's Willie Mays, dinner is on the house. It was, now do you think Willie's overpaid? Now that's the entry, you can go to the Chronicle and see that. So, even Herb Cain got into the act of reinventing Horace Stoneham as a San Franciscan. Horace was one of the great denizens of Tootshore. When he got to San Francisco, one of the things he loved was the great dining here, the theater, the music. He loved the city and he took right away to substituting Tootshore's place to go to Bardelli's on O'Farrell Street where he was welcomed regularly and had a lunchtime table. So this was another facet of him as a San Franciscan, someone who enjoyed the city and was loyal to it. Herb Cain, or sorry, Curly Grieve reminded his readers that Horace was famous for his loyalty. Not only loyalty to players, loyalty to staff, loyalty to employees, but Grieve goes on to say he was loyal to his commitment and his commitment was to come to this city and he planned to really put down roots and stay here. So this is another facet of, again, the reinvention of a Manhattanite, someone who knew no other place for a long time in his life into a San Franciscan. Now the project of reinvention or change is something that is truly a San Francisco thing in the 20th century. So much was going on in the city, starting with the earthquake and the famous moment when the city kind of not only reinvented itself but rebuilt itself, President Taft came here in 1911 after the 1906 earthquake had wiped out most of the town and he was amazed at what progress had made and how the city had remade itself. And he uttered that famous phrase, the city that knows how, coming kind of a watchword or catchphrase for San Francisco. And after the war, after the Second World War, Herb Cain gets credit, this is from Ken Starr's book, Golden Dreams, about what San Francisco's like after the war, that it was, Cain saw this as a city that was offering new chances for people. It was a magical place. And he creates this idea that it's a place so different and so wonderful that people can come here and have a brand new beginning. But this was going on true in California in general, people who had worked here in the war and the armed services, they came back for jobs and wanted to live here. Southern California was also remade in a sense. In fact, in 1955, Disneyland opened, calling itself a magical kingdom and attracting families from all over the place. And remember too, that things were going on all over the country that changed in the late fifties. We have air travel, not only facilitating the idea of West Coast baseball, one of the objections to West Coast baseball by the owners in the early 1950s when it was proposed that maybe the Pacific Coast League would become the third major league was, well, how are we gonna get out there? I mean, we're gonna have these long train trips and the season will be so long. Well, jet travel started in 58, about the same time as the teams. And it transformed American life in so many ways, not only shortening distances in the country, but changing the diets of Americans, changing business, people were able to eat fresh, eventually fresh food and so on. So it was a big deal. Look what was happening to popular culture. TV was a meteoric in the 1950s, people buying television sets, changing the way we look at popular culture. People all over the country had a common kind of culture. They could talk about Milton Burl or Ed Sullivan or so on at the water cooler on Monday morning, something that hadn't been possible prior to that. Dwight Eisenhower began the highway system in 1958, changing, again, making distances different and changing things. So facilitating a kind of shortening, a shrinkage of the country. And then really all of this amazing kind of transformation in retrospect looks kind of overwhelming in some ways, looks amazing, almost disorienting, but for people who live through it, they saw it as just simply part of an era, part of life at the moment and simply accepted it. San Franciscans on the other hand, part of this change and so on, had an additional, might say, largesse bonus or notion of transformation. They became the beneficiary of the Major League Baseball and this changed the whole scene for the city and brought a new prospect and they had for the time their notion of the home team. So I'm gonna leave it there. I hope that if you have any questions, I can respond to them, but I'll stop talking and then maybe there's some questions you might have for me that I can take an attempt at answering.