CHAMBER OF HORROR : Part Fact, Part Fiction, the Notoriety of Candlestick Park Is Deserved

Listen up, because he’s only going to say this once.

Stu Miller has never been blown off any pitching mound.

“There was only 40,000 people there that day, yet I’ve gotten about 100,000 people claim they saw it,” recalled the former San Francisco Giants pitcher of the 1961 All-Star game at Candlestick Park. “They talk like I was blown from the mound to the left-field fence. They say all kinds of funny things and they are all wrong.”

In the ninth inning, with runners on first and second and the 165-pound Miller facing Roger Maris, a wind gust hit him in the face.

“It was a blast, it caught me by surprise, it knocked me off balance . . . “ Miller recalled, then sighed.

“But I never lost my feet. I wavered back and forth like a tree, but I never fell. Truth be told, I may have moved four inches.”

Miller’s pitch to Maris was a strike, but plate umpire Stan Landes had seen Miller move and called a balk, which eventually helped the American League make the score 3-3. Miller protested that it was a wind-aided balk. Landes refused to listen.

Even though the National League won in 10 innings, with the help of Roberto Clemente and Willie Mays, the next day’s largest headline turned Miller and the ballpark into legends.

“Miller Blown Off Mound,” it read.

“And from there, the story has never died,” said Miller, now 61 and living in retirement near Sacramento. “People talk about Candlestick Park, they talk about that story.”

The story launched Candlestick Park’s reputation as baseball’s only stadium in which the field reminds players of amusement park rides, the dugouts remind them of prisons, and the bullpens remind them of nightmares.

Hence the fears that the Chicago Cubs will have trouble this weekend when they visit the Giants, beginning tonight, for the middle three games of a National League Championship Series that is tied at one game apiece.

Is Candlestick’s reputation for wind and cold and craziness unfounded?

Well, not quite.

Miller was asked how often he ventures to Candlestick to watch his old team play.

“Never,” he said. “You kidding me?”

A nation is expecting the joke to be on the Cubs beginning today, even though they will match Rick Sutcliffe (16-11) against the erratic Mike LaCoss (10-10).

Although they won half of their six regular-season games here this season, the Cubs were outscored, 29-18. The Giants had the best home record in the league at 53-28. Since Manager Roger Craig’s first full season in 1986, they have not lost more than 36 games in a season here.

And in the stadium’s 30-year history, no team has a winning record against the Giants here.

And then there’s tonight’s human edge. LaCoss, like all Giant pitchers, loves it here.

“I hope it’s nice and cold, a little foggy, about a nice 25-m.p.h. wind,” he said earlier this week. “Then I hope all that sand and paper and hot dog wrappers starts blowing in the hitter’s face.”

He smiled. He wasn’t finished.

“Then maybe get some birds trapped in the swirling wind here, all flying around and swooping down . . . “ he said. “Gosh, that would be great.”

It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise. At least not to the Cubs, whose manager, Don Zimmer, coached third base here a couple of years ago.

“I remember one time when I was with the Giants, we were playing the Cubs, and it was cold and windy and there were birds everywhere,” Zimmer recalled. “The birds were diving down at different players. They were all over the place. I stand at third base and pull my hat down over my ears and plant my feet as solid as I can.

“Then on the mound I hear Ed Lynch, the pitcher, cussing and moaning. Then here comes his hat, rolling past me, and next thing you know, it’s up against the left-field fence. That hat was moving.”

What can Zimmer tell his young players about this park, located on land jutting into San Francisco Bay?

“We don’t talk about it,” Zimmer said. “We just get through it.”

They say that. But teams rarely do that.

“All I know is what I hear down on first base,” the Giants’ Will Clark said. “And all I hear is guys talking about how much they hate the place, how they want to get their one hit and get out of here.”

There are many reasons for this, beginning with the minute the players take the field.

For one thing, they will be cold. Even if the temperature doesn’t dip to Candlestick’s famed mid-summer night 45 degrees, they will be cold.

“The guys start moaning the minute they walk in the clubhouse, and all before the game they are putting on layers of T-shirts and sweat shirts and turtlenecks,” said visiting clubhouse manager Harvey Hodgerney. “They let the cold get to them before anything else.”

That is partly because once they hit the dugout, for most of them there is no turning back. The ballpark’s visiting dugout is not equipped with heat, and is the only one in the league not connected to a warm clubhouse.

The dugout is on the third-base side, and the door to the clubhouse hallway is down the right-field line, so if you’re a pinch-hitter and need to get warm . . .

“Forget it,” said Cub infielder Domingo Ramos. “To go get a cup of coffee and get your hands thawed, you got to run all the way across the field. By the time you get back, you’ve missed two innings.”

Hodgerney does his best, sending down jugs of coffee to the dugout throughout the game. Counting pregame and postgame coffee, Hodgerney goes through 25 pots a night, more than four times what is consumed in the warm Giant dugout connected to the warm Giant clubhouse.

“There was no heat in the visiting dugout when the park was built, and we have seen no reason to add any since,” said Matt Fischer, Giant media relations director.

Of course not. If they did, visiting clubs might even play the game with all of their available players.

“Guys are always running up and spending the game in the clubhouse,” Hodgerney said. “Then it always happens--somebody runs in here looking for a late-inning pitcher, and the guy is sitting in his underwear.”

Who crowds the clubhouse quickest?

“The Dodgers,” said Hodgerney, in his eighth year. “The Cubs stay on the field the longest.”

The only other place for players to go during games is the bullpen, but here it really is a pen--an ugly box enclosed by wire mesh.

“It’s the ‘penalty box,’ ” Giant relief pitcher Craig Lefferts said. “You go down there and feel like you’re locked in while you freeze.”

But the unsafest place of all here is the field. Earlier this year, former Dodger and current San Diego announcer Rick Monday captured the wind’s effects on routine plays.

“I was going back for a fly ball, but it kept blowing and blowing,” Monday recalled. “I kept my eye on the ball, and before I knew it, I had run through a gate in center field and was on the other side of the fence.

“But then the ball gets blown back over into play. Just then, the wind blows the gate shut. I’m outside of the fence while the ball lands in center field. While the runners are going around the bases, I’m thinking, ‘I hate this place.’ ”

And why don’t the Giants?

Easy. Manager Roger Craig won’t let them.

“First thing we tried to do when we came here was get rid of all that stuff about this being a negative park,” Craig said of the 1986 season. “I told our players, ‘It’s a major league park, we play at least 81 games here, it’s a place that represents a great city.’

“I told them, ‘This park is our home. And I don’t want to hear any more complaining.’ If they didn’t like it, we would find them a new home.”

Complaining? Who’s complaining?

“I’m actually glad people think I really got blown off the mound,” Stu Miller said. “If not, I would have spent the rest of my life hearing, ‘Stu who?’ ”