THE WORLD SERIES : OAKLAND ATHLETICS vs. SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS : Survivors Too Shaken for Baseball

The home of the World Series-leading Oakland Athletics was pretty and peaceful Wednesday.

Three groundskeepers at Oakland Coliseum were watering and mowing the lush green field. Frank Loza was limping where a large chest fell on his leg during Tuesday’s earthquake, but he was feeling better already.

“Normal day, here.” Loza said. “Like nothing ever happened.”

Six miles north on Interstate 880, a 10-minute drive in normal traffic, it was a different story.

Reginald Walker stood within a block of the Cypress Avenue exit, where Tuesday at 5:05 p.m., two miles of the freeway’s upper level had collapsed upon the lower level. It had created the earthquake’s most devastating scene, a concrete sandwich that killed what officials believe could be as many as 250 people.

As Walker spoke, most of the bodies remained trapped, including perhaps an aunt he had spent 10 hours searching for.

“Somebody around here was saying, ‘Where are the A’s going to play now?’ and I said, ‘The hell with the A’s,’ ” Walker said. “Who cares about A’s when you still have people up there?

“Who cares about the A’s when you can still smell death? Just smell how close it is. You smell it? I can.”

The home of the San Francisco Giants was quiet and stately Wednesday. There were wrappers and bags swirling through Candlestick Park’s parking lot, but its structure remained unmoved, unmarked, and structural engineer John Clinton climbed into his van with a smile.

“What we saw today looks fine,” he said.

Three blocks up the hill, in the Bayview neighborhood, most of the aging wooden houses remained solid, but their owner’s memories still shook.

“Most of the problems from this earthquake are going to be the aftereffects,” said Ruth Callan, who was so upset Wednesday she drove her car into the side of her front-yard retaining wall while trying to pull into the driveway. “All of us are scared. We’re all nervous. I mean, I have never, in all my years, even come close to hitting that wall.”

When asked about the World Series, she interrupted the question with: “I’m glad they aren’t talking about bringing that World Series right back here. I think it has to give us time to heal. We all need time.”

The playing sites are in good shape. The surrounding sights are not.

Oakland’s Coliseum was in working order as soon as four hours after the quake. Visiting clubhouse attendant Steve Vucinich rushed from Candlestick Park after hearing that the Coliseum scoreboard had collapsed, only to find the place just as he had left it.

“It was amazing,” Vucinich said Wednesday outside his clubhouse. “When I got back we had power, phones, everything. We could play a game here tomorrow.”

He paused.

“But I wouldn’t want to do that. Would you want to play a World Series with all those crushed bodies just six miles up the road?”

That was the question they were asking at the site of the pancaked freeway. About 100 people from the surrounding neighborhood stood and stared at the disaster, transfixed by what looked like two giant jaws, clamped together with debris hanging from their teeth.

Richard Reynolds, who owns an automotive service shop one block from the freeway, said he saw the incident while hanging for his life from a telephone pole. He said the most incredible sound was, there was no sound.

“I’m hanging from the bottom of the pole yelling, ‘Holy God, what are you doing?!’ ” Reynolds recalled. “I see the expressway wriggle one way, then the other way, and then--poof--down it came.

“And not a sound. Just a cloud of dust. Nobody’s voice. Nothing crashing. I knew then, hardly any of those people made it alive.”

Reynolds said he was so frightened, he climbed the telephone pole to see if the Bay Bridge was still there.

“I knew if I didn’t see the two spires of the bridge, then the world had come to an end,” he said. “Thank God they were there. I shouted to everybody, ‘The Bridge is still standing!’ ”

Now that he’s back to earth, Reynolds says the difficult part is just beginning.

“I’m an avid A’s fan, but I’ll be damned if I can get into it now,” he said. “People are dead and not buried. Every day I’ve got to come to work and look at that awful highway. We love baseball, but we’re human beings, man.”

Other local businessmen felt the same way.

“It’s pretty amazing that of all the people that are still up there, dead,” said Spike Cryderman, owner of a poster company one block from the highway. “I’d like for the World Series to start again, it’s good for the community . . . but you’ve got to let people bury their dead.”

Said Greg Robinson, owner of a local hot dog stand: “What we’re thinking is that it could have been any of us on that road. That takes time to go away.”

Across the bay--a difficult trip from Oakland Wednesday during sporadic bridge closings--there was serenity at Candlestick Park.

“Nothing wrong or unusual here,” guard Gary Sourifman said.

Clinton, an owner of an architecture and structural engineering firm contracted by the city to inspect the stadium said that because the stadium was refurbished in 1982, he was not jittery about it even as Tuesday’s earthquake struck.

“I really wasn’t worried then, and I’m not worried now,” he said. “We just did a walk-down (tour) of the stadium, and it looks good.”

He was asked, if everything is safe, what about those chunks of concrete that fans were carrying away Tuesday night?

“Cosmetic concrete,” he said. “Happens all the time with concrete buildings. It has nothing to do with the structure.”

A few blocks away, a few didn’t want to have anything to do with Candlestick, or anything outside their neighborhood.

Jasvire Singe, an ice cream vendor, said his wife did not even want him to leave the house Wednesday morning.

“As I was leaving my house, she screamed at me, ‘Don’t go, I feel another tremor,’ ” he said. “I told her, ‘I must go, We must go on.’

“It will be slow, but we must go on.”

CANDLESTICK PARK About 30 minutes before Tuesday’s Game 3 of the World Series, an earthquake of a magnitude 6.9, rocked the almost full San Francisco stadium.

Earthquake damage: Section 53 of the upper stand in right field separated by about six inches; several cracks ran down the concrete aisle. People were hit by falling debris, no one was injured seriously.

Power was knocked out and phone lines disrupted., AP / Los Angeles Times