REMEMBER WHEN : Padre Hero Forgot Unforgettable Game

It was one of the zaniest games the Padres have played, but the man who won it with a home run says he doesn’t remember anything about it.

On the afternoon of May 23, 1970, the Padres and Giants struggled for 5 hours 29 minutes at Candlestick Park in San Francisco before shortstop Steve Huntz’s leadoff homer in the 15th inning gave the Padres a 17-16 victory.

The score itself set the game apart, and so did certain other details.

Such as one Giant Hall of Famer, Willie Mays, making two errors on one play. Such as another, Juan Marichal, blowing most of an 8-0 lead. Such as the Giants firing Manager Clyde King after the marathon was finally over and replacing him with Charlie Fox.

Mays committed his rare pair of errors on a single by the same player who was to emerge as the hero of the day.

It’s logical to assume that Huntz would look back on it as one of the highlights of a major league career that covered 32 days short of four years.

Amazingly, such is not the case.

When Huntz, 44, now an insurance agent, was reached at his home in Fairview Park, Ohio, he said, “I really can’t recall the game. It’s one game, and it’s really not too big to me.”

All told, Huntz, a switch hitter, had 11 home runs that season but only 16 in his career, which included two hitches with the Padres and one each with the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox.

The victim of Huntz’s game-winner in San Francisco was an obscure rookie right-hander named Miguel Puente, who was to make just five other appearances in the majors before vanishing with a 1-3 record and an 8.05 earned-run average.

Huntz’s home run was his sixth of the season and one of nine in the game. The Padres set a club record of five that still stands, the others being hit by Chris Cannizzaro, Cito Gaston, Ron Slocum and Nate Colbert. The Giants hit four, two by Mays and one each by Ken Henderson and the third Hall of Famer in their lineup, Willie McCovey.

While Huntz claimed total non-recall of the game, other principals had vivid memories.

Colbert, the Padres’ big power man of that era and their first fan favorite, had an interesting story to tell. He went five for eight, including a two-run homer that temporarily broke a 14-14 tie in the 11th, but the game dragged on so long that he missed a mandatory National Guard meeting in Oklahoma City the next day.

“I had a 6 o’clock flight out of San Francisco,” said Colbert, now a coach and member of the community relations department for the Padres’ Riverside farm club. “I had to be there (in Oklahoma City), and when the game went into extra innings, I knew it was going to be touch and go.

“Preston Gomez (Padre manager) tried to get me a later flight, but he couldn’t get one until the next morning. When I hit the home run, I thought that gave us the win, and I started packing my bags.

“When they tied it up again, I figured I was in big trouble. But I said to myself, ‘Fine, that’s it.’ I didn’t want them to give anybody preferential treatment.

“As it turned out, I never got to the meeting. But I made it up at a later time, and I didn’t get a penalty.”

Like everyone else at Candlestick and those watching on television in San Diego, Colbert assumed the game was as good as over when the Giants staked Marichal to an eight-run lead in the first two innings. They got to Padre starter Clay Kirby for seven runs in the second.

“At that point, I thought we’d be lucky to get out of there alive,” Colbert said.

But the Padres jumped on Marichal for five runs in the third, and the man they called the Dominican Dandy failed to survive the inning. Cannizzaro started their comeback with a bases-empty home run; Gaston, now manager of Toronto, kept it going with a three-run homer, and Ollie Brown chased Marichal with a run-scoring double.

Said Gomez afterward: “That was the most surprising thing of all. Give Marichal an 8-0 lead, and you have to bet your life that he’ll win the game.”

The Padres used 21 players, the Giants 22. Among them were seven pitchers for each club.

Not one Giant pitcher managed to escape without allowing a run. Two Padres, Tom Dukes and left-hander Danny Coombs, were unscored upon, and Coombs earned the victory with a fine four innings.

Considering the way baseballs were flying around and out of Candlestick, Coombs’ scoreless pitching may have been the most remarkable feat of the day. The Padres’ run total is still their highest ever, although it has since been tied, and their 21 hits and the 23 they gave up were club records that have since been broken.

After the game, Coombs said, “I was sitting in the bullpen, laughing at all the crazy things that were happening, and before long, I was the last guy down there.”

Colbert was the most prolific hitter with his home run and four singles. Mays went four for six, with two singles besides his two homers, but his performance is best remembered for the successive errors with which he played a single into the equivalent of a home run.

With the Giants holding a 10-8 lead, Huntz led off the eighth against Frank Reberger, a former Padre, with a single to center. When Mays booted the ball and let it bounce all the way to the fence, Huntz kept running and chugged into third. When Mays overthrew the cutoff man, Huntz continued to the plate.

The Padres wound up with five runs in the inning, the last three on Slocum’s only home run of the season, and they shouldn’t have had any.

Shortstop Hal Lanier, now a Philadelphia Phillies coach, lost Ivan Murrell’s popup in the wind, and the ball bounced so high that Gaston scored from second. Then, after the side should have been retired, Slocum hit the homer that gave the Padres a 13-10 lead.

Lanier’s misadventure was not a rarity at notoriously windswept Candlestick. And, all things considered, a game such as this wouldn’t have been complete without it.

The Giants retaliated with two runs in their half of the eighth and, after the Padres had made it 14-12 in the ninth, scored two more off lefty Dave Roberts to send the game into extra innings.

After Colbert had untied the score in the 11th with his home run off left-hander Ron Bryant, Tito Fuentes led off the bottom of the inning with a double off Roberts. Gomez then tried to wrap it up by bringing in Mike Corkins, who had started and gone six innings the previous night, but his move boomeranged. The Giants made it 16-16 on a two-run single by Ron Hunt, then loaded the bases before Corkins rallied from a 3-0 count to retire Henderson on a fly ball.

It was Coombs versus Puente thereafter, and Coombs had to squirm out of perilous situations in both the 13th and 14th before Huntz teed off.

One ex-Padre who wishes he could catch amnesia from Huntz is Dave Campbell, then their second baseman, later one of their broadcasters and is now an ESPN baseball commentator. Campbell walked once and scored twice but went hitless in seven at-bats.

“It was not one of the greatest games of my career,” Campbell recalled. “It seemed like I went oh for 100. When my dad back home in Michigan heard the score, he was all excited. He expected to see some hits for me in the box score, and he couldn’t believe it when he didn’t find any.

“I went into that weekend hitting about .280, and all of a sudden, the bottom fell out. I was hitless the night before, and we played a doubleheader the next day, and I went one for eight. When the (one-for-19) weekend was over, I was down around .250.”

Bob Chandler, then as now a Padre broadcaster, was working the game with Dodger Hall of Famer Duke Snider.

“Duke left the booth in the eighth inning to do the post-game show,” Chandler said. “He waited in the little area they had for photographers, and he never came back. I had to do a solo for seven innings.”

Fox, who was managing the Giants’ Phoenix farm club, listened to most of the broadcast in Portland, where the triple-A Giants were to play that night.

Now a scout for the Houston Astros, Fox recalled the circumstances of his promotion from his home in San Mateo.

“I was in the hotel dining room when Rosy Ryan, our general manager, came in,” Fox said. “He asked me how it was going, and I said, ‘We’re going great’--we were in first place--’but they’re having a terrible game in San Francisco.’

“He wanted to know what I was talking about, and I said, ‘King is using up his pitching staff with a doubleheader coming up tomorrow. He’s in real trouble.’ Rosy said, ‘Oh, no, you’re in trouble. You’re the manager tomorrow.’

“That’s how I found out I was going to manage the Giants.”

Fox started as a winner when the Giants swept the Padres, 6-1 and 7-6, as the teams played two games 46 minutes faster than they had played one the day before.

But the doubleheader was strictly an anticlimax. Huntz’s forgetfulness notwithstanding, the 17-16 gem was a game to be remembered.