Remembering the earthquake World Series, 25 years later

I was annoyed, to be honest. Had a deadline, that’s what I knew. Game 3 of the 1989 World Series was about to begin at decrepit Candlestick Park and my pregame notebook was due for Gannett News Service.

Then the damn table started shaking. My Radio Shack TRS-80 model 100 – really nothing more than a word processor – was pulsating on the portable table in the makeshift press room.

I waited for the trembling to pass so I could get back to work, but all around me sports writers from throughout the country who had never experienced an earthquake were frightened to the bone. We were in what looked like a large storage room beneath the right-field stands. It would have made for a great tomb. There was one normal-sized door leading out to the concourse, a room filled with maybe 50 to 75 national reporters and all under the concrete, tiered stands.

As a lifelong Southern California native I figured I’d been through a zillion earthquakes. I just wanted to wait it out so I could file my story. But reporters in the room scurried about like terrified rats. One ran under a large beam that curved up along the stands and a dozen quickly followed. Looked at them like they were aliens. If the stands came crashing down, we were doomed. Seemed so simple.

The quake lasted 17 seconds. At the time I had no idea of its 6.9 magnitude, the over $6 billion in damage it would cost or the 63 lives it would claim. This was still a world without cellphones or the Internet. When the shaking ended, I just went back to pounding the keyboard. Then came an aftershock, a big one, and more near-panic in the press room.

“Relax,” I said, witlessly. “It’s just an aftershock.”

Claire Smith, now a news editor at ESPN but then a writer at the New York Times, later thanked me, saying watching how coolly I reacted helped calm her. The aftershock was over 5.0. My ignorance was her bliss.

Soon after the aftershock the power went out. The phone lines went dead. No one would be filing any stories from Candlestick. Since the game was being nationally televised, the country lived through its first live earthquake. The whole world seemed to know more about was happening than anyone actually there. The 1989 World Series was the between the Giants and A’s and players went into the stands to pull family members on the field, probably the safest place in the stadium. Soon the game was postponed and people started heading out, or at least trying to.

Night came and blackness seemed to engulf everything. The stadium went dark, the streets, the city, everything. It took seemingly forever for the parking lots to begin to empty. The durable TRS-80, though could be operated on double-A batteries, so Gregg Patton – then a columnist at the San Bernardino Sun – and I started pounding out our stories before jumping on a city bus heading to downtown San Francisco. Thankfully the bus was lighted on the inside – our little screens were not – so we wrote away on the ride, trusting the bus driver to maneuver in the darkness. He finally let us out somewhere on Mission Street, still a good hike from our hotel – the Marriott Marquis, which had enjoyed its grand opening the previous day. In those days stories were sent by slipping rubber couplers over the ends of a phone. The Marriott had a couple of phone lines working in an office and allowed us use them to file our stories.

They did not, however, let us or anyone else into their hotel rooms. Instead they directed us to the ballroom where we were handed blankets and pillows and slept on the floor, the world’s biggest communal sleepover. People just found a spot and collapsed.

Later there would be an almost eerie candlelit press conference with baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent in a St. Francis Hotel ballroom, where he announced the postponement of the series. Ten days after the earthquake, the World Series resumed. It offered the Bay Area a bit of normality, though the A’s would sweep using only two starting pitchers.

Twenty-five years later, the World Series opens Tuesday night and again features the Giants. Now they play in a beautiful modern ballpark. One, hopefully, without a press room that speaks to King Tut’s final resting place.