MLB | The World Series That Stopped for an Earthquake (Candlestick Park site, San Francisco)

The earthquake hit at 4 minutes past 5 on 17 October 1989, about half an hour before Game Three of the World Series. Sixty thousand people were in Candlestick Park, the television cameras were already live, and the picture went out across the country as the upper deck moved. The stadium came through with minor damage and nobody inside was killed. Elsewhere the Loma Prieta earthquake killed 67 people and brought down a section of the Bay Bridge and a mile of elevated freeway in Oakland.

The Series was suspended for ten days and resumed on 27 October. It is the only interruption to a World Series that was not caused by weather, and the only one that made the games feel beside the point.

The ballpark existed because San Francisco had bought a team. When the Giants left New York after 1957 they spent two seasons at Seals Stadium, a minor-league park, while the city built them something at Candlestick Point on the western shore of the bay. It opened in April 1960 for about $15 million and roughly 43,000 seats, and the site was a mistake almost immediately.

The wind came off the bay in the afternoon and did not stop. Radiant heating pipes had been laid under the lower boxes but set too deep in the concrete to warm anything, and neither the city nor the club would pay to dig them out. It got a reputation as the coldest ballpark in the majors. In 1963 a gust picked up the batting cage during Mets practice and dropped it sixty feet away on the mound.

The most repeated story about the place is not quite true. In the first All-Star Game of 1961, Giants reliever Stu Miller is supposed to have been blown clean off the mound. Major League Baseball's own account, published when Miller died, says a gust merely upset his balance mid-delivery and he was charged with a balk. The legend outgrew the event within a season. A 1963 book on the Giants records that during that same game 95 spectators were treated for heat prostration in the early innings, which does not fit the story anyone tells.

Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal played here. The 1962 World Series ended on this field with McCovey's line drive caught at second base, the Yankees winning Game Seven 1-0.

The Giants left for their new downtown ballpark after 30 September 1999, the 49ers left after 2013, Paul McCartney played the last event in August 2014, and demolition finished in 2015. The site is being rebuilt as housing.

Coordinates are Candlestick Point, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: Candlestick Park in 2014, in its last year standing, photographed by rulenumberone2, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the stadium part-demolished in May 2015, photographed by Pete Forsyth, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.