The miracle of 1989

Twenty-five years ago today, the eyes of the nation, or at least, its baseball fans, were on San Francisco.

The Oakland Athletics were playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. ABC promoted it as “The Battle of the Bay.”

The A’s practically fielded an All-Star team that year. Some names you might recognize: Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Rickey Henderson and Dave Parker. The Giants had 23-year-old Matt Williams, now manager of the Washington Nationals. Not surprisingly, Oakland had won the first two games at home.

Game 3 was to be played in Candlestick Park at 5:35 p.m. At 5:04, Al Michaels and Tim McCarver were showing highlights of Games 1 and 2 when the sound crackled and the picture flashed.

“I’ll tell you what, we’re having an earth … ” Michaels began to say, and then his voice cut out and the screen went dark. The words “World Series” appeared on a background of ABC logos. About 15 seconds later, the audio returned: You heard the crowd roaring, then a bewildered Michaels:

{mosads}”I don’t know if we’re on the air or not and I’m not sure I care at this particular moment, but we are. Well, folks, that’s the greatest open in the history of television — bar none.”

My friend Michael Yonchenko, a Giants season-ticket holder, recalled Candlestick’s light standards banging together and the top of the stadium rippling the way a dropped silver dollar “rolls around as it comes to a stop.”

A dapper little blind man named Alison DeGenero — DeGe — who had been to every World Series since 1946, had the presence of mind to capture the moment on a mini-cassette recorder.

“Forty-four consecutive World Series and this has to be the most dramatic of all!” he exclaims on the tape.

Over on the Bay Bridge, Maria Goldinger was driving to Oakland when she saw dozens of fellow motorists running back toward the San Francisco side. Without knowing why, she got out of her car and started running too. Then someone clued her in: “The bridge has collapsed!”

Well, not quite. A section of the upper deck had collapsed onto the lower deck.

Carol Sakamoto might have had the most surreal experience of all. She was shopping with her daughter at the Marina Safeway when the building’s trusses began to shake “the way an animal would shake something in its mouth.”

The lights went out. Wine bottles crashed to the floor. Sakamoto remembers “seeing this pyramid of soda cans arcing across the room.”

She draped her body over the shopping cart to protect her daughter until the shaking stopped, then waded through a river of wine, salad dressing and broken glass to the front of the store.

That night, relying on generators and the first generation of battery-powered laptops, the San Francisco Chronicle put out an eight-page paper. The headline: “HUNDREDS DEAD IN HUGE QUAKE.”

It wasn’t true. The estimate assumed the normal amount of rush-hour traffic on a collapsed section of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland. But this was not a normal rush hour. This was the Bay Area’s very own World Series. Thousands of commuters had either left work early or stayed put to watch the game. As a result, there were 63 fatalities. Hundreds were spared.

This was the miracle of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Grim as it was, the quake inspired one memorable one-liner:

Did you hear that President George H.W. Bush dispatched Vice President Dan Quayle to the epicenter?

He flew to Orlando.

(For those who don’t get it, the vice president — who was not considered the sharpest knife in the drawer — in this joke confused epicenter with Epcot Center at Disneyworld.)

I called my friend DeGe in October 1997 to see if his remarkable World Series attendance streak was intact. As soon as I heard his strong, clear voice I knew that it was, and that it would continue for at least another year.

“Where else would I be?” he said. “I’m only 85.”

DeGe swore he’d throw out the first pitch of the 2012 World Series at Fenway Park: He’d be 100 years old, same as the ballpark. He didn’t make it (neither did the Red Sox). He died in 1999, his streak ending at 52.

But I’m told a collection of ticket stubs, the cap that Jackie Robinson wore in the 1955 World Series and a Willie Mays home run ball donated by the self-proclaimed “World’s Greatest Baseball Fan” is in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

As for the 1989 World Series, play resumed 10 days after the earthquake. Contrary to a Chronicle sportswriter’s jest, the momentum had not shifted. The mighty A’s swept.

But with so much of the Bay Area in ruins, who cared?

Frank teaches journalism at Penn State University.