Vernona Gomez - Lefty: An American Odyssey

AMERICAS PASTIME
FOR BAREFOOT BOYS

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF
MY BOY VERNON NOW?

WHEN I MARRIED LEFTY,
I MARRIED BASEBALL

O n Saturday, August 4, 1962, 30,000 fans crowded into Candlestick Park in San Francisco to see the Giants defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates 65. The Giants were new to the city, one of two major league franchises from New York that had arrived in California in 1958, a century after professional baseball began. The Brooklyn Dodgers had also moved to the West Coast, settling in Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south.

Large crowds were uncommon at Candlestick, an uncomfortable, hastily designed stadium known for violent, swirling winds. During the All-Star Game the year before, Stu Miller had been blown off the pitchers mound by a powerful gust and charged with a balk. Although the Giants would go on to win the 1962 National League pennant and then lose to the New York Yankees four games to three in a thrilling World Series, the team would average only 19,000 paying spectators per game. The reason 30,000 people had come out on this day was to see not the players of the present but those of the past. The Giants had chosen August 4 to stage their first-ever Old-Timers Game. To evoke the nostalgia crucial to the success of such an event, the three-inning contest would pit the old New York Giants against veterans of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League.

The Giants might have been storied in New York, but the Seals were the legends in San Francisco. Minor league baseball had grown with the city since 1903, through earthquake, depression, and wars, filling a series of intimate, rickety ballparks, and was a part of both the citys heritage and its fabric. For California boys growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, the majors were as removed from their lives as if on another continent. With only sixteen big league teams, the farthest west 1,500 miles away in St. Louis, with no air travel or live broadcast media, the closest Depression-era Bay Area fans could come to the majors was through newspaper accounts or radio re-creations read by local sportswriters off telegraph wires. And such was the quality of Pacific Coast League baseball that some players preferred remaining where they were to going east to play in the majors.

The Seals themselves had been the most successful franchise in minor league history, and not all San Franciscans had been pleased to see the team fold after the 1957 season to make way for the New Yorkers. In its fifty-four-year history, the Seals had finished first in a highly competitive league on twelve occasions, all while sending a steady stream of star players to the majors. Six Seals alumni had been voted into the Hall of Fame, more than some major league franchises.

Which is why, on August 4, 1962, desperate to fill some seats, the new San Francisco Giants chose to celebrate the team that it had displaced.

The Seals starting outfield was a big reason the Candlestick stands were full. For the first time in their storied careers, the three DiMaggio brothers would play together: Dom in left, Vince in right, and, in center, the great Joe, The Yankee Clipper, perhaps the most complete player ever to don a uniform. The Seals starting pitcher would be another Hall of Famer and a local legend in his own right: Joes old Yankee roommate, Vernon Lefty Gomez.