They Find Better Way by the Bay

SAN FRANCISCO —  Hey! Put away the flowers! Hold the blindfolds! Stop talking in hushed whispers!

You might have lost your heart in San Francisco, but it hasn’t lost its.

The city that the late Doc Kearns would call a “good game town” is getting off the floor one more time. It is reaching for the bottom rope to pull itself up for one more go. The city by the bay is like a grizzled old club fighter who keeps getting to his feet and carrying the fight to his opponent.

As knockdowns go, this one was a nine-count, too, but not nearly the wallop that the city took in 1906. The magnitude of that one was 100 times harder.

It’s small consolation to those who lost loved ones or homes or limbs, but this one was not the Big One. That is yet to come.

Baseball was reluctant to resume its revels in the midst of the human misery that was the Bay Area this week. An event caked in human blood is scarcely the appropriate backdrop for hits, runs, errors and the sacrifice bunt--how can you hook up lights for a mere ballgame in a city where some areas will be without power for 16 weeks.

The first notion was to move the classic as far from the devastation as possible. Any direction would do.

But a good game town deserves a good game commissioner. “Carmen” was announced, “Carmen” will be sung--as the notice on the opera house on the occasion of the original earthquake in nought-six.

The World Series will be played in its original venue, the Giants’ home park, in that historical edifice, which last seen was swaying in the air like a fat lady doing a hula.

It’s going to be like the boy pilot in “Lafayette Escadrille” going right back up to duel the Red Baron.

The city that won’t quit, the Comeback Kid of American municipalities, is going to put the gloves back on. No towel comes floating over the ring ropes from San Francisco’s corner.

The realities of the earthquake of naught-six were dearly learned. This time, the city did not fall down in total ruin. The death toll, in fact, was almost exclusively restricted to a section of the bridge, and a one-mile stretch of a double-decked freeway.

In both cases the top section collapsed on the lower like the devil’s compactor. Which would seem to suggest that two-level engineering is inadvisable on any geography traversed by the San Andreas Fault. But apart from the catastrophe of split-level engineering, something less than 20 people were lost to ordinary structural failure.

The earthquake of 1989 was tragic but not cataclysmic. As an engineer at City Hall was to note, “I do not need to minimize but, coming into the city, you would be hard put to find the earthquake.”

It seemed to be the notion of the rest of the world these past 48 hours, judging by incoming calls, that San Francisco was a former city, a municipal relic disappearing under martial law and a toppling skyline desperately holding on to keep from sliding into the sea.

It has been rocked $2-billion worth, its mayor acknowledged, but that’s only money.

It is not about to see its first World Series in 27 years, and only its second in history, go by default to some other lesser city that has never had to climb back into a ring in its life. San Francisco is a resilient city. It doesn’t quit in its corner.

The unpredictability of earthquakes is a major annoyance and source of embarrassment to American science.

Scientists can chart a hurricane, a flood, or even a tornado. They cannot chart an earthquake.

Earthquakes are diabolical. They come in their own good time. They come in your sleep.

The earthquake had seemed to rob San Francisco’s Giants of their last real hope for parity in this World Series.

The Giants had hoped to wheel their real cleanup hitter into place--Candlestick Park. Candlestick Park wins more games for them than Will Clark and Kevin Mitchell put together. It is the most valuable Giant since Willie Mays.

The team is 56-28 in games played at the ‘Stick. It is their 30-game pitcher, their .400 hitter, their stopper, their ace in the hole. For the rest of the league it is Dracula’s castle, a scream in the night, a place where the portrait’s eyes seem to move and where fly balls disappear in the dreaded winds with its banshee howl.

It was supposed that Candlestick was as out of commission as the city in which it’s in.

Not so. They both make their comeback next Tuesday. Open your Golden Gate. The city of the 49ers’ (the miners, not the football team), is not through yet.