So baseball playoffs are going on right now. It’s been quite some time since that really made me excited; the strike affected a lot of my feelings as a fan and my childhood love of the game. I still attend games from time to time, but I no longer follow the sport on a day to day basis.
Twenty years ago, this wasn’t the case. I loved my San Francisco Giants.
Brett Butler
Will Clark
Matt Williams
They were the best. When we played a neighborhood game of baseball, we’d call out which baseball player we wanted to be. My neighbor two houses down never wanted any of my players, because he was a huge Oakland A’s fan. He’d want to be a young Mark McGwire or Ricky Henderson. We were both happy that year, because the 1989 World Series included both teams in what most called, The Bay Bridge Series.
My Giants didn’t do well in the first two games, but I still had hope they could turn it around. I wanted to see the game, every moment of it. I counted it down on the clock on October 17, 1989, and quickly turned the TV to the station I wanted. My older brother wasn’t as big as a baseball fan and he tried to change it back to the show he wanted (knowing that most games have 30 plus minutes of pregame before the first pitch). I just snagged the remote back from him, just in time to see the following footage.
There was a fraction of a second where the screen went out and we didn’t initially feel anything–just a brief moment. Then you could feel the earthquake. It lasted only fifteen seconds or so and was about a 6.9 on the Richter scale (which basically means, you could feel it and it caused damage). I hesitated for a second and then ran under the nearest doorway. When it was done, everyone at home (my dad was still at work) headed out to the front of our house, greeting other neighbors on the block. The other boys on the street were dressed in the gear of the favorite team, but the excitement over the game was replaced with that startled surprise of the earthquake.
The ABC Sports footage contains that sound of the crowd originally cheering. At first it felt like just another quake, although bigger in magnitude, but that thing could continue as usual. Then the damage reports came out.
At home our refrigerator moved forward a foot as did my parents china cabinet. Boxes fell over in our pantry and I’d like to also blame my messy room on the quake as well. The damage throughout the rest of the Bay Area was worse. 63 people lost their lives, many when the 880 freeway, a double-decker freeway at the time, had one level collapse on the other. The Bay Bridge itself lost part of its upper deck as well. San Francisco faced major road damage. It became the focus of the news for the next few days.
I will say this, I’ll still take an earthquake over any other natural disaster. There is no earthquake season. We don’t have stock up sales for your earthquake supplies (although most families to have an earthquake kit include food provisions and flashlights that gathers spiderwebs in a garage). Earthquakes hit. They surprise you and then they go away. There has been only one major earthquake where I’ve lived, although a few smaller ones will catch you off guard. There was one major earthquake in southern California in my lifetime, and again some smaller ones that catch you off guard.
But what I do hate about earthquakes are the aftershocks.
A major earthquake will have aftershocks for the next day or so. You never feel the aftershocks of a smaller quake. Each aftershock is smaller than the previous quake, but they still catch you off guard. They startle you.
After seeing what an earthquake could do, the round of aftershocks just didn’t make me feel safe. I kept on wanting to know if the bad times were over yet.
I remember entering my parents room in the middle of the night in tears–even though I was in 4th grade–and asking my parents for the aftershocks to stop.
I wanted to get my safety and security back.
As I checked on a bit of the playoff news recently, I also saw the other major news reports. I feel like we are all somehow waiting for the aftershocks to go away. We’ve all been started and surprised with the economic shift the country took in the last year or so. We are worried. We have fear. We are hesitant at times to cheer for our teams or to celebrate because we are waiting for the next quake to come, to startle us, to wreck what we have built.
I think it is moments like this where we almost need the voice of a mom, stating simply “there will be a few more aftershocks, but they’ll get smaller, and it’ll be okay. You’ll be watching the series again in no time.”
It’s been 20 years since the quake. The roadways have been repaired. Buildings have been retrofitted. Scientific understanding of earthquakes has increased. Now it’s the baseball teams that need help, the success of 1989 in their distant franchise past.
Still the series did finish–badly for my Giants–and life goes on.
We may still feel our own “aftershocks” now and then when we flip on the news, but we are getting better. In the meantime, I think it is time for us to find the ways to still celebrate.
With the World Series postponed in 1989, another version took place–in the driveway of my neighbors house with a great t-ball set and a home run line of the house across the street.
It’s time for all of us to stop worrying about the aftershocks, and start playing ball.