DID CANDLESTICK GET A BUM RAP?

Byline: Kevin Modesti

Candlestick Park is the victim of some kind of double standard, if you really think about it.

The world is full of forbidding landscapes, extreme weather and natural disasters. But among them, only the San Francisco Giants' ballpark on Candlestick Point is ridiculed the way it has been for 40 years.

Is this fair?

Candlestick Park is approximately as cold as the South Pole. Yet while travelers are advised to stay away from Candlestick, the South Pole gets written up in National Geographic as a worthy destination for adventurers. Any bright schoolchild can tell you that Roald Amundsen was the first man to reach the South Pole, but can anybody name the first baseball fan to brave Candlestick?

Is this justice?

Candlestick Park is just as windy as the typical East Coast hurricane. Yet whereas anchormen routinely put on heavy-weather gear and drag camera crews to Florida or a Carolina for live-from-the-scene reports, they almost never show up on the Candlestick pitching mound when the cyclones hit there. Candlestick is tagged with an obscene epithet by ballplayers (it rhymes with ``the Stick''), so why is the hurricane awarded an attractive moniker (Ann, Bobby, Charlene)?

Is this equality?

Candlestick Park is as inhospitable as Death Valley. Yet while Candlestick is renamed 3Com Park under a sponsorship agreement, nobody thinks to cheapen Death Valley by rechristening it Bristol-Myers Squibb Valley.

You're reading and hearing a lot about Candlestick this week as the stadium winds down to its final baseball game this afternoon between the Giants and Dodgers. Some people say it has been the all-time worst place to play and the Giants should be thrilled to open their new park next spring. Others say it wasn't that bad and this is a sad day.

I take a third position: Candlestick was special because it provided major-leaguers with challenges they wouldn't otherwise have faced. Do swimmers complain that the English Channel is too wet?

Players get used to fly balls making strange bounces off the walls at Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Candlestick simply took that to the next level: Balls make strange bounces in mid-air.

Doesn't anybody share my sunny view of Candlestick?

``I'm proud to play here,'' said Barry Bonds, who has won an MVP Award and four Gold Gloves in left field for the Giants.

Barry has fond memories of hanging around the clubhouse when his father Bobby was playing for the Giants. He played catch with Willie Mays.

``If they didn't change the ballpark, I'd still be proud to play for the Giants,'' Barry said, looking out from the first-base dugout.

Which is exactly the spirit I hoped to find at Candlestick before an August night game against the Montreal Expos - some fond farewells among the general feeling of good riddance.

``Thank God they are (moving), though,'' Bonds added.

Oh.

Stan Javier, the ex-Dodger who played most of four seasons for the Giants before a late-summer trade to Houston, was pulling up his socks in the Candlestick clubhouse. In his locker hung a jersey, a black long-sleeve undershirt and a thermal undershirt.

Javier is not one of those players who wore thermal leggings at Candlestick.

He said that unlike some Giants who plainly hated Candlestick, he had mixed feelings about the upcoming move.

``To me, this is one of the best places to hit,'' Javier said

Why? Good lighting? A solid background for viewing pitches?

``This is the only place you can hit four fly balls and get two hits,'' Javier said with a grin. ``I thought right field was tough. Then I played left field. Barry Bonds should win the Gold Glove every year for playing in left field here.''

Javier summed up his attitude about the demise of Candlestick.

``I've enjoyed playing here,'' he said. ``Of course, I'd enjoy playing anywhere. I'd play in a parking lot. ''

Oh.

In the 1980s, the Giants marketing department began to poke fun at its own ballpark in ads, and devised a perversely successful promotion that awarded a pin called ``the Croix de Candlestick'' to fans who stayed to the end of extra-inning night games. At the same time, Giants general manager Al Rosen urged players to turn the Candlestick conditions into ``the ultimate home-field advantage.''

``It united everybody,'' said Mike Krukow, a Giants pitcher of that era and now a Giants broadcaster. ``It gave everybody something to (complain) about.''

Krukow stood near the dugout one afternoon in August, watching the center-field flags swirling in the wind and Charlie Hayes taking batting practice wearing a wool hat.

``Most guys' initial reaction is, `What a miserable place to play baseball,' '' Krukow said.

Come on, Mike, put those critics in their place.

``And it is miserable.''

Oh.

``But it's the best place in the world to pitch,'' Krukow said. ``Simply because it's the worst place in the world to hit.''

Krukow referred to the wind in the hitter's face (some think Mays could have hit 800 home runs playing elsewhere), the dust in his contact lenses, his stinging hands.

Krukow was asked if, in the fullness of time, players who curse the old park might come to think more fondly off it, to cherish the obstacles it presented, to even laugh about the experience.

He thought for one tenth of a second and then neatly capsulized the prevailing attitude about Candlestick.

``No.''